The many work to enrich the few

Tinkering with the capitalist system can never alter its fundamentally anti-social character. The relationships and values involved in a humane life demand that we abolish this system and bring into being one that reflects the interests of the people. The new system will be one that brings about the end of exploitation.

What's wrong with working part-time? Nothing, if you're making enough to live on. But, as everyone knows, part-time jobs don't pay enough to pay all the bills, nor as a rule, do they include necessary health insurance and other benefits. Most so-called part-time workers are actually full-time workers, holding down two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet. Millions of workers with legitimate full-time jobs also need another, part-time job because the full-time job pays too little. Americans work more hours per year than workers in many other industrialised countries. When workers are working harder for less, profits soar. The stock market rockets to new highs. The only thing that could upset this gravy train, it seems, is if wages should go up!  Surely folk can see that something is clearly wrong if economic health depends on its people doing poorly. Yet this senseless contradiction is the "normal" condition in our capitalist economic system, where the many work to enrich a few who don't do my productive work. Trying to get around this conflict of interest between capital and labour economists describe the trickle-down theory with the argument that if companies making more money will then pay their workers more - a theory proven to be false.  It's not a question of whether the CEOs are "greedy" or not. It's a simple matter of the law of the market: the law of supply and demand. Supply and demand determines the price of labour just as it determines the price of any other commodity. Yes, in this system labor is a commodity, bought and sold on the labor market. But today the labor market is not confined to national boundaries. You have to look at the global supply of labor because now it's possible for companies to move (out-source)  their operations overseas, especially to developing countries where dispossessed rural peasants stream to the cities looking for employment. So when wages started escalating it only hastened the exodus of capital, lowering the domestic demand for labor and driving its price down once again. And once the economy slipped into recession unemployment climbed and wages tumbled.

The fact that labour under capitalism is a commodity, ruled by the law of supply and demand, explains another puzzling contradiction: how people can get poorer by working harder and producing more wealth. Although workers produce all the economic wealth in the form of goods and services, they own none of it. The product is owned by their employers, be they small businessmen or multinational corporations. What the workers get from their product is what they can buy back from the owners, using the wages they are paid by the owners for the use of their labor. Since the workers are not working for themselves, they may increase their output by 10, 20 or 50 per cent and still not see a penny of the increase. What the worker receives for her work is something quite different from the product of her work, and that something is determined by the supply of and demand for her in the labor market. The output of goods and services has increased enormously as workers have worked longer hours and improved technologies have increased their output per hour. But since that time workers have received less in real terms for each hour of their work. The value of that added output has gone instead to capital, with the result that the owners of capital have increased their share of the national wealth and national income while the non-owners, the workers, have seen their share decrease.

Now imagine for a moment that instead of what actually happened we had had a different economic system. In this different system labour, instead of being a commodity bought by capital, was itself the owner of the machinery and facilities of production and distribution. As owner, labor would be working for itself, and so would own its own product. In one year so many goods and services would have been produced, which would have been distributed among their owners, which would include all the workers who contributed labour toward their production. This would be all the useful and necessary labor, including that of women and men working at home caring for children and doing all the other domestic labor required to maintain a household. The following year the population may have increased a bit so there would be more people of working age to help in production. Also, there may have been new technologies introduced which would have reduced the amount of labor needed to produce the same number of goods and services. What would have happened? The people might have decided to continue to work the same number of hours as before, which would mean more goods and services were produced and people had more things. Or the people might have decided they didn't need more things and instead wanted more free time away from work. The workday then would have been reduced for all, while their consumption of goods and services remained the same. In a system of labor ownership, where basic economic decisions are made democratically by the people through a workplace-based government, every advance in technology directly benefits all the people by either increasing the goods and services for consumption or shortening the workweek. With the rapid advances now going on in computer technologies, it's not hard to imagine producing everything we need with a few hours of work per person per week.

In the capitalist system, where goods are produced to sell for a profit, production has to keep growing whether we need the stuff or not. In a labor-owned system, once we have enough of whatever well quit making it, conserving resources in the process. When the current incentive for waste and obsolescence - in order to keep selling more - is removed, the overall level of production could actually fall, greatly easing the stress on the environment as well as on us.

If all this sounds too good to be true it's only because what we have now is too crazy to be true. But, sadly, it is true, and as a result, we've become accustomed to accept the irrational as normal, or at least unavoidable. But it eventually reaches the point where irrational contradictions become intolerable and must, one way or another, be resolved. While no one can set a date when people will finally rebel against the economic and social madness, the operations of the capitalist system itself guarantee the time will come. Of course, there's no guarantee that when the time comes it will be socialism that is adopted by the majority and put into effect. All kinds of crackpots and quacks will be in the field to lead the people in every direction except towards the economic reconstruction of society.

It will require an intense political struggle to win the day for socialism. This is a struggle that can be carried out only by a highly organised and dedicated political movement, the movement the Socialist Party is today working to create.