
hen Marx
referred to workers in capitalism as “wage-slaves” he meant
more than a striking phrase. For him, the analogy between
slavery and capitalism offered a powerful contribution to
anti-capitalist movements. The clue to that contribution
lies in the Communist Manifesto’s summary of what
differentiated communists from other leftists: the latter
seek to raise wages, the former to abolish the wage system.
While slavery emerged
at different times and places in world history, it always
generated opponents. Among the enslaved and others, two
kinds of opposition arose. The first focused on improving
the slaves’ living conditions: these opponents demanded that
slaves be better fed, clothed, housed, treated, and so on.
The second made a very different demand: slavery as an
institution had to be abolished. The two oppositions
sometimes collaborated, but they sometimes fought each other
bitterly. Then the first accused the second of an
irresponsible utopianism that sacrificed action for the
immediate improvement of slaves’ lives and aimed instead for
what at best was a distant goal. The second retorted that so
long as slavery survived as an institution, improvements for
slaves would be difficult to achieve, insufficient, and
insecure; moreover, by limiting the opposition’s goal to
improving slaves’ conditions, slavery as an institution was
condoned and the movement for abolition weakened.
Although slavery lasted
for long periods in many places, eventually the second sort
of opposition prevailed. Across much of the modern
“civilized” world, slavery was abolished as an intrinsically
immoral and inhumane institution regardless of whether the
slaves’ enjoyed good conditions or not. The fourteenth
amendment to the US Constitution outlawed the institution of
slavery for all except prison inmates. Predictably, the
de-facto slavery of prison inmates has everywhere generated,
once again, the same two sorts of oppositions.
When Marx likened
wage-workers to slaves, he brought the lessons of
oppositions to slavery to the emerging movements against
capitalism. Put bluntly, Marx argued against forms of
anti-capitalism that limited themselves to improving
workers’ living conditions. Fast-forwarding to today, Marx
would criticize movements such as those for “a living wage”
or “pension reform” or “welfare increases” or “saving social
security” and so on. A Marxist opposition to capitalism is
rather one focused on its abolition as a system. Marxists,
he might say, are to capitalism what abolitionists were to
slavery.
For Marx, the crux of
the issue is that capitalism entails exploitation. A
large part of the population (productive laborers) produces
a surplus that is appropriated and distributed by a small
part of the population (capitalists). In capitalist
enterprises, workers are hired only if the value that their
labor adds (to the raw materials, tools, and equipment their
work uses up) exceeds the value paid to them as wages for
doing that labor. That excess value – the surplus – belongs
to the capitalists since they own the outputs of production,
sell them in markets, and thereby realize the surplus value
in them. In the preferred language of capitalism, that
surplus value comprises the “profits” of the capitalists,
their “private property” to dispense in their own interests.
The less wages that
capitalists must pay to workers, the more surplus they get
for themselves. Exploitation thus situates tension,
hostility, and conflict in the heart of production.
Capitalists and workers are set into oppositional struggles.
Moreover, those struggles ramify and provoke competitive
struggles among capitalists and among workers. Alongside the
outputs of capitalist production yielding impressive incomes
and accumulating wealth, there are also the countless,
ramifying social costs of the conflicts and competitions.
By excluding them from
the surplus, exploitation also excludes workers from the
tasks, skills, and rewards of organizing, managing, and
directing production. Workers and capitalists thus become
systemically unequal in ability, competence, and confidence.
The inequalities anchored in capitalist production usually
carry over to make the politics and cultures of capitalist
societies similarly unequal. The absence of democracy in
production undermines efforts to establish it in politics.
Capitalist exploitation
would be difficult to sustain if it had to be imposed on
workers resentful of their exploitation and its social
effects. Hence, as with all other exploitative systems
(e.g., feudalism and slavery), theories are advanced and
disseminated by capitalism’s organic intellectuals that make
exploitation invisible and so function to deny its
existence. Such theories parallel their counterparts in
slavery and feudalism where it was argued that slaves and
serfs were not exploited but were rather protected (saved
from despair, poverty, and death), loved like children,
culturally uplifted, and so on by their lords and masters.
Today, the hegemonic
economic theory, called “neoclassical economics” for
historical reasons, serves to make exploitation invisible.
Building on the early formulation of such ideas by Adam
Smith, neoclassical economics casts production as a process
in which no surplus gets produced, nor appropriated, nor
distributed. Instead, production is an harmonious
collaboration: workers bring their labor, landlords their
land, and capitalists their capital. All three contribute to
production and all three share in its fruits according to
their contributions: the workers’ share is wages, the
landlords’ is rent, and the capitalists’ is profit. It is a
world of fairness and harmony. The inability of workers to
contribute capital is explained by their failure to save out
of their incomes and their resulting lack of capital to
contribute to production. The capital in the hands of
capitalists is not the fruit of exploitation, of taking a
surplus from workers, but rather the fruit of their own
virtuous frugality. Capitalism fairly rewards individuals
for the contributions each brings to production. More than
that, capitalism represents an engine of wealth production,
economic growth, and thus the possibility for everyone to
become rich. Those who have failed to do so should chiefly
blame themselves. To blame capitalism is not a valid social
critique but rather the whining of losers.
Neoclassical economic
theory, among other hegemonic sets of ideas, has worked well
to support and justify capitalism and undermine the appeal
of Marxist economic theory. One modality of its working has
been the sedimentation into the popular consciousness of the
notion of “the wage.” It strikes vast numbers of people as
somehow obvious, natural, and necessary that production be
organized around a deal struck between a wage payer and wage
receiver. And this is all the more remarkable in as much as
the vast bulk of human history displays economic systems
without wages (neither serfs, nor slaves, nor individuals
who work alone, nor most collective work systems have used
wages). Capitalism’s history is in part the history of the
deepening conceptual hegemony of the wage. Thus, for
example, the individual peasant or craftsperson working
alone has had to be renamed a “self-employed person” to
revision a non-wage production system as if it were waged.
Naturalizing the wage
concept works to naturalize capitalist relations of
production, the employer/employee relation, not as one among
alternative production systems but as somehow intrinsic to
production itself. Workers, trade unions, and intellectuals
often cannot imagine production without wages and hence wage
payers juxtaposed to wage earners. This helps to make
capitalism itself appear as necessary and eternal much as
the parallel theories celebrating feudalism and slavery
performed the same function for those systems of production.
The naturalization of the wage system helps support the
notion that the fundamental goal of workers’ organization
must be to raise wages.
Thus, no surprise
attaches to the fact, these days, that one widespread kind
of social criticism concentrates on softening capitalism’s
negative impacts on workers and the larger society. It seeks
to raise workers’ wages and benefits and to make governments
limit capitalists’ rapaciousness and the social costs of
their competition. In the US, this is what “liberals” do:
from the minimalist oppositions within the Democratic Party
to the demands of social democrats and many “radicals” for
major wage increases, major government interventions, and so
on. What always frustrates liberals and radicals is the
difficulty of achieving these improved workers’ conditions
and the insecurity and temporariness of whatever
improvements they do achieve. Today they bemoan yet another
roll-back of improvements, namely those won under FDR’s New
Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and so on.
Marxism is that other
kind of opposition that demands the abolition of capitalism
as a system. Since Marxists find capitalist exploitation to
be as immoral and inhumane as slavery, they might logically
seek a further amendment to the US Constitution that
abolishes it as well. A Marxist program would seek to
replace capitalist production by a non-wage system, one
where the workers will not only produce surpluses but also
be their own boards of directors. The “associated workers”
would, as Marx suggested, appropriate their own surpluses
and distribute them. The wage-payer versus wage-recipient
division of people inside production would vanish. Every
worker’s job description would entail not only his/her
technical responsibilities to produce a specific output but
also her/his responsibilities as part of the collective that
appropriates and distributes the surplus. Monday to
Thursday, each worker in each enterprise makes commodities,
and every Friday, each worker functions as a member of that
enterprise’s board of directors. The stakes here are less
obtaining higher wages than abolishing the wage system.
The point of such a
Marxist program is to overcome the conflicts, wastes, and
inequalities (economic, political, and cultural) that flow
from the existence of capitalist exploitation whether or not
wages are raised. The point is likewise to stress the
incompatibility of any genuine democracy with the wage
system and its usual social effects (and again whether wages
are higher or lower).
Of course, in the
struggle between such a Marxist perspective and its various
critics, the latter will depict the programmatic advocacy of
an end to the wage system as impracticable, utopian, or
deluded. Those persuaded by neoclassical economics will
simply dismiss or ignore not only the Marxist criticism of
the wage system but Marxism altogether. For them, the wage
system is not only eternal and necessary, but also fair and
“efficient.” For them, since there “is” no surplus, they
need not read or learn Marxist theory and criticism, let
alone debate it. So Marxist theory and its proponents can
and are largely excluded from public discourse in the media,
the schools, and politics.
For liberals suspicious
of neoclassical economics – or “neoliberalism” as it is now
more often called - the Marxian program sketched above would
be seen as utopian fantasy at best. Yet, not the least irony
of Bush’s America today is how his regime’s relentless
removal or reduction of the past reforms (high wages,
pensions, medical insurance, social security, state social
programs, etc.) makes a liberal politics today seem
painfully deluded to so many. The liberals seem hopelessly
weak, unable to stop let alone reverse the Bush juggernaut.
Worse still, what they advocate are precisely the reforms
now being dismantled and thus revealed as having been
fundamentally insecure all along. The audience for
capitalism’s critics and opponents is thus being primed to
listen rather attentively to Marxist claims that an
abolition of the wage system offers not only a better
society but also a far better basis for securing
those improvements in wages and working conditions that mass
action can achieve. What is needed now are Marxists able and
willing to articulate those claims to that audience, to
persuade ever more of capitalism’s critics and opponents
that abolition of exploitation and the wage system must be a
component of their program for social change.
Rick
Wolff's major interests include (a) the critical
comparison of alternative economic theories (neoclassical,
Keynesian, and Marxian) (b) the application of advanced
class analysis to contemporary global capitalism, and (c)
new developments in Marxian economics. He has published
several books with Stephen Resnick including Knowledge
and Class: A Critique of Political Economy. He is a
member of the editorial board of several academic journals
including Rethinking Marxism.
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