Let’s look more closely at the relationship and how it benefits the capitalist. Let’s say the capitalist owns a factory that makes wooden tables. This means he needs to buy an amount of wood and the tools to make the tables (hammers, nails, glue etc). He also needs workers to come and use the tools to turn the wood into tables he then sells. Let’s say he spends $10 on the raw materials for one table and when it’s finished the table is worth $20. The worker who comes in to turn the raw materials into a table uses his or her skills and energy, takes the raw materials and adds value to them in the form of a finished table. The capitalist then pays the worker. The table immediately belongs to the capitalist and the capitalist sells the table for $20.
The capitalist has spent money on tools and raw materials and on a worker to build the table. The worker has used brain power and muscle power to turn the raw materials into a table (which immediately belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker), adding $10 units to the raw materials in the form of labour. The capitalist then sells the table. But something is missing. What did the capitalist pay the worker?
If the capitalist paid the worker the value of his or her labour, this adds up to $10. The capitalist has spent $10 on the raw materials and tools, and $10 on the labour to use these up and produce a table worth 20. The capitalist then sells the table for $20. What’s in this for the capitalist? He’s spent $20, and at the end of the process he’s received $20. So what was the point? The capitalist hasn’t got anything out of this arrangement.
But what happens if the capitalist pays $10 for the raw materials and tools, but only pays the worker $8 for his or her labour? The capitalist sells the table for $20, but it only cost $18 to produce. The $2 left over is the capitalist’s profit.
So the key is in the nature of the relationship between the worker and the capitalist. One capitalist isn’t likely to sell wood or tools to another capitalist for less than what they’re worth. So where does a capitalist find a reason to be in production in the first place? The reason is profit, and that profit is found by the capitalist paying the workers less than the value of their work.
To make this a little bit clearer, consider that the capitalist rarely pays a worker based on the number of finished items they produce. The capitalist pays the worker to come to work and work as hard as they possibly can for a set amount of time. This obscures the real relationship between worker and capitalist somewhat and leads to the situation where the worker works half the day to meet his or her own immediate needs, and the rest of the day works to create wealth just for the capitalist.
It is this relationship between the worker and the capitalist that is central to how the capitalist system functions. It is in work done by the worker above and beyond that needed to meet his or her own immediate needs that the capitalist finds a reason to be in business. This relationship is the basis of profit. We can see it most clearly, and it begins to explain the situation, where labour is cheap and where it produces expensive commodities, places where the weekly wage of a person stitching trainers isn’t enough to buy a single pair of them.
In essence we as workers have been reduced, by the capitalist class and the politicians who support them, to tools of work; a cog in a machine; essentially born to work for them, and have our work make them money. If we're going to be truly free, we need to have the freedom to pursue our goals where and when and how we see fit. Wage labour is fundamentally incompatible with this.
What is needed is a fundamental shift in attitudes towards work and the relations that make work necessary. People feel undervalued and underpaid because they are. People can see the inequity in their relationship with their bosses. What isn't seen so well is the fact that we're literally selling our ability to work and a good third of our lives, giving up our freedom in the process, in order to live. But people weren't born simply to work. We instinctively know this and we value our lives more than this because none of us really likes work, but this is balanced against the necessity of work for the vast majority. If we don't do it, we can't really live at all. These are conditions imposed on us by capitalism. We need to continue the task of attempting to reconstruct society.
Nationalising a business or service or industry isn't going to help deliver economic democracy either. The people who work there, and workers generally, would have no more control over how the business is run or what happens to the product of their labour than they would if the business was in private hands. Nationalisation doesn’t address the relationship between employer and employee. It is simply a case of swapping one group of expropriators and facilitators for another. The trade union movement is concerned with higher wages, sometimes with shorter hours (or at least limiting increases in hours), protecting jobs, but these days never, it seems, with the way production and distribution is organized. Such concerns are pushed to the fringes. However, labour movement doesn't go anything like far enough in addressing the real economic problem facing workers and society at large: the problem of how we should organise production and distribution of what workers produce. In fact, trade unions makes no attempt to address this problem at all. We need to make economic democracy a cornerstone of radical thought again. We have to present workers with a vision of the future where they decide democratically, and in collaboration with the community at large, what to produce, how to produce it and then how to distribute it. To really change capitalism, we need to change its core: the relationship of workers to the production, appropriation and distribution of the surplus they create. Workers need more radical solutions. The ultimate aim must be not to prop up capitalism but to destroy it. To overturn the relationship between employer and employee. To abolish the root cause of our economic misery – the employer, the rentier and the banker – and to take control of our own working lives by whatever means necessary. This should begin with a fight to control the ground on which this battle is being fought but the focus overwhelmingly seems to be on fighting for a few extra crumbs from the table. What is needed is not concessions to capitalists and politicians but a vision of workers taking control of the production process themselves so we can free ourselves from the misery of wage slavery.
Adapted from here
http://libcom.org/blog/universal-basic-income-freedom-workers-13122016
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