When you’re out on the stump discussing capitalism – face-to-face or
on-line – you can guarantee some defender of the system that has left a
third of the world population without clean water, nearly a sixth
without enough food, and wrought megadeaths upon megadeaths from wars
within the last hundred years, will try and point out how the market is
the most efficient system for allocating resources. A self-correcting
mechanism without which we would all descend to barbarism and all
advanced industry and technology would utterly cease to be. Leaving
aside that the cogs in this marvellous mystery self-regulating machine
are human beings who must be ground out to make it run smoothly, such a
picture of the market system is quite, quite wrong.
A clear example stands before us from the recent news. Over the past
year, television and radio has been reporting how people in well-paid
City jobs have been leaving to become plumbers. The shortage of those
skilled tradespeople has meant, according to market forces, that the
price of their labour has risen. Accordingly, the price of a plumber’s
labour or labour power (depending on whether they are self-employed or
not) has risen to attract more people into the trade to fill up the gap
between supply and demand. All of this sounds exactly like the market
functioning perfectly.
The problem is that, at the end of January, BBC radio reported that
the market for plumbing skills has become glutted – so many people were
attracted into the trade that now there are more plumbers than there is
work available. This can happen because, far from being the perfect
mechanism for conveying information, the market can only convey
information at the speed of trade. Prices will not be lowered until the
plumbers start entering the market and begin lowering their prices to
tout for trade against stiff competition. New entrants to the market
will not be able to see that supply has been fulfilled until after the
prices start to fall.
People just entering training – having heard the
word on the street – will not know until they are finished that the
bottom has fallen out of the market, and that the arrival of them and
their class mates has caused this.
However, even if some sort of mechanism was applied to coordinate
between different branches of production, the problems of capitalism
would still occur. Otherwise the state capitalism in the former Soviet
bloc would have never collapsed and its system would have been seen to
be more sturdy than the Western variety. Even with the greatest planning
in the world, accidents happen, things change and perfect coordination
is rendered impossible. The problem lies much deeper than that, though,
in the very nature of capitalism itself.
If the plumbers could simply jump from the plumbing market to a
different trade without any difficulty, there would be no problem – they
would still be able to acquire the necessary use values with which to
live. The problem is, however, that these workers have invested money
that they need to recover – both in terms of paying for training and of
earnings and promotions they would have gained had they stayed in their
old careers. They have invested money in order to enter into the market,
and in many cases may well have borrowed as well as using up their
savings. In order to ensure they do not make a loss (which will risk
their homes and families) they need to ensure that they get that money
back – they have to return their initial investment back into its
original form as money.
Many plumbers will be unable to do this, and will find themselves
driven out of business, based on nothing but the mistiming of their
investments and their inability to lay hands on cash. It will not
necessarily reflect on their plumbing skills, their personality or
anything about them, but simply the blind workings of the market. In
order to obtain use values – the things they need with which to live –
they must secure exchange value. To stay in business, though, they must
use some of the money – exchange value – they earn to pay debts or to
ensure they are not out of pocket.
This process, or turning useful things back into exchange value,
distinct from the particular usefulness of any given thing, is the
essence of capitalism. Anything that interrupts this process puts a
spanner in the works of that shiny self-regulating machine – and
miscoordination based on poor information is just one such (common)
spanner. Whilst our example here is small affecting only a few thousand
people at most, obviously, a major capitalist concern could lose
billions of pounds and wreak havoc on millions of lives.
Some sharp-eyed pro-capitalists – skilled in misdirecting arguments
from points on which they are losing – may choose to suggest that we
have here accepted an important point of theirs. These people, they will
claim, are willing to do the dirty work – the plumbing – solely because
the price is right and they have been lured into the trade. Such nimble
minds would actually find themselves too fast for their own feet. Many
of the bored office workers (interviewed by journalists, another species
of bored office worker) expressed their pleasure that they would find
the work interesting and fulfilling, and that it was because the work
paid a decent wage now that they were able to enter that trade.
So, in fact, it proves precisely our point once more – the
requirements of exchange value hold back the natural co-operation and
ability and desire to work of human beings, rather than enabling it.
Socialism would be as prone to nature and accident as any system and so
could miscalculate and produce too much of something. But as it would
not be hamstrung by turning things into exchange values as capitalism
is, it could just write off any waste as a misfortune to try and be
avoided, rather than one to be exacerbated and spread by sackings and
bankruptcies.
People’s skills could be used when required and people would not find
themselves dumped on the rubbish heap and denied access to their
necessities of life just because they had worked hard and finished the
job or because less of that type of work were no longer required. We
would be able to enter into an age where communication conveyed at the
speed of light could be used immediately, without having to be grafted
onto the old operating system of society – like trying to read the
internet on a pocket calculator.
PIK SMEET
The above article is taken from the April 2006 Socialist /Standard
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