Time Is Running Out

Capitalism is presented as a ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’, formed like mountains and the oceans by forces beyond human control, that it is an economic system ultimately resulting from human nature. However it was not established by ‘natural forces’ but by intense and massive violence across the globe. At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit. While some people own means of production, or capital, most of us don't and so to survive we need to sell our ability to work in return for a wage, or else scrape by on benefits. This first group of people is the capitalist class and the second group is the working class.

For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work. Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work, worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work. Or even worse, we don't have work and then our main worry is trying to find it. Paradoxically, while millions of people are overworked, barely able to cope with high workloads and long working hours, millions of other people are jobless or work on part-time contracts and desperate to work. And while automation, mechanisation and productivity continually increases, working hours and working lives don't fall. In fact, in most places they are rising, as retirement ages are put up and working hours are increased. For many of us, we don't care about the work we do, we just need money to get by and at the end of the month, our bank balances are barely any different from the month before. We spend our days checking our watches, counting down the minutes till we can go home, the days till the weekend, the months till our next holiday.

Even those of us who have jobs in areas we enjoy, we do not control our work. It controls us, we experience it as an alien force. Most of us do not control what time we get to work or what time we leave. We do not control the pace or volume of our work, what products we make or what services we provide, or how we do it. For example, nurses may love helping people. But may still be frustrated by bed shortages, insufficient staffing, punishing shift patterns and arbitrary management targets.

And then much work, which may be extremely difficult, boring and dangerous for workers and destructive for the environment, is not even socially useful. Globally, millions of people every year are killed by their work, while scores of millions are made ill and hundreds of millions are injured. From built-in obsolescence causing products to break down making people buy new ones, to entire industries like sales and marketing existing only to persuade people to buy more products and work more to buy them. And much other useful work is squandered in supporting socially useless industries.

Why is it like this?

The reason is simple: we live in a capitalist economy. Therefore it is this system which determines how work is organised. And our work is the basis of the economy. Money - capital - is invested to become more money. And this happens because of our work. Our work adds value to the initial capital, and the value we add comes to more than our wages. This surplus value results in the growth of the initial capital, which funds profits and expansion. Capitalism is based on this simple process – money is invested to generate more money. When money functions like this, it functions as capital. For instance, when a company uses its profits to hire more staff or open new premises, and so make more profit, the money here is functioning as capital. As capital increases (or the economy expands), this is called ‘capital accumulation’, and it's the driving force of the economy. The wages we get roughly match the cost of the products necessary to keep us alive and able to work each day (which is why, at the end of each month, our bank balance rarely looks that different to the month before). The difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is how capital is accumulated, or profit is made. This difference between the wages we are paid and the value we create is called "surplus value". The extraction of surplus value by employers is the reason we view capitalism as a system based on exploitation - the exploitation of the working class.

The lower our wages, the harder we work and the longer our hours the bigger this surplus value is. Which is why employers in the private and public sector continually attempt to make us work harder and longer for less pay. For this reason our jobs are made dull and monotonous, as then unskilled workers can do it cheaper. The products we produce or the services we provide are also often substandard to cut costs. Mass unemployment functions to keep wages of overworked employed workers down. As workers who are not afraid of being replaced by the unemployed can demand higher wages, better conditions and shorter working hours. Enterprises which extract the most surplus value and so profit and expand the most, succeed, while those which don't, fail. So if a company or an industry is profitable, it grows. Regardless of whether it is socially necessary, whether it destroys the environment or kills its workers.

In order to accumulate capital, our boss must compete in the market with bosses of other companies. They cannot afford to ignore market forces, or they will lose ground to their rivals, lose money, go bust, get taken over, and ultimately cease to be our boss. Therefore even the bosses aren't really in control of capitalism, capital itself is. It's because of this that we can talk about capital as if it has agency or interests of its own, and so often talking about 'capital' is more precise than talking about bosses.

Both bosses and workers, therefore, are alienated by this process, but in different ways. While from the workers' perspective, our alienation is experienced through being controlled by our boss, the boss experiences it through impersonal market forces and competition with other bosses. Because of this, bosses and politicians are powerless in the face of ‘market forces,’ each needing to act in a way conducive to continued accumulation (and in any case they do quite well out of it!). They cannot act in our interests, since any concessions they grant us will help their competitors on a national or international level. So, for example, if a manufacturer develops new technology for making cars which doubles productivity it can lay off half its workers, increase its profits and reduce the price of its cars in order to undercut its competition. If another company wants to be nice to its employees and not sack people, eventually it will be driven out of business or taken over by its more ruthless competitor - so it will also have to bring in the new machinery and make the layoffs to stay competitive. Of course, if businesses were given a completely free hand to do as they please, monopolies would soon develop and stifle competition which would lead to the system grinding to a halt. The state intervenes, therefore to act on behalf of the long-term interests of capital as a whole. The primary function of the state in capitalist society is to maintain the capitalist system and aid the accumulation of capital. As such, the state uses repressive laws and violence against the working class when we try to further our interests against capital. For example, bringing in anti-strike laws, or sending in police or soldiers to break up strikes and demonstrations. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have always woken up to throw off their chains.

Raising the minimum wage is no solution, as it doesn't get anywhere close to solving the root problem. If our work is the basis of the economy, and the basis of growth and profits, then ultimately we possess the power to disrupt it, not to mention ultimately take it over for ourselves. It is entirely reliant on us, the working class, and our labour which it must exploit, and so it will only survive as long as we let it. By taking direct action like stopping work - striking - we stop the gears of production, and prevent profits from being made. In this way we can defend our conditions and leverage improvements from our bosses. By organising together we do not only improve our lives now but we can lay the foundations for a new type of society. A society where we don't just work for the sake of making profits we will never see or building a so-called ‘healthy’ economy but to fulfill human needs. Where we organise ourselves collectively to produce necessary goods and services not for exchange but for use. Where we get rid of unnecessary work and make all necessary tasks as easy, enjoyable and interesting as possible. A socialist society. We need to free ourselves from this wage slavery which robs our pay-checks every month and keeps us in debt and forever in the rat-race and on the tread-mill just to survive. Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you have, or if you go to the ballet or opera rather than the football match but the basic conflict which defines capitalism – those of us who must work for a living vs. those who profit from the work that we do. By fighting for our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the market we lay the basis for a new type of society - a society based on the direct fulfillment of our needs. Is such a society possible? You bet it is... there is simply no other way we will make it as a species but our time is running out.