Capital's Laws of Motion

Speaking of alienation of labor, the police assault on ten-year-old Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, one of the stars of Slumdog Millionaire, and the ongoing difficulties of all of those child stars, really underscore the many ways the worker is separated from the production and the profits from the production under our system. Anyone who's seen that movie knows, without those three kids, that movie would not have been the hit that it was. Of course, under capitalism, any three cute workers will do as well as any other three cute workers. Anyway, they make $200 million dollars worldwide for Celador, Warner Bros., and Fox Searchlight, and they continue to live in poverty. I know, I know, Danny Boyle's set up a trust fund, but poverty kills, minute-by-minute.

Anyway, I have a lot of experience working with people in various forms of entertainment who do the job (for next to no money, this would include myself) because it gives us a sense of belonging to something, perhaps while we feel alienated from our day labor. I'm a fine mix of contradictions in this area. My point is, as things are, those children are very nearly exploited at a level undreamed of by their thuggish pimp in the movie--all of this while the whole world watches. This is central to the accepted morality of capitalism. We can all sigh and say why that's the way it is, but we don't get around to collectively discussing the possibilities. Some people think that this is the best we can do, but I think that's a cop out. I have to dream of a future when people will see the way we rationalize injustice today as clearly as we can look back at the evil groupthink that rationalized the slave trade.

Now, Lebowitz moves into the direction of capitalism, what I think is the most useful part of this kind of analysis fo the world we live in today.

Lebowitz writes:

Capital’s laws of motion

25. So, you can be certain that the capitalist will do everything possible to increase the ratio between surplus labor and necessary labor, the rate of exploitation (or, in its monetary form, the rate of surplus value).

Again, in the real world (not Frank Capra movies), this is how people stay in business.

26. If the workday is equal to the level of necessary labor (e.g., that six-hour workday in our example), there is no surplus labor. So, what can the capitalist do in order to achieve his goal of surplus value (profits)? One option is to reduce what he pays the worker. By driving down the real wage (for example, reducing it by one-third), then the hours of labor necessary to produce that wage will fall. Instead of six hours of necessary labor, only four hours would be required now. The result is that two hours of the six-hour workday now would be surplus labor for the capitalist—the basis for production of surplus value.

The muddiness of some of Lebowitz's set up to this really makes me appreciate the clarity of Marx (and Adam Smith, for that matter). This is one reason I'd really like to use this blog as a discussion to fuel a clearer, more succinct explanation and illustration of the ideas discussed here. At this point, it should be clear that the capitalists' profits absolutely depend on these kinds of negotiations. Workers have to be paid less than they are really worth in terms of what they produce, and that's determined by the competition between multinational corporations, producers and distributors. We live in a world of Wal-Marts, where every penny we save is taken out of someone else's hide, and that's not going to change if we get rid of Wal-Mart. It will only change (IMnotsoHO) if we uproot the system.

27. Another option is for the capitalist to use his control over production to increase the work that the laborer performs. Extend the workday, make the workday as long as possible. A ten-hour workday? Fine, that would mean now four hours of necessary labor and six hours of surplus labor. A twelve-hour workday? Better. The worker will perform more work for the capitalist over and above the wage, and capital will grow. Another way of extracting more work from the worker is by intensifying the workday—making workers work harder and faster in a given time period and making sure there is no wasted motion, no slack time. Every moment workers rest is time they are not working for capital.

Again, this is just competitive sense. Efficiency works us harder for the sake of company profits. In the world of the information revolution, along with robotic housekeepers and automatic checkout, capitalists need less and less workers to be competitive. This has led to a situation where, as a recent Monthly Review column illustrated, almost a fourth of the U.S. employment-age population is not fully employed--which has something to do with why over three times as many people are in jail today as were during the employment boom after World War II.

28. That is the inherent logic of capital. The inherent tendency of capital is to increase the exploitation of workers. In the one case; the real wage is falling; in the other, the workday is increasing. In both cases, surplus labor and the rate of exploitation are driven upward. Marx commented that “the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum.” He continued, however, saying “while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

And it's obvious who's going to win in that game, as long as it is the same game we've been playing. The capitalist, whoever pays our wages, will only give when times are good. The expansion of capital allowed for a steady increase in employee gains throughout most of the latter twentieth century, which was strategically and/or systematically tied to the destruction of unions as well as the overt and covert censorship of exactly the kind of conversation we are trying to initiate on this blog.

Today, times are not good. I work for a wealthy county community college, and our union's managed to negotiate something close to the status quo, while we've actually lost benefits (supposedly because of a new legal understanding of how our retirement should be funded). We're doing very, very good next to most people.

We're at an interesting point in history, and a scary one. All of the seams are showing, and the threads are starting to tear. What will it take for average people to see that their future does not depend on maintaining the current system?

One thing we might do is brainstorm a few examples of what would help illustrate these points for a more general audience? This list seems very familiar with most of these ideas, and I would guess most Americans (my focus on Americans, although everyone on this list may not self-identify as such, is that Americans have been so indoctrinated not to even contemplate the possibilities) actually have anecdotal evidence of all of these ideas but haven't made the connections.

So, what is some of that evidence? How do companies try to lengthen the workday? How do they make us work harder for the same pay? How else do they drive down pay?