How capitalism justifies exploitation

Exploitative systems nearly always justify themselves in terms of the superiority of the exploiters, and the benefits they provide to the exploited. The Spanish in South America and the East India Company in India, claimed they were bringing peace, religion, and civilization. At the worst they were ruling the “barbarians” justly.

Similarly, the benefactors of capitalism argue that wealth inequalities stem not from co-operation, inheritance, violent histories of theft and conquest, or the ability of powerful people to extract value from people who are forced to labour for others or starve, but because wealthy people are brilliant, talented, hard-working and virtuous, and everyone else is lesser.

This can happen because, loosely, capitalists form a ‘class’ which, while competing amongst themselves for status and advantage, aims to benefit, protect and justify what they do, while suppressing opposition. Their primary aim to take as much of the wealth in circulation as possible.

They do this by building a society in which those wealthy people support politicians, policies and laws that benefit them. They can further support and distribute the ideas which justify them, far better than any opposition, through ownership and control of media and the ability to support think-tanks. They can use governments to suppress alternate information (by acts such as prohibiting government scientists from speaking about climate change, getting records of ecological damage removed from official websites and so on). They have the money to make it very hard to challenge them. They tie the exploitation to attractive ideas like liberty, the benefits and virtue of hard work and so on. They can suppress the workers’ ability to co-operate to take some of the profit those workers generate back, which is the only power that workers have. They attempt to generate group polarisations, so the workers cannot unite as a whole in opposition to capitalism, merely to each other. They attack unions, use automation, deskilling, and so on to lower general wages. Do you really think that capitalists want to abolish minimum wages because they really think that this will increase workers’ income?

Historically, we had a relatively quiet capitalist class when they feared revolution from the workers, but over the last 50 or so years this fear has declined and they have moved back into overt dominance; they have nothing to fear, but Islamic fundamentalism, which has little attraction in the West, and can be used to scare Western populations into submission.

Capitalism encourages three main drives:

To make things, offer services and distribute these commodities as cheaply as possible. Part of the cost of production is wages, so they want those as low as possible, and their ideology suggests that workers are generally low value or they would be capitalists as well.

To charge as much as possible for whatever they sell to make profit. To this end they will often compete for slightly higher prices, or co-operate to ensure prices remain high. In a mass consumption, high wages society, with capitalists fearing revolution, competition increases. With lowering wages competition decreases, eventually shifting into production for the wealthy alone where high prices are important to stop poorer people from purchasing the items and so prices mark ‘quality’ or ‘exclusivity’.

To distribute as much of the profit as they can to upper level executives and shareholders. There can be competition between executives and shareholders over distribution of profit, although this is usually fairly constrained as they share interests in it not going to the workers. Recently shareholders have started to request that more of the profit goes to them, and that upper level executives not get paid huge bonuses when they have appeared to have damaged the company, or not delivered maximum profits.

Capitalism is a political system, not just an economic system, and the political system it encourages is geared to plutocracy or rule by wealth. The more that wealth inequalities increase the more capitalism becomes plutocracy, and power relations favour the wealthy. Naturally it pretends to be virtue based, rather than based on exploitation or the use of power.

Tags: Disinformation, economics, free markets

This entry was posted on January 2, 2019 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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