Ford Motor Corp is “on track for one of its most profitable years ever.”. The journal adds. Starbucks, that closed some 600 stores, is also on a roll with its second quarter operating profit the highest ever.
The paper reports that revenue is down, not surprising given the current situation as consumers are still debt burdened and overwhelmed by the present crisis and reluctant to spend any extra cash. The owners of this profit are not willing to invest much of it, if any, back in to the economy until they feel more confident that the economy is stabilizing and the ability of the mass of us consumers to buy improves. I don’t see this as an immediate prospect. This shows that it is not revenue alone that can guarantee the capitalist's profit. Source of graph below.
Labor productivity, what workers produce per hour, is the source of these historic profits and it grew 3.5% in 2009 and at a 3.9% annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2010. In other words, the bosses “squeezed” more out of existing workers as they say as they eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs. “To achieve this performance, companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, closed less profitable units, shifted work to cheaper regions and streamlined processes.”, the Journal explains. One company admits it is “stretching its workforce by using part-timers and adding weekend shifts.”
As we have written on this blog before, what that means for workers and the middle class is longer hours, increased workloads, and the constant stress of having to perform more for fear of losing your job next; it has very real material consequences as the added competition helps turn worker against worker. This is workplace terrorism and wreaks far more death and destruction than any Afghan warlord or “alleged” al Qaeda operative does, all former partners of US capitalism. This is the economic system in which we live.
Individual bosses may well feel remorse at the destruction their action causes to people’s lives, but they are driven by the laws of the market to take the actions they do, “The human cost of eliminating jobs is always painful but in a weird way, the economic melee has helped us build a stronger company” says one says one employer who laid off 2000 workers and “moved others to China, India and Canada.”
We are told by all the institutions of capital, the mass media, the “experts” in academia as well as the heads of organized Labor and leading religious figures, that we are in “hard economic times” and we all have to pull together. But they always tell us we are in hard economic times, that there is no money for schools or transportation or to invest in the community. We are told we have to pull together and do more volunteer work whether it be at school or picking up trash in the streets. Services are being slashed because there is no money. Public sector workers have “overly generous” benefits we read every day in the press now as we are to be blamed for the economic crisis, or better, their response to it. Thousands of homes stand empty as more and more become homeless and others cram themselves in with relatives and friends. Democrats and Republicans alike tell us every day prior to the elections in a month that we “all have to live within our means”
The stage is being set for more of the same crisis ahead. We can change this. It is hard for us to think about working people actually governing society and making decisions about what we produce and how we produce it. It is even harder for us to imagine that this profit, these trillions or so that they are earning in the aftermath of the crash and as people lose jobs, homes and their health, is the product of our Labor as we are taught from Kindergarten on that the billionaires money is "their money". But it is not, it is our creation and should be in our possession collectively.
It is clear from reading their serious journals that their increased wealth comes at the expense of our increased exploitation. I am leaving for now detailing the extreme exploitation of workers in what they call the “underdeveloped world”. But we can see that they say that their increased gain is the result of “squeezing” more out of their workers, of “stretching its workforce”. This means extracting more from us in the terms of our life activity that they purchase for a period of time and use for their benefit. “Stretching” "squeezing", think of what these terms means. And for those of us who are not profitable to hire, those of us they discard, we become “bad credit risks” as without wages we can’t pay the interest on the credit card or the home mortgage or the car that we need to get to work. They send the sheriffs to evict us from the homes they lend us the money to buy, our money lent back to us for a price.
When we see it this way it becomes clear that capitalists, borrow money all the time, they access capital through all sorts of means, but that pool of capital, that reserve, is the product of past Labor power, it is “our” product but we don’t own it, it is stolen from us. It is legalized theft just like the ownership of a human being under the laws of a slave society is.
Lets leave aside the few trillion we have set aside for the bankers and moneylenders that caused the crisis or the trillions more on wars around the globe to protect these profits; lets just think about all the profits that have been made between recessions and crashes. From 1980 to 2000 for example there was a much longer period of accumulating profits than there was of not accumulating them. Over centuries capitalism has accumulated massive wealth, great British ports like Bristol and Liverpool became wealth centers based on the trade in human beings stolen from the African continent and sold as slaves. For 300 years a huge section of US capitalism paid no wages to those whose Labor created massive wealth.
An important step is understanding in our own minds that the system we live in has not always existed and it will not always exist. When they talk of their money or their wealth they are talking of wealth that is the product of our Labor power, of work that we do for them collectively that they don’t pay us for.
When we see this clearly it is much easier to begin the process of figuring out how we can get that wealth back and use it for the benefit of all of us who created it rather than for the benefit of a few.
It will open the door to our real emancipation as human beings.
1 comment:
It is a huge on going tragedy. Why are these capitalists so uncaring. There simply should be a better means of regulating capital. All this excess profit should be returned and reinvested with the working class. Yes,it is labor that created this wealth.
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