Work for Revolution

For capitalists, workers are a necessary inconvenience. To make a profit in the productive sector, they must purchase our labour power. (They’d prefer to go robotic or concentrate upon the financial—moving money around rather than selling goods or services—and not have to deal with pesky workers. Sadly for them, robots aren’t everywhere yet. They still need us—without exploiting us, their whole economy falls apart.) For them, the employment rate is not determined by what society needs; it’s determined by how much money they can accumulate. If it’s not profitable to employ us, they throw us in the street. This is the framework within which capitalists conceive of the “employment rate.” They evaluate the numbers with certain questions on their minds, namely: “Should we employ more workers or can we get a higher rate of profit playing the market?” and “Is the masses’ discontent threatening social disorder, making it necessary to ease their pain a little bit?”

We working people, on the other hand, consider being employed as “making a living.” In our framework, everyone has the right to do so. We, who have to hawk our labor power and services on the open market, value our labor power differently than capitalists do. For us, its value is equal to whatever it takes to live. “Live” and “survive” are two different things—we’re not talking about the bare minimum that will keep us just alive enough to return to work tomorrow. At a bare minimum, “employment” should provide us and our families with certain basics: a comfortable home, a broad and stimulating education, quality clothing, restful vacations, high-quality food and medical care, convenient and cheap transportation. These are the basic human rights of everyone who lives in a functioning society, yet we’ve been so conditioned to deprivation that these simple necessities have become wild fantasies. We yearn for them when buying lottery tickets, dreaming of beating ridiculous odds in the hope of easing the intolerable stress of constant hassles and personal financial disasters. But in these days of austerity, part-time jobs and zero-hour contracts that capitalists count as “jobs”—part-time gigs that don’t even let us feed ourselves properly—are not worthy of that name. The same goes for day labor, temp work, being subcontracted out, coming out of retirement, freelancing, internships, and other forms of slave labor. We are working too hard, too much, and not enough. Well, we need better. We produce all the value in this damn economy—we deserve better.

Every day we’re being dragged deeper into the capitalist nightmare. The reformists decry capitalism’s “excesses” by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism and then they offer they offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like “ethical capitalism,” “conscious capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” and “green capitalism.” These reformists build careers as intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it. Fortunately, faced with looming demise as global warming makes itself felt, increasing number of progressive thinkers  are acknowledging that capitalism itself is the problem. But are they pointing out the solution to the madness? Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: “collaborative commons,” “workplace democracy,” “workers’ co-ops,” “mutual aid,” the “sharing economy.” These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or “socialistic.” It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and manipulate our discontent. This is not post-capitalism. Exploitation in the process of production is still at the heart of the global economy. And as long as the value produced by workers is being appropriated and accumulated by capitalists, then we are still in capitalism.

So deep down, they are reformists even if they sound radical and don’t really want to eliminate capitalism completely, but rather to mitigate its worst effects. Because their hearts aren’t fully committed, they want an easy way out. They seek administrative measures and decrees like establishing “democracy in the workplace” and “guaranteed income.” They hope they can wait for the economy to evolve to some improved state through co-operatives or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises, even the return of sewer socialism in the form of municipalisation of local utilities. That these academic hucksters of stupid ideas are able to get a wide hearing is amazing.

To get beyond capitalism, we cannot wait or hope or engineer an upgrade. There is no easy way out. We need to emancipate ourselves from it through struggle; we need to destroy it. The good news is that it is possible to destroy it. It is the producers of material value—the working class—who are in a position to lead all of us out of capitalism. Their hands are on the means of production—factories and land and infrastructure. By taking it out of the hands of capitalists, they free it so it can be used by all to meet the needs of all, for a real common good. The proliferation of these fake anti-capitalist schemes should serve as a wake-up call—a loud and clear sign that we need to organize and build a real mass movement led by the working class against capitalism. We need to become a strong social force, so we can fight our exploiters and win. We gain nothing unless we fight for it. If we’re going to be strong enough to win our rights, then we need to organize. If unions hold us back or sell us out then we need to organize on our own, into a new labor movement that workers control. Let’s band together.  

For capitalists, workers are a necessary inconvenience. To make a profit in the productive sector, they must purchase our labor power. (They’d prefer go robotic or full-financial—moving money around rather than selling goods or services—and not have to deal with pesky workers. Sadly for them, robots aren’t everywhere yet. They still need us—without exploiting us, their whole economy falls apart.) For them, the employment rate is not determined by what society needs; it’s determined by how much money they can accumulate. If it’s not profitable to employ us, they throw us in the street. This is the framework within which capitalists conceive of the “employment rate.” They evaluate the numbers with certain questions on their minds, namely: “Should we employ more workers or can we get a higher rate of profit playing the market?” and “Is the masses’ discontent threatening social disorder, making it necessary to ease their paina little bit?”

We working people, on the other hand, consider being employed as “making a living.” In our framework, everyone has the right to do so. We, who have to hawk our labor power and services on the open market, value our labor power differently than capitalists do. For us, its value is equal to whatever it takes to live. “Live” and “survive” are two different things—we’re not talking about the bare minimum that will keep us just alive enough to return to work tomorrow. At a bare minimum, “employment” should provide us and our families with certain basics: a comfortable home, a broad and stimulating education, quality clothing, restful vacations, high-quality food and medical care, convenient and cheap transportation. These are the basic human rights of everyone who lives in a functioning society, yet we’ve been so conditioned to deprivation that these simple necessities have become wild fantasies. We yearn for them when buying lottery tickets, dreaming of beating ridiculous odds in the hope of easing the intolerable stress of constant hassles and personal financial disasters. But in these days of austerity, part-time jobs and zero-hour contracts that capitalists count as “jobs”—part-time gigs that don’t even let us feed ourselves properly—are not worthy of that name. The same goes for day labor, temp work, being subcontracted out, coming out of retirement, freelancing, internships, and other forms of slave labor. We are working too hard, too much, and not enough. Well, we need better. We produce all the value in this damn economy—we deserve better.

Every day we’re being dragged deeper into the capitalist nightmare. The reformists decry capitalism’s “excesses” by defining the problem not a capitalism itself, but as errors within an otherwise acceptable economic system. They add qualifiers: crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, corporate capitalism and then they offer they offer reassuring-sounding it-won’t-be-that-bad schemes like “ethical capitalism,” “conscious capitalism,” “social entrepreneurship,” and “green capitalism.” These reformists build careers as intellectuals by offering the comforting thought that if we could simply eliminate its worst elements, the system might yet be saved. But the worst aspects of capitalism aren’t a mistake. They’re inherent to it. Fortunately, faced with looming demise as global warming makes itself felt, increasing number of progressive thinkers  are acknowledging that capitalism itself is the problem. But are they pointing out the solution to the madness? Let’s see what remedies many of them point to: “collaborative commons,” “workplace democracy,” “workers’ co-ops,” “mutual aid,” the “sharing economy.” These sound good, and indeed some of them may be positive and necessary steps toward a non-capitalist mode of production. But they are just that—steps—and it’s a mistake to confuse them with the path as a whole. Unless the framework of capitalism is broken entirely, they circle back to the beginning every time. Capitalism is not damaged simply because we engage in activity that is cooperative, non-hierarchical, collaborative or “socialistic.” It can and often does assimilate this activity, monetize it to generate new revenue streams. At the same time it helps manage and manipulate our discontent. This is not post-capitalism. Exploitation in the process of production is still at the heart of the global economy. And as long as the value produced by workers is being appropriated and accumulated by capitalists, then we are still in capitalism.

So deep down, they are reformists even if they sound radical and don’t really want to eliminate capitalism completely, but rather to mitigate its worst effects. Because their hearts aren’t fully committed, they want an easy way out. They seek administrative measures and decrees like establishing “democracy in the workplace” and “guaranteed income.” They hope they can wait for the economy to evolve to some improved state through co-operatives or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises, even the return of sewer socialism in the form of municipalisation of local utilities. That these academic hucksters of stupid ideas are able to get a wide hearing is amazing.

To get beyond capitalism, we cannot wait or hope or engineer an upgrade. There is no easy way out. We need to emancipate ourselves from it through struggle; we need to destroy it. The good news is that it is possible to destroy it. It is the producers of material value—the working class—who are in a position to lead all of us out of capitalism. Their hands are on the means of production—factories and land and infrastructure. By taking it out of the hands of capitalists, they free it so it can be used by all to meet the needs of all, for a real common good. The proliferation of these fake anti-capitalist schemes should serve as a wake-up call—a loud and clear sign that we need to organize and build a real mass movement led by the working class against capitalism. We need to become a strong social force, so we can fight our exploiters and win. We gain nothing unless we fight for it. If we’re going to be strong enough to win our rights, then we need to organize. If unions hold us back or sell us out then we need to organize on our own, into a new labor movement that workers control. Let’s band together.