First of all I would like to extend thanks to Cam Naniwa for a very credible attempt at discourse, where he answered questions, presented detailed evidence and as far as I can tell, engaged in no name calling or ad-hominems of any sort. If we all attempt to do likewise, there might actually be some learning going on here. Now Jules, Ben, Brendan, Stuart, Craig, when I talk about learning something here I am referring to understanding the mindset and the language of socialists who make up a considerable portion of the Australian and international activist community. I have been guilty of writing them off too hastily because in my mind, I had a different understanding of the terms they used. Recently I had several of these words clarified by Cam : class consciousness, capitalist class, working class, petty bourgeoisie.. Ill include his defintions at the bottom of the post. I am begining to think that this communication breakdown is the biggest around the notion of Capitalism itself. Accoring to Shannon and Cam Capitalism IS exploitation i.e. getting someone to work for less than the value of their labour and pocketing the difference. I do not see Capitalism that way at all. My understanding of capitalism is this: universal respect for property rights, which include your ownership of your own body and your time. Also according to the original defintions of property offered by Adam Smith, you can only own something you use on a daily basis (mix your labour with) ... which adamantly stands against hoarding of land, and should also be against hoarding of all sorts of wealth. The other aspect of capitalism is the trade of property for mutual advantage. Namely I want your hammer more than I want my $15 and you want my $15 than you want one of your many hammers etc... I think such win-win transactions make up something like 20-50% of the money you spend, this is branded discretionary spending. Now that sounds good in theory, and can even present some valid examples in practice...but its a system so prone to corruption it can only exist in the utopian minds of Libertarians. Firstly as Marx predicted, free trade results in massive windfalls of profit that are temporary, these windfalls give undue power to certain individuals who then act to entrench their wealth and status before the rate of profit naturally falls. . . this is a corruption factory. Then there is a government which in theory represents the collective will of the people. The government regulates both trade and property which ensures that free trade can never really happen. Then there is the corporation which is an institution of ZERO accountability, protected by the government. It is designed for plunder, wealth extraction and political leverage. So here is my conclusion. capitalism is amoral it is just a sub optimal system for managing resources. It creates both wealth and value for the people but it has a fundamental flaw of concentrating wealth temporarily and thus creating an incentive for corruption. It is like a car which in theory will improve your life and get you from A to B really quickly but in practice it gets stuck in traffic jams, pollutes your air, damages your health and drains your resources for its maintenance. If there is an EVIL associated with Capitalism it is the corporation. This is limited liability institution allows exploitation and environmental destruction in a way that no individual is personally accountable. And the people that create destruction are just shareholders generally unaware of the havoc they cause in the process of getting a return on investment. If people that worked in a factory owned it, if its managment paid for all the environmental damage and if passive investment was outlawed, the world would be a much better place. So I finish this with a statement and a question. I state that, getting rid of the corporation a good first step, It is a step that most anti-system groups can agree on. Now the question, do you agree with my use of the term capitalism? here, if not please elaborate. Cams defintions and examples of classes in accordance with Marxist theory: Sonny, Thats a good question. Marxists bang on about the working class and what capitalism is and how it works for a reason. Without that understanding, how can we say what we want to change about it, and more importantly, how to change it? So I think vague analyses of the current system weaken our ability to do anything about changing it. We certainly live under a global system of capitalism, nobody seriously disputes that. Its not a flawed version of some much nicer version of capitalism, its just plain capitalism. The fundamental relations are the same today as they were 50 years ago. The system has just matured, thats all. It doesnt change the fundamental relations if some capital investment in manufacturing is now in the financial sector. It just means the system is long past the point where it has some kind of role in improving global productivity, which would provide the potential for a future society to provide food, water, housing and a good standard of living to every person on the planet. Onto your question! I mentioned before that the working class and the capitalist class are the two MAIN classes under capitalism, but there are others. For example, the long-term unemployed. They are not part of the working class. Theyre treated even worse but their position outside the production chain means they cant really play a progressive role in being a revolutionary class and changing the whole system. As I mentioned before, the amount of money you have is not what determines if you are part of the capitalist class. Instead, its your relationship to the means of production. If you own a factory or some enterprise that employs workers, and you dont work there yourself, youre a capitalist. The profit you are making has been skimmed from the value the workers are producing. If youre one of those workers in the enterprise, youre part of the working class. It can be characterised as wage slavery because although youre free to choose not to work at all, the reality is that this is simply the freedom to starve or work, ie. not much freedom at all. What if instead of owning a factory, you own part of a factory through your ownership of shares. Its surprising that most shares in corporations are actually owned by other corporations and the ultra-rich, so the number of large shareholders is actually quite small, despite what we always here about mum and dad investors, etc. The owners of shares are capitalists too, its as if they own the factory itself. Most politicans are part of the ruling capitalist class too, you can see this by the ease with which ex-politicians enter the executive world (and vice versa, look at Clive Palmer). What about small business owners, like people who own and run a corner shop, employing a couple of people? Well they would be characterised as between these two classes. Marxists would call them the petty-bourgeoisie, small scale capitalists. They are small scale exploiters. They do a lot of work themselves. Their goal is to join the ranks of the large scale exploiters and have financial security and no longer need to work themselves (in general). This upwards mobility is quite rare and they can end up doing more work for less money than many workers! Hence, a well-paid carpenter is still a worker, but a convenience store owner who works a lot and employs a few people but is in dire financial straits is still part of the petty-bourgeoisie. Miners in Australia in the light of the mining boom are another good example. They can make more than $120,000 a year, how can they possibly be considered workers? Well, they are actually one of the hyper-exploited workers in society, because their labor produces a fantastic amount of profit for the owners of those mines! They may be on relatively good salaries, but the labor of one miner is producing more value in an hour than workers in most other sectors. Also, people who have some degree of control over their work, are paid very well and are well-educated, and in general identify quite strongly with the ruling class above them and not the working class below them, for example, doctors and lawyers, are also part of this middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie. Of course, people can move from one class to another. Athletes who earn fantastic salaries are another kind of anomaly. But its still true that as a necessary abstraction, for the vast majority of cases, people fit into the class categories. I would say that if someone is making more than $200,000 a year and has some job stability, it seems unlikely that they would be part of the working class (but its possible). If someone makes more than a million dollars a year, its most likely that this comes through the exploitation of someones labor in some way, so they would be a member of the ruling class in all likelihood. These classifications are necessary to understand the general role large groups of people can play in large-scale changes in society, ie. revolutionary movements. But as I said, they are generalisations due to the fact that we live in a world of billions of people
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 03:48:26 +0000
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