Capitalism What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothin'

Total profits of U.S. corporations, as compiled by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, were at $1.50 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 and reached $1.59 trillion in the first quarter of 2010. Over that same period, the country lost 8.2 million jobs, or 5.9% of the job base. (Economic Policy Institute)

The mass media reports yesterday that the situation is indeed dire for young people.  The dailies report that data compiled by Bloomberg News, (named after its owner, the billionaire Mr. Bloomberg) shows that for the first time on record, senior citizens outnumber teens in the Labor force.  With the attacks on pensions, the increase in the retirement age, the economic crisis in general, older people are being forced to work longer.  The capitalists call it "hanging on to their jobs." Unemployment for 16 to 19 year old's is around 25% and higher, 50% in some communities and 34% or so here in California.

This is capitalism.  This is the market at work.  Those who should and could be enjoying their lives in relative comfort and security at retirement have to work, and those who want to work and be productive cannot.

The driving force of a capitalist economy is profit.  And profit has its source in the surplus value created in the process of production or what most of us workers would call work.  Surplus value being the value created above the cost of wages and material costs that the capitalist outlays. Profit can only be made through the expenditure of Labor time, from the use of a human being's life activity over a period of time; it is only the worker at work that adds value in the Labor process.  Production cannot take place without workers, but we do not own the means of production, so it is the owners of the means of production who determine whether or not the process starts.

What's happening now is that the owners of capital and the means of production cannot make significant profit from production, cannot extract enough surplus value from the worker; we are in a world of "excess supply" say the economists----capitalism is too productive. Marx brilliantly explained this over 150 years ago.  This is one of the reasons the recent bubble occurred as the financial sector took more and more of a role in the economy as a whole, but this activity does not add value.  So people starve, become homeless, are forced to work in to their eighties while young people wander the streets and fill their jails.

Workers know it's a sham really.  We may not understand the intricate details of how the process of wealth creation and exploitation occurs, but we know it's theft. I recall a rather crude but illustrative piece of grafitti I read while spending a few unpleasant moments in one of those porto-potties that we have to use on construction sites.  In between some of the racist but more often misogynistic writings was the following: "Life is like a turd sandwich---the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat."

Marx would have understood that.

Many writers I have read and others I have talked to insist we read Marx's Capital.  It is a great book and I have read much of it.  But I am not sure it is critical we read "all" of it, we can if we want to of course. But workers have been betrayed by many who read Capital from beginning to end.  Many great revolutionaries of the past I would figure, never read all of Marx's capital.  A healthy class anger is necessary for one thing.  I think the most important thing is that we as workers understand the general processes at work.  The Labor process and the creation of surplus value is an important aspect of Marx's wonderful work and it is easily grasped by us with a little discussion, as it merely expresses what happens every day at work.  What are prices and their relation to wages, primitive accumulation and the origins of capitalism are all in there and exciting reading; they help bring what is in our gut in to our consciousness as one worker I knew said.

Once we grasp that the capital an employer brings to the marketplace  is our own product, the result of human Labor power in use whether in the form of machinery or wages to pay us. Then it makes perfect sense that the allocation of this capital in society and in further production should be our decision as we are the rightful owners of it.  It is the result of past Labor power.  One thing we have to overcome is our own lack of confidence, a result of class oppression.  We do not see ourselves as economists or historians when we are both; their theoreticians bully us intellectually.  We shy from art and music and other intellectual pursuits that we considers "theirs" or too complicated for us.  We do have to break from the mindless garbage that they overwhelm us with every day through their media, the control of education and the production of ideas.  But as Marx himself stated, "Nothing human is alien to me."

Meanwhile, back to the Labor force.  As I read Bloomberg's findings I think of the trails I walk with my dogs here in California; I am fortunate to live in a metropolitan area so close to natural beauty. The trails are becoming a little overgrown as public services and jobs are cut.  The park department asks for volunteers and gets them.  I saw one clearing weeds from the trail and got on his case about working for nothing, taking someone's needed job.  Naturally, these volunteers are overwhelmingly well off people, quite well of in the case of this particular individual.  Working people can't afford to work for nothing. Liberals do it a lot as it makes them feel satisfied inside, as if they are saving their little bit of the world.

Bankers, corporate CEO's, speculators are liars and thieves and  most workers know this. (Unfortunately, Union heads are up there with them too in most workers' minds)  One solution to the increasing unemployment for youth says one strategist of capital is to "create a lower minimum wage for teens to lower the cost of hiring and training entry level employees.......what we would get for this is more jobs for our teens to learn career skills."

How thoughtful of him, but evidence of the fact that workers are not so stupid is that no worker would believe the above statement that hadn't already lost her mind.

Capitalists, by virtue of their class rule, own the surplus value stolen from workers in the Labor process, maintaining trails, building hospitals, bringing fresh drinking water to the millions in this world without it; these are not profitable ventures, its money out. There are other non-productive (Don't produce surplus value) areas that are more crucial to them like the police, military or the security needed to keep the restless and starving masses at bay; and they truly fear the revolutionary potential of the youth.

So a major part of the solution for workers, a starting point in the wider understanding of how the world really works, is to gain ownership of the surplus value our collective Labor creates; we must control the Labor process and the allocation of its product.

That's not so hard to understand is it?