The Workers Against the Bosses

No beast is fiercer than the capitalist protecting his profits which exceeds even the ferocity of a she-bear defending her cubs.

Before people can be robbed, people have to be ruled; before people can be ruled, people must first be fooled or deceived. Fooled, ruled and robbed to ensure the master’s profit and every Every evil passion is let loose. In dumb, blind fear people turn to the very institutions which the masters had built and perfected to be used on slaves who would not meekly accept the slave’s position as determined by the masters and escape the slave’s fate. Prison and death is used when bullying, lies, cajolery, bribes, promises and bluffs fail. There were no limits to the means that are to be made use of to coerce the slaves.

For years the political questions are to revolve about labour and capital. We are living under institutions where the discretion and control of the whole economic situation are in the hands of capital. Capital can do business only when a profit is in sight. Capital exists for profit alone. To get the largest possible profit it is often advisable to slow down production or to discontinue production entirely. This is what is social sabotage and the capitalist class are the most persistent perpetrators and consistent culprits. To sabotage industry is a crime only when it is committed by a worker but when it is committed by a capitalist it is only doing business. This sabotage of industry by the employing class is the principal cause of poverty, unemployment and all of the social ills which flow from them. It is at the bottom of all the labour unrest abroad in the world today.

Negotiating Wage Slavery

So long as the economic system, based on private ownership of the means of production, is the system by which we supply our wants, the workers will have to apply to employers for a chance to work in order to get money to buy the necessities of life. These are the class of men and women who must sell the skill and efficiency that they possess, in order that they may live and support those near and dear to them and this where the bosses are trying to bribe the workers to side with the boss. If the boss hires the workers, one at a time, and the workers have no organization, he hires them cheap. Where the workers have strong and well-ordered organisations, they are in a position where they are able to bargain successfully for a price for that which they take to the labour market, their skill and ability to do work in production.

A workers’ union must be in the position to, at all times, bargain with the capitalists for the sale of their labour power. The capitalists must also be able to ready to contract for the purchase of the labour power without which the ownership of the plant, the raw material, and the possession of the pay roll would be of no benefit to the capital.

The capitalist is no fool or he would not become, or remain a capitalist. The capitalists being business men or buyers and sellers are ready to make bargains of any kind whatsoever. In fact the bigger the deal, the bigger the scale, the more appeal it carries for Big Business than any small transaction possesses. So it is found that many of the managers of the large-scale industries have encouraged their workers to develop their union organisations so that the buying of labour power is carried on in the most efficient way to draw up employment contracts collectively arranged with all the workers for defined times (often lengthy). The capitalist often finds it to better advantage to buy the leaders of the men’s unions than it is to meet the representatives of the men from the shop-floor in a straight effort at negotiation. If the relations of bargain and sale could be institutionalised in such a way that he would always meet the same men in negotiations, if these men were safe and reasonable, how much better would the relations be between capital and labour. The crooked, co-operating labor leader has some ability, some plausibility, and some ambition. Once he finds that he is able to make a living by being a labour leader, he finds that his life-style is changed for the better. No longer the dirt and noise of the factory floor; new faces to meet; new experiences to undergo; travel and hotel life and time not at all occupied. He comes into contact with the givers of gifts. He is under appraisal; his abilities are measured; his vanity and his integrity and his moral fibre are all weighed. In short, if the man has in him the capacity of being a traitor, he is reached, and labour suffers one more betrayal to be added to the thousands of the past. Having habituated oneself to being a human jelly-fish, neither loyalty nor good faith can ever be expected from many union leaders, but rather duplicity of every kind is to be looked for.  All signs point to the fact that treacherous labour leaders are engaged in co-operating in laws enacted to sell labour into peonage to capital.  A thousand schemes are put forth to make the worker believe that it is in his or her interest to be tame and subservient, that he or she can best serve oneself  at the expense of other fellow workers. If the bosses  recognise that the labour leaders who would lend themselves to such a game,are crooks so what? The capitalists’ money is invested to make profits not make moral judgments.

A successful bargain is one in which the things exchanged are exchanged at their value. To make such a trade the parties to the transaction must be on an equality. A starving man would give much gold or precious stones for the food that would save life. Experience shows that the workers are naked and defenceless against the greed of the capitalist if they have not the power to bring to a stop the production of profit, which is the only reason why the capitalist has become an owner of the means of production. The withdrawal of their labour power from the work-place is the only force at the disposal of employees. If workers make a mistake in their guess, or their estimate, of how much the capitalist will give rather than see his plant go out of production, there comes a lockout or a strike.

Still better, if the workers can be fooled into believing that there was no class state, could be made to believe that that the government was the government of all the people, undertaking to preserve peace and order in the labour world, then all would indeed be well for the capitalist. The politician’s  calling is to keep the confidence of the voters to the extent that they remain in office. Stripping the political game bare, the politician must have money to carry out the work of winning elections and he can get this money only from the same source from which he levies the taxes, from those who have the money. The division of labour gives to the politician the job of making the laws necessary and imperative to allow the economic system to operate. That is, his job is to keep capitalism so that it can work, that it can make profits on the capital invested, that it can exploit labour.  Historically, the politician has never flinched or allowed moral concepts to stand in the way of serving capital. To do anything else would be to commit political suicide.

Holding the political theory that the class struggle, daily taking part in the activities of the labour movement, is the most stubborn fact in history. But the experiences of the modern factory submitting workers to its daily grind, make them more and more troublesome. The fresh open air was the condition under which man entered into relations with his fellows to make the living together. A million years of open air cannot be forgotten in a few decades of the foul, polluted atmosphere of a capitalist factory. The urge is for shorter and even shorter hours, inside of this veritable prison. The strict discipline required for efficiency, which is enforced by the machines as well as the boss, tends in the same direction. The industrial system of production, too, requires that a worker should have some education and some ability to rationalise so comes to see social production in the large, to see how all the processes are dove-tailed, interlinked together. Workers begin to acquire consciousness of their existence. They commence to give some attention to the problems of distribution.

 At the starting point, they receive an immediate object lesson in the retail store outlet of the product created by them and that the wage received as money taken home is utterly inadequate to meet all the requirements of the house-hold budget. A little enquiry and the benefit of some statistics and the conclusion is reached that the standard of living among all workers is about the same, that is, they are all having an equally hard time to make both ends meet, that wages are just about what will keep a worker alive and going along, in one part of the world as well as in another.

According to socialist economics “Labour produces all wealth.” That is to say, every commodity that goes on the market is produced by the combined efforts of the workers. The workmen in return for their labor get wages, while the articles they make belong to the man they work for and are sold on the market at their value. The difference between the wages the workers get and the price of the commodity which the owners of the industries get we call: “Surplus value.”

What becomes of the rest of the product that has been manufactured?

 It goes in rent, interest and profit after the cost of the raw material, the up-keep of the machinery and plant and the overhead charges have been paid. Rent and interest are really profits which are paid to landlords and banks, for, if the industrial company had bought the land and had no borrowed money it would have to have to treat its whole investment as capital and all the money it made over paying wages and the sums paid out for raw material and up-keep and overhead would be entered on the books as profit.

Now don’t forget that the boss owns everything under the system by which we make the living together. He owns the plant and the machinery: he owns the raw material; he owns the money paid out in wages and he owns the product, the product of labour. When he pays the wages he secures the actual ownership of the skill and efficiency that resides in the worker, not only the highly specialised skill of the trained workman but the equally or even more highly skilled efficiency which is the transmitted joint heritage of the human race. Let no worker ever forget that if it were not for the virtual ownership of the skill and efficiency which is the only asset of the workers, the ownership of the plant, the raw material and the money capital would be of not the slightest use to the Money-Bags of the world.

The ownership of the ability to make the living which resides in the workers, by the owners of the capital invested in the business where the workers labor, makes slaves of the workers. There is no other name that will describe the relations of the bosses and workers. It is slavery and abject slavery at that. Hence it comes that the bosses are against the workers and the workers are against the bosses. Hence it comes that the worker that sides with the boss is a treacherous and a disloyal human with the culture and the psychology of a yellow dog.

Part of this surplus is paid through the banks to other persons for the loan of their money for investment in industrial enterprises, or the bank lends out money for a certain return to people who wish to start new industries or businesses. This part of the surplus we call: “Interest”.

Another part of the surplus goes to owners of land where the factories and the shops are located wither as a yearly payment or once and for all as a purchase or it is through the banks for “interest” lent to people to build houses for other people to pay to live in. This second part of the surplus we call: “Rent.”

The remaining part of the surplus goes to the owners of the industries “pro persona” and this third part we call: “Profit.”

Part of this profit the industrial capitalist again invests in raw materials, new and improved machinery and wages. This “money invested in industries to make more money” we call: “Capital”

Of the remaining part of his profit the capitalist pays his office staff for helping to keep track of the commodities thereby preventing waste and theft. He also pays the people who take part in the selling of the commodities in order to have distribution on the competitive market efficient and without delay. While the office staff is paid a monthly or semi-monthly salary, those who help in the distribution are generally working on a percentage basis, or in the case of the traveling salesman both.

After the industrial capitalist has paid his office staff and his salesmen has laid off enough capital for the improvement and continued running of his industry, he divides the remaining part between his stockholders, that is, those people who from the start helped to furnish “capital” for the industry, in short, those who laid out money for buying machinery, raw materials and labor power.

On these three, the personifications of “rent,” “interest,” and “profit,” are levied the taxes of the community for schools the upkeep of law and order and the whole political and military machinery of our day. These three always stick together when there is any danger for the surplus to be diminished, namely when the workers who produce the surplus want more wages. If a raise in wages is brought about, it necessarily has to be paid out of the surplus—there is nowhere else to take it from. In such troubled times they lean on the sympathy of the teachers, the middlemen, the office staff, the university students, the officials of all descriptions, in short, the “public,” that is the whole respectable crowd who in an industrial community live on the surplus produced by the workers.

Profits

We find among our fellow workers in the mines, mills and factories two distinct types: those who know how profits are made and can explain how the boss makes this profit by selling commodities at their value, and those who don’t know.

Those who don’t know that profits are made by selling commodities at their value fall easy victims to all kinds of funny-money currency quacks with patent schemes to fix up the differences between capital and labour and are invariably fooled and ruled, and those who do know are socialists and can do a straight piece of thinking on economics themselves.

What characterises a capitalist cast of mind more than anything is the belief in the fallacy that profit is made by selling commodities above their value, and all foolish panaceas for prolonging capitalism by increased production or by reduced prices are based on this misconception.

Karl Marx threw an eye-opener into the science of economics by stating: If you cannot explain profits on the supposition that they are derived from selling commodities at their value, you cannot explain it at all. This statement received scant treatment among the university professors. First they ignored it, then they belittled it, and finally admitted it.

Marx was about as popular in his day as Galileo some three centuries previous had been when he stated that the earth was round. In those days it was a clear case that Galileo was crazy. How could he maintain the sun appear in the east in the morning, circle the sky over the earth, and disappear in the west in the evening ? For us the explanation is easy: Galileo had a telescope, which had just been invented, and by the use of it he was able to learn more about the stars and the sun than were those who observed with their eyes only. Galileo was not recognised in his own time for his great contributions to the science of astronomy. Neither was Marx recognized in his time for his discoveries in the science of political economy. But facts are facts, and when the misconceptions have been dispersed the facts still remain. For anybody to speak about how to save society today and not know working class economics is as pretentious as to argue astronomy on the supposition that the earth is flat.

In “Value Price and Profit” Marx gave the finest little key that a mentally bound wage slave could ever wish for to open the locks on his chains with. In this Marx says: “To explain the general nature of profits, you must start from the theory that, on an average, commodities are sold at their real values, and that profits are derived from selling them at their values, that is, in proportion to the quantity of labor realized in them. If you cannot explain profit upon this supposition, you cannot explain it at all. This seems paradox and contrary to every-day observation. It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gasses. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by every-day experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.”

The working class today is the advancing class and therefore acquiring advanced knowledge and  conclusions but they do not need look to the the academics and universities for their enlightenment. The truth of their slave existence is in their daily lives.