When Marx likened wage-workers to slaves, he brought the lessons of oppositions to slavery to the emerging movements against capitalism. Put bluntly, Marx argued against forms of anti-capitalism that limited themselves to improving workers’ living conditions. Fast-forwarding to today, Marx would criticize movements such as those for “a living wage” or “pension reform” or “welfare increases” or “saving social security” and so on. A Marxist opposition to capitalism is rather one focused on its abolition as a system. Marxists, he might say, are to capitalism what abolitionists were to slavery. For Marx, the crux of the issue is that capitalism entails exploitation. A large part of the population (productive laborers) produces a surplus that is appropriated and distributed by a small part of the population (capitalists). In capitalist enterprises, workers are hired only if the value that their labor adds (to the raw materials, tools, and equipment their work uses up) exceeds the value paid to them as wages for doing that labor. That excess value – the surplus – belongs to the capitalists since they own the outputs of production, sell them in markets, and thereby realize the surplus value in them. In the preferred language of capitalism, that surplus value comprises the “profits” of the capitalists, their “private property” to dispense in their own interests. The less wages that capitalists must pay to workers, the more surplus they get for themselves. Exploitation thus situates tension, hostility, and conflict in the heart of production.[...]The inequalities anchored in capitalist production usually carry over to make the politics and cultures of capitalist societies similarly unequal. The absence of democracy in production undermines efforts to establish it in politics.[...] A Marxist program would seek to replace capitalist production by a non-wage system, one where the workers will not only produce surpluses but also be their own boards of directors. The “associated workers” would, as Marx suggested, appropriate their own surpluses and distribute them. The wage-payer versus wage-recipient division of people inside production would vanish
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 07:36:02 +0000
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