Capitalist and Worker, the thief and the victim.

Language is important as a means of communication, but how we describe events reflects our understanding of them which is influenced by class, by the role we play in the production of society’s needs.

The Wall Street Journal reports this week on productivity. The capitalist class describes productivity as the amount of any given thing produced in one hour. Productivity grew considerably last year, at an average annual rate of 6.2%. Why was that? It was because the owners of capital, the buyers of Labor power as opposed to the sellers of it like us workers, were, in the language of the bosses, “able to squeeze their work forces.”
During this period they “sought to get as much work out of as few people as possible.” while avoiding hiring or purchasing additional Labor power (look at this as the use of a human being’s life activity over a period of time). This was always called wage slavery in the earlier days in this country.

What this means in living terms is less time with your family, a faster, less safe and more inhospitable workplace whether you are a sanitation worker or a doctor working for an HMO. It means more animosity between workers as the competition between us to stay employed at all costs intensifies. It translates in to more alcoholism and drug abuse in order to make it through this which in turn leads to a crisis in our personal lives between lovers, friends, partners. It leads to the annihilation of entire families as human beings, like chickens in mass production just can’t take it any more.

Productivity can increase when capitalists spend money on new equipment or technology that increases how much a group of workers can produce without adding more or even by reducing hiring which is more likely when what they call “Labor saving” devices are brought in. One example is online booking for airlines or ATM’s for the banks, or container shipping or e mail or faxing documents. It was new technology that was a major factor in the 90’s boom which sent profits to a 40-year high. They can increase the working time without increasing wages as described above. The WSJ boasts of the productivity advantages of the US over Europe but fails to mention the better benefits European workers have or that US workers work some two months a year more than workers in most industrial economies. This is a major reason for the US productivity advantage over its rivals.

When they don’t spend on new equipment or hire, they “squeeze” those that they have. But there are limits to this as Marx once explained, the limits of human physical endurance. At some point, worker productivity will decline due to poor or excessively brutal working conditions. They let workers drop like flies when we are in abundance. We are all aware of the conditions in the plantations of the Caribbean, Latin America and the US South.

Unions set some limits to this “squeezing”. Major strikes in China at auto plants have won some major wage increases and frightened the Chinese bureaucracy enough to force them to improve Labor Laws. In Bangladesh, workers, many of them women, have waged street battles against the police over wages and conditions in the textile factories. This expense will make bosses re-consider. It should remind us that we have what we have through such sacrifice of workers before us. A lot of blood has been shed to get us this far.

So what they call hard work, productivity, “squeezing more out of their workers”, has real consequences for us in our lives, in the language of flesh and blood. Capitalist economists describe productivity as important because “It’s linked to our economic futures and our kid’s economic futures.”

Like the religious sages who describe heaven as a paradise yet always omit from their descriptions of the place one of the most pleasurable and important aspects of pleasure for human beings, sex; capitalists conveniently omit profit from the equation.

Increased productivity generally translates in to more profit. Profit, as we have pointed out on this blog many times, has its source in the unpaid Labor of the workers, it comes from the surplus value created by the Labor process as the value paid in wages is less than the value produced. This has all sorts of other consequences too.

And new equipment, Labor saving device, technology and all these other means by which output per hour is increased are not Labor saving devices from our point of view. They are labor destroying devices. The capitalist means by Labor saving that she can shell out less money on wages, hire fewer workers. (this too has its consequences). My garbage guy drives around like a maniac with an automated truck and always ends up working overtime to get the job done. There used to be three of them. What happened to the others and how come the guy left is so stressed? The workweek could be shortened to 20 hours given the productivity of Labor.

Labor saving for us would mean that we work becomes easier or we have less of it. But to have less of it under their terms means no work, no means of subsistence, no food, no house, no medical care. It means the unemployment line. New technology is used to increase profits, it does not mean more leisure time for us which it would if we owned this technology, if we owned the means of producing and the productive process itself.

The Luddites destroyed the new technology of their day in order to save their jobs. They were heroic figures but were on the wrong track, the object is to own the technology. The capitalists resist this as they believe they are the rightful owners, but we are great in numbers and have the potential power to change this situation. They are owners by theft. The slave owners believed their ownership of other human beings was written in scripture, every ruling class has to justify its rule.

The English king Charles, like all feudal monarchs, believed they were King by divine right; that they were chosen by god. Some fool decided to cut off his head and see what happened; the rest is history.