I’m not particularly trying to convince anyone of anything here, just to make Marx’s position relatively clear and simple.
Firstly Marx argues that what people have to do to survive in society is more important for understanding historical processes than ideas are. Popular ideas are frequently just ways of justifying the actions of the dominant classes, and the modes of hierarchy – people tend to do what they have to do.
This is why his theory of history is sometimes called ‘historical materialism’. It is primarily based on what people have to do, and the material basis of that action, rather than on what they think.
Capitalism and wage labour
Capitalism engineers a mode of life, or arises out of a life, in which the majority of people depend on wage labor for survival. In other words, capitalism destroys self-sufficiency amongst the majority of the people it encounters as soon as possible. It may dispossess people from their land, or insist upon taxes so that people have to earn money through labor.
This process means most people have work for somebody else, starve or live a very precarious life as a beggar. In employment, they have to do as they are told – the first rule of capitalism is not liberty, but obey your boss (or ‘master’ as they used to be called in Marx’s time). Workers produce goods and ideas that legally belong to their employer. They have little to no control over what they produce, or what happens to those goods. They generally have little control over the working day, or the times they work. Holidays (or control over the worker’s own time) are relatively rare. So called flexibility, usually means the worker has to be flexible to suit their employer.
This separation from involvement in, and control over, the products of their labor and their labor time Marx, in his earlier works, calls ‘alienation’ and it usually appears to produce dissatisfaction with life.
It is a hallmark of capitalism. For example, crafts people controlled their own time, designed and made their own wares, and sold them to merchants, or other locals etc. Feudal peasants may give part of their crop to the lord, or spend some time working on their lord’s fields but generally what they grow, how they grow it, how they dispose of it, and when they work is up to them and the demands of nature. As long as they fulfil their obligations, their time and produce is their own. So while the labor set up may not be great, it is different from that in capitalism, and small farmers may have even more self-sufficiency.
Another way of phrasing this is that the imperatives of capitalism subtract from human satisfaction in work. Capitalism attempts to fill this hole, through encouraging consumption, which is capitalist materialism in action, and probably will never work for long. However, pressures to keep wages low, mean that consumption runs against limits, or encourages destructive debt.
Transfer of wealth
Capitalist, employers vary from good to terrible, but the dynamic for any employer, to help survive in the capitalist market, is to get as much labor out of the worker as they can for as little cost as possible. They may also automate production, so that they are less dependent on employee skill and crafting ability, so work becomes even more alienated, and workers more interchangeable and more disposable should they make trouble, times are hard, or whatever.
Rather than being recognised as people, the capitalist dynamic tends to make workers into impersonal energy to be used at the Master’s whim. Some employers recognise that this is not the best way to get work out of people, but they are still generally constrained by the necessity to make labor as cheap as possible.
Marx also argues the employer essentially ‘steals’ value from the the employees’ labor. That is the employee has to be paid less than their labor actually contributes to the product or service, or there can be no profit.
While this latter point may ignore the risk to the employer, and the organisational work they contribute, in general capitalism skews the market so more return goes to the owner and controller of labor than goes to the actual makers of goods. The greater this differential, the more capitalists are in charge of politics and society.
As successful businesses get massive benefits in terms of scale of production, discount sales or purchases and so on, they usually drive smaller businesses out of business, and gain even more wealth and power. You can think about what happens when a chain like wal-mart, or another big supermarket, comes to town. Independent businesses often close down, and small employers get to lose their capital and become precarious wage laborers. The same happens as agribusiness moves into a farming area. Small farmers get squeezed out.
In other words capitalism destroys small business, as well as exploits workers.
There is some argument as to whether managers, nowadays, are workers or representatives and controllers of capital. I’d suggest many try to pretend that they are part of the dominant elites, but usually end up finding out they are disposable workers. At the pinnacle, however, even incompetent CEOs get severance packages that would support normal people for a life time. The elites support their own.
Power and class war
On top of this, wealthy capitalists get to own and control the State, because wealth in capitalism buys anything from information and ideologies, to politicians. Therefore the State tends to represent their interests in keeping labor cheap, disposable and bound to employment, than it tends to represent the interests of workers, who have much less money to buy power.
Because the two classes have competing and opposed interests within the system, what we can call class warfare arises, which, in general, the powerful classes win.
Marx thought that eventually the workers would experience unity in their work experience, classify themselves as a group, and co-operate to overthrow the ruling classes, who would be weakened by the inherent tendency of capitalism to destabilise and destroy itself (which might be another blog post).
So far he has been wrong about this.
For a while between the 50s and the 70s driven by the fear of revolution amongst the dominant classes, there was an attempt to declare peace in the class war, by providing easy unemployment benefits, which allowed people to change jobs freely. This freed them from being stuck in jobs that have bad wages and conditions, and encouraged employers to share the wealth. Most countries supplied some kind of free health care, to keep workers free and functional, and they used the Keynesian insight that more money going to the workers will drive the economy. Hence we seemed to have massive growth of prosperity, social mobility and creativity in that period. With the threat of revolution gone, these ‘advances’ have gradually been withdrawn and we seem to be getting back to pure class warfare, and the concentration of employer power.
Historically, since the ascendency of capital, this full on alienation, and disposability, leads to fascism and war. That seems to be coming, but we shall have to see.
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