The factories to the workers!
As is usual when the financial order exposes its weakness and seems to be tottering before a fall, the possibility of an end to capitalism comes to the fore. The trouble with such speculations is that they often confuse the basis of capitalism and its various extensions. Those subsidiary parts that can be destroyed and rebuilt without threatening the essential principles of capitalism. Real estate, banks and commerce, land and money, these profit from capitalism, but they preceded it and could therefore outlive it. They are not the substantive matter of capitalism.
As Marx pointed out, capitalism breaks with the past by replacing servile labour by free labour. Workers are paid wages when they are employed. As opposed to slaves who have been bought and need to be fed and kept fit, whether employed or not. The slave owner buys the person and must obtain enough work to make a profit. The capitalist leaves the person free, buying only the work time. Fuelled by waves of migrants from the countryside, then from Ireland and Central Europe, the early capitalism described in Capital 1 was quite horrendous, with a human waste that defies belief. A miserable situation that was the logical result of extracting the most labour for the least wage. (One should perhaps put this perception in perspective, as Marx was writing during the American Civil War, 50 years after the Napoleonic Wars and 50 years before WW1. Human life had seldom been so apparently worthless).
Capitalism needs a free work force that it can employ at will. But, to make a profit, capitalism also needs free markets to sell its produce at a price that is higher than the cost of production. This can be the case on foreign markets where production depends on more primitive tools and less knowhow. The home market, however, is subject to fierce competition and to price fixing by cartels. And this is where capitalism made its other break with the past. When wages and working hours are fixed at their utmost and the market price is the same for all, the competitive edge can only come from gains in productivity obtained by technological innovations. So capitalism introduced the notions and the rules concerning patents, copyrights and their offshoots.
Capitalism widened the scope of property. Land and money had from the start been based on private property. Capitalism expanded the rule to include the means of production, the work and the tools. Work could be bought piecemeal without owning the worker, and an idea could belong exclusively to someone. If Citigroup and General Motors go under, will that bring down capitalism, change the way work is bought, and prohibit the private ownership of ideas? Certainly not. Capitalism will rise from the rubble with renewed youth, vigour and attraction. Has anyone heard the president elect talk of giving the property of the above mentioned corporations to their employees? Even though the supposed value of their pension funds probably outweighs the stock market value of the said companies. Could co-operatives bloom, and executives turn to beards, bioethics and bicycles? Can flower-power turn back the guns and can sitting in or dropping out stop the cog-wheels, when everyone is just trying to catch up with yesterdays spending? When capitalism is making its final break with the past by using the constraints of debt instead of force, in a world where the loss of one’s “capital” resembles a death sentence.
As Marx pointed out, capitalism breaks with the past by replacing servile labour by free labour. Workers are paid wages when they are employed. As opposed to slaves who have been bought and need to be fed and kept fit, whether employed or not. The slave owner buys the person and must obtain enough work to make a profit. The capitalist leaves the person free, buying only the work time. Fuelled by waves of migrants from the countryside, then from Ireland and Central Europe, the early capitalism described in Capital 1 was quite horrendous, with a human waste that defies belief. A miserable situation that was the logical result of extracting the most labour for the least wage. (One should perhaps put this perception in perspective, as Marx was writing during the American Civil War, 50 years after the Napoleonic Wars and 50 years before WW1. Human life had seldom been so apparently worthless).
Capitalism needs a free work force that it can employ at will. But, to make a profit, capitalism also needs free markets to sell its produce at a price that is higher than the cost of production. This can be the case on foreign markets where production depends on more primitive tools and less knowhow. The home market, however, is subject to fierce competition and to price fixing by cartels. And this is where capitalism made its other break with the past. When wages and working hours are fixed at their utmost and the market price is the same for all, the competitive edge can only come from gains in productivity obtained by technological innovations. So capitalism introduced the notions and the rules concerning patents, copyrights and their offshoots.
Capitalism widened the scope of property. Land and money had from the start been based on private property. Capitalism expanded the rule to include the means of production, the work and the tools. Work could be bought piecemeal without owning the worker, and an idea could belong exclusively to someone. If Citigroup and General Motors go under, will that bring down capitalism, change the way work is bought, and prohibit the private ownership of ideas? Certainly not. Capitalism will rise from the rubble with renewed youth, vigour and attraction. Has anyone heard the president elect talk of giving the property of the above mentioned corporations to their employees? Even though the supposed value of their pension funds probably outweighs the stock market value of the said companies. Could co-operatives bloom, and executives turn to beards, bioethics and bicycles? Can flower-power turn back the guns and can sitting in or dropping out stop the cog-wheels, when everyone is just trying to catch up with yesterdays spending? When capitalism is making its final break with the past by using the constraints of debt instead of force, in a world where the loss of one’s “capital” resembles a death sentence.
posted by le Lézard at 7:10 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home