Workers Without Property Rights

The dialogue's very important to me, so please let me know if I miss comments you've made on past points.

Onward--

Workers without property rights

21. The second characteristic of capitalist production is that workers have no property rights in the product that results from their activity. They have no claim. They have sold to the capitalist the only thing that might have given them a claim, the capacity to perform labor. It’s not like producers in a cooperative who benefit from their own efforts because they have property rights to the products they produce. When workers work harder or more productively in the capitalist firm, they increase the value of the capitalist’sproperty. Unlike a cooperative (which is not characterized by capitalist relations of production), in the capitalist firm all the fruits of the worker’s productive activity belong to the capitalist. This is why the sale of labor-power is so central as a distinguishing characteristic of capitalism.

This is one way of getting at the concept of the alienation of the worker. Part of the division of labor in capital is that the worker's labor is abstracted, countless times, from the market value of the item being sold. No matter how many morale-boosting seminars our employers fund, we cannot be convinced that we are getting anything out of boosting company profits. The harder and longer we work, the harder and longer we are expected to work. The more students I can teach a semester, the more students I will be expected to teach a semester. This is precisely why faculty has fought hard for a cap on how many students can sit in our classrooms and why we can't budge that number (at least in my program) as a favor to a particular student. The more work teachers show themselves as capable of doing, the more they will be asked to do, and the quality of attention gets lost in the process. I know my best classes would have about 10 people; 15 is a generally agreed upon number, and those are both workable. But the less students I have, the more I am able to focus my attention on individual students' questions and needs. Right now, for a writing intensive course, we've fought hard and managed to maintain a cap at 26. This day will no doubt pass, as it already has with some online instruction.

The point is that white collar and blue collar workers have this in common. Even those folks who work down at HyVee and have a profit-sharing plan have no way to trace their actual labor to the amount of profits they are individually making for the company. Since that formula is unknown, I think we can all agree that it's very likely that the average employee contributes much more to the ability of the company to make profits than he or she ever sees in a paycheck. That's simply what is known as good business. Business people pay no more than they have to for their resources, and of course that includes each employee's capacity to produce.

Make sense? What am I missing?