The Market Exchange Between Capital and Workers

Selling Out? It's Called Survival

Lebowitz continues:

The market exchange between capital and workers

17. We now have the basis for an exchange between two parties in the market, the owner of money, and the owner of labor power. The worker needs money, and the capitalist needs the worker’s power. Each of them wants what the other has; it looks like each will get something out of that exchange. It looks like a free transaction. Many people look at the transactions that take place in the market and declare, “we see freedom.” After all, no one forces you to engage in a particular exchange; you could freely choose to starve instead.

I wish Lebowitz wouldn't go oblique here and engage in sarcasm. The point needs to be vivid. The owner needs the worker's labor (at least until it can be automated away), and the worker needs a paycheck. This is nowhere near an equal relationship. The owner buys the labor of many workers, and it is easy for the owner to trade one worker for another. The worker is in competition with every other worker who shares roughly the same skills. The worker sells herself at a price to beat the competition, and the market, as a whole, rarely works in her favor. The market is more or less controlled by owners, even though the actual individual capitalists have limited control. I'd like to see an image as strong as a slave on an auction block in this transaction. The difference being the worker is trying to sell herself rather than another person. Of course, we have many more individual freedoms than slaves, and we have to be treated, more or less, as human beings. But, bottom line, we have to use most of our energy keeping our main commodity, our labor power, competitive in the marketplace.

18. What makes this market transaction different from the sale of any commodity? True, the worker has no alternative but to sell what she has, but that is often true of a peasant or craftsman too. What is different is what happens next; something very interesting happens to each of the two parties to that transaction. Marx commented, “He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” And where are they going? They are entering the workplace; they are entering the place where the capitalist now has the opportunity to use that property right which he has purchased.

I'm beginning to get impatient with Lebowitz's approach. Marx takes his time in Capital, but in a work of this length, he would not meander around in this much abstraction. The difference is that the real marketplace, the capitalist marketplace is one where those who own our days (our employers, capitalists) use our labor as their assets. Unlike the slave, we are not literally sold as people, but our potential to produce becomes someone else's wealth. And that's going to be key to the picture we are drawing. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer because the capitalist system, particularly in the industrial and post-industrial era (in which many workers produce for one employer), redistributes wealth (the value of labor) from the poor to the rich. It's abstract, so we can't see it without breaking in it down the way we plan to do here, but it's this simple. Capitalism robs from the poor to give to the rich--even the "best" capitalists do this. And we can and will prove it.

For all of us who have to work to pay the rent, there is no long term alternative.