The Exploitation of Wage-Slaves

The capitalist class, as a class, robs the working class, as a class. The individual capitalist exploiter does not pocket the whole loot taken from the workers. Out of the wealth, the workers produce come rent, interest, fees for insurance, advertising, taxes etc.  When workers read of the net profits of corporations, small or large, they should always bear in mind that these represent only a fraction of the total plunder.

The exploitation of wage-labor is the story of a robbery so colossal that it defies measurement. The robbery is confined neither by time nor space. It is continuous, unremitting. It proceeds wherever society is divided into classes, wherever one class owns the instruments of production to which another class, owning no tools of its own, must have access in order to live. There is nothing illegal about this robbery. It is considered the normal "way of life." But it is robbery nonetheless. For the capitalist class uses its ownership and control of the factories the same way that a highwayman used his gun -- to extract a tribute from its victims. When the serf of feudal times was forced to yield part of what he produced to the feudal baron, he knew he was being robbed. But capitalist robbery is more subtle. The worker may perform but one-minute operation in the production of a commodity requiring thousands of operations. Nevertheless, his labour has created new value equal to his day's wages in the first hour or two on the job and this new value -- together with the value added by his fellow workers -- is embodied in the finished product.

Marx gave a name to the part of the working day in which the worker reproduces his wages. He called it necessary labour time. During the rest of the working day the worker produces values for which he is not paid, or -- let us call a spade a spade -- values of which he is robbed! This part of the working day Marx called surplus labour time. For purposes of simplification, take the case of a worker who sells his labour power -- to be expended in eight hours -- for the price of $100. The first two hours of his working day are necessary labour time. In these two hours, he produces as much as the boss pays him for eight hours of labour. During the remaining six hours -- surplus labor time -- he produces three times as much or $300 worth of new values. In the science of political economy we call the wealth that the worker produces, but of which he is robbed of surplus value.

What in the degree of robbery, or exploitation? It varies as conditions vary in the different countries. In a country where more advanced techniques and methods of production are applied (such as the United States), the degree of exploitation is greater than it is in less advanced countries. At first sight, this may seem contradictory. Why, you may ask, should workers who are more productive receive less proportionately of what they produce than workers who are not so productive? The answer is simply that wages are not determined by what the worker produces. Leaving aside their temporary rise and fall due to fluctuations of supply and demand in the labour market, wages are determined by what it costs the worker to live and raise a new crop of wage slaves to take his place when he dies or is thrown on the scrap heap.

Everyone is familiar with the expression a "living wage." Our grandfathers got a "living wage"; our fathers got a "living wage": and. normally, we get a "living wage." Thus, in terms of food, clothing, shelter, etc., we receive substantially what our grandfathers did. Yet we produce vastly more than our grandfathers and considerably more than our fathers. Why, then, haven't we advanced beyond the "living wage" concept? The answer is that we cannot advance beyond this concept, no matter how much our productivity increases, as long as capitalism lasts. And the reason is that, under capitalism, labour power is a commodity, an article of merchandise, whose price is governed by the same economic laws that govern the price of any other commodity. Price may fluctuate according to the supply of a commodity and the demand for it in the market. Just as a pendulum swings back and forth, but is always drawn toward the center by gravitation, prices may go up or down -- but always it oscillates around its value in accord with the economic law of value. In other words, price, in the long run, coincides with value. And the value of any commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce it. In the case of the commodity labor power, this means that its value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce the food, clothing, shelter, etc., needed to keep the worker in working condition. He or she gets a 'living wage."

The more highly developed a nation is industrially, the less labour time is required to produce the workers' necessities. Hence, instead of the workers' share of their product increasing proportionately as their productivity rises, it is the other way around. As new methods and techniques -- such as automation -- are introduced, the articles workers consume are cheapened and wages fall accordingly. Thus the workers' relative wages (what they receive in relation to what they produce) tend to fall as productivity rises. In other words, as labor productivity rises, the necessary labor time grows shorter, thus lengthening that part of the working day when the worker produces surplus value.

For purposes of simplification, we have used a single worker as an example. Actually, exploitation "is not the act of any individual capitalist, or set of capitalists, perpetrated upon any individual worker or set of worker. Exploitation is a class act -- the act of the whole capitalist class-perpetrated upon a class -- the whole working class. Apologists for capitalism sometimes try to refute socialist charges of high-degree exploitation by pointing to the net profits of corporations. But socialists have never contended that the corporations pocket all the surplus value their workers produce. On the contrary, socialists point out that before a capitalist can count his net profits he must pay off the landlord, tax collector, banker, advertising capitalist, insurance company, and all the other parasites on parasites. By the time taxes, interest, rent, etc., are deducted, net profits of the immediate capitalist exploiter may be only a fraction of the surplus value of which workers are robbed. But this in no way disputes the fact that the working class is robbed by the capitalist class of wealth so vast that it defies measurement.

DISPOSING OF THE LOOT

Now, let us examine this thievery from another angle. We measure surplus value in dollars. But the workers do not produce dollars, they produce commodities -- and a commodity, Marx tells us, is an article that will satisfy some human want and that is produced for sale. Hence, before the capitalists can enjoy their plunder, they must first find buyers for it. If they don't get rid of their commodity loot, it accumulates in the warehouses and production stagnates. In wartime the solution is simple. In wartime the surplus steel goes into tanks, ships and guns. the surplus textiles into uniforms, tents and bandages, the surplus lumber into training camps, barracks and caskets, and so on down the line of commodities. But between capitalist wars -- in the intervening periods of "peace" -- the capitalists do not have this ready outlet for their wares. In peacetime, they must find other means of disposing of their loot. How do they do it? First of all, it is self-evident that the workers do not consume more than they can buy with their wages. And, as we have shown, this is just a fraction of what they produce. What happens to the remainder of labor's vast product?

A part is consumed by the capitalists in prodigal living. Some capitalists -- the plutocracy -- live in opulence surpassing that of kings, and often maintain not one palace, but many. In every city, the capitalists form a community of super-consumers. They are the patrons of the night clubs, the purchasers of costly luxuries, the members of expensive clubs. Yet, despite their prodigality, the capitalists can use up in personal consumption only a fraction of the immense wealth created by labor and appropriated by their exploiters.

Another part of this wealth -- a much larger part -- is used up in running a huge, bureaucratic, capitalist political State. The cost of running the political State -- including city, county, state and federal governments.

Capitalist rulers have no ears for the voice of sanity. Socialism would put an end to capitalist robbery of the working class. By raising the worker out of his commodity status to that of a free human being with a voice and vote in the administration of industry, by guaranteeing to every producer the full social value of the product, in abort, by replacing capitalist anarchy and exploitation with socialist cooperation and harmony, the world could be made into a veritable paradise of peace and plenty.