Common Work for the Common Pot

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

Even the bosses can’t cover up the fact that the world economy is still deep in a crisis.  But the bosses are keeping up their drive for profits. Workers know all about their “solution” to the problem: cuts in wages and pensions, redundancies and  closures to rationalise, new technology and faster and faster automation, direct government subsides to prop up profits. To protect their profits, the bosses are at our throats more fiercely than ever before. They’re using the situation to eliminate job security for everyone, including the older workers supposedly protected by seniority. Everywhere the bosses are putting these men in harder jobs in order to force them out – out of a job as well as out of a pension that they have contributed to for half a lifetime. The management sharks replace them with some of the millions of unemployed who are looking for work. The new workers are offered new temporary or zero-hour contracts that provide no protection at all, and are often fired at the end of three months “probation”. It’s happening in every in. All this is happening while the profit keep on rolling in and stashed safely away from the tax-man in some off-shore haven

Work is human activity for the purpose of useful production. Work has always been the basis for human life, the creator of man's well-being and culture. Employment is toiling for  capitalists  and being exploited by them.  The term work ought to be reserved for voluntary activity and the welfare of society. Work is a means not only for creating goods that support the existence of mankind and society, but also for the self-improvement of the individual and of humanity. There is no really human existence imaginable without work. But drudgery is the enemy of human dignity and self-development. As a rule we dislike labour for the purposes of others, forced activity not of our choice.

 It is true that wage employment appears like voluntary work, but it is not. Slavery was enforced by superior power; and similarly  no independent peoples have ever been found who would voluntarily work for wages. Indeed, it was by deceitfully calling wage labour “free labour”. People did not jump at it, but reluctantly and with a certain amount of resistance, they accepted the new conditions because they had no longer possessed their own means of livelihood, having had them forcibly removed. The new wage-slaves could be goaded into twofold or threefold more efforts than chattel slaves could ever be forced to furnish. The latter could not forget that the laws of nature in them rebelled against doing their full measure of possible performance. But wage slaves would forget it under the deceptive appearance of freedom; they would still more refuse to listen to the warning voice not to sacrifice health, longevity, and comfort for the profit of capitalists. They would, regardless of consequences, overwork themselves in the hope of saving in a comparatively short time sufficient wealth to become themselves capitalists or “self-made men.” Stifling that inner voice, the wage-slaves were gradually rendered more helpless, and, unaware of their dignity as free individuals , constrained themselves to perform labour of the most uniform, mind-killing, disgusting, and brutalising kind, and to become slaves of machines, parts of a machine, employed by the machine, and stimulated to work as quick as the machine would command, all for the benefit of the profit-mongers. Every year statistics publish the annual catalogues of death, disablement and disease suffered by workers in the cause of profit.

Have your noticed how much labour the boss wants you to do for a living? Every time there is the slightest excuse, he increases the hours. One excuse seems to be as good as another. If there is a big demand for products, he wants you to work overtime to get the stuff out; while if there is a slack market, the employer suggests that you put in an extra hour or so to cheapen the cost of production. He claims that he cannot afford to pay you the wages you have been getting unless you make more profit for him. If a new process is installed, he wants you to work overtime in order to pay for putting it in; and if the process saves labour, he points out to you that you have to work longer now, because it would be a waste of his machinery if it is idle.

In the displacement of labour by machinery, the performing by a machine of work hitherto done by human beings, we should always remember that it is not the machine, nor its inventor that is at fault. The fault lies in the system which permits individuals to own the machine, and use it to destroy the happiness of the workers, instead of making it the social property of society, to be used to lessen the labour whilst increasing the comforts of all. In other words, the machine itself might be a blessing, but the private ownership of the machine has made it an unmitigated curse.

You submit to employment to make a living, and you must work long enough to produce the value of that living. Your boss looks at this differently. He is not just interested in keeping you alive, he wants something for himself which he has no intention of working for. He wants you to work for it. Every hour that you put in, over and above what provides for your living, is clear profit for the boss, or someone in his class.

The wage system makes life precarious for workers. The payment of wages entails the power to dismiss the worker by officials. So long as the money system remains, each productive enterprise must be run on a paying basis. Therefore it will tend to aim at employing as few workers as possible, in order to spend less on wages. It will also tend to dismiss the less efficient worker who, becoming unemployed, becomes less efficient. Thus an unemployable class tends to grow in numbers. The existence of a wage system almost inevitably leads to unequal wages; overtime, bonuses, higher pay for work requiring special qualifications.

But there is no cure for the scourge of capitalism. The system can’t be salvaged – and it isn’t worth saving anyhow.