Capitalism, both in theory and practice, is immensely successful at creating huge amounts of wealth. That seems to be fairly obvious. The creation of wealth does not make it a moral system, however, and the human cost of capitalism needs to be addressed. Another important aspect of capitalism that occurs in both theory and practice is its immorality; capitalism puts the importance of profit and wealth accumulation before the interests and human rights of people, namely the laboring class.
This can be seen just by looking at the history of capitalism, starting as recently as the Industrial Revolution in the United States. When the accumulation of profit is the main priority of a society, one can logically infer that the rights and human interests of people are deemed less important. This is by no means a radical statement: why is minimum wage not enough to live on? Why do we not raise minimum wage to 25 dollars an hour? The answer is obvious, anyone will tell you; companies would not make any profit. The difficulty of minimum wage workers to live and provide for themselves is not even part of the conversation. Why don’t we bring back textile and electronic manufacturing back to the United States? Because labor is much cheaper overseas, this in turn leads to lower prices for the final products. The terrible working conditions of the people, the long hours, low pay, dangerous conditions, lack of job security, and extraordinarily low wages are rarely brought up.
Some may argue that once companies make more money, the profits will trickle down and the workers will make more money and spend more in the marketplace creating demand for goods, so other companies create jobs and which leads to profit and those companies will raise wages and so on. The problem is companies don’t willingly raise wages. Minimum wage in this country was fought for by the labor movement. People died for minimum wage until it was finally written into law, the “benevolent” corporations did not just hand it over in the interest of raising the bottom line. The labor movement also had to fight to create child labor laws, the forty hour work week, and safer working conditions, among other things. The reason why these had to be fought for and not handed over by corporations: profit. Corporations have a vested interest in keeping wages as low as possible to drastically increase their profit. In a capitalist economy this is completely logical. The end goal for everyone in society is to make as much money as possible, never mind the human cost. This is not an issue of the past. In an article on Alternet about iPhone manufacturing conditions, it was said:
“Multinational corporations claim innocence about working conditions, but the reality is that sweatshops are inevitable when retailers don’t share their wealth with the people who produce their products. At least a third of the money we spend on a new phone or computer goes directly into the pocket of the retailer. Apple makes even more, averaging a 60 percent profit margin on its products. The majority of production costs go to materials, like screens and chips. Only a fraction goes to workers. Take the iPad, for example, which is the sole item produced at Foxconn’s 100,000-worker factory in Chengdu. Industry analyst iSuppli estimates that Apple spends only $9 on labor for every $499 iPad. That $9 is apparently too expensive, since Foxconn has been taking steps to lower labor costs, first with the inland factories and now with the introduction of a one-million robot workforce.”
This year The New York Times has also released some articles talking about the labor practices of China and the production of Apple products. The United States may not have draconian working conditions anymore (that’s not to say working conditions cannot be bad here, just by relative juxtaposition) but there is a reason for that. Terrible working conditions exist in the countries that do still have massive manufacturing industries, which make all of our products. In the NY Times article “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” by Charles Duhigg the working conditions in Foxconn, the Chinese company where iPhones are assembled, are described “The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day” but:
“As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.”
If capitalism worked as it was supposed to, these laborers would be making much more money. The problem is, capitalism is working as it is supposed to: create as much wealth as humanly possible, and Apple is certainly doing that. The assumption that it makes everybody’s lives better however, is a falsity.
Capitalism and its prioritizing of wealth accumulation has a profound psychological effect on people. In “The Power of Money,” Karl Marx says, “Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.” Marx is arguing that when money is the medium of exchange, everything is looked at in terms of how much money it is worth, even if that “object” is a person. How much does a minimum wage worker deserve to make? Their worth is dependent on how valuable their job is, not the virtue of the person. Just because a job may be objectively easy to do, that doesn’t mean the labor itself is any less intensive. I know this from 5 consistent years of minimum wage work. When anyone is asked why minimum wage workers don’t make more, however, the answer is always dependent on the amount of wealth somebody is accumulating off of that labor, on the logical nature of business within a capitalist structure.
The question begs to be asked then, what is the goal of a society? To create an environment where human needs are met, people can live with freedom, sufficient opportunity to become a well-rounded individual, to provide an environment where there is an established quality of life, and to pursue their interests. I argue that capitalism does not create this kind of society, neither in the United States nor around the world. Without a laboring class (who does all the work, with the lowest wages), wealth could not be accumulated at such astonishing rate by the bourgeoisie; capitalism is a system predicated on worker exploitation. The great ethicist and philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that it is fundamentally immoral to use people as a means to an end, and that is exactly what capitalism does. It uses people as a means of labor to meet an end of accumulated profit.
More humane systems of government are out there: capitalism is not an inherent trait of human life or society. Capitalism has not always existed and will not always exist. We should actively try to create a global society that places human values and human needs over the pursuit of profit. After all, we are human beings. It is time to realize that each person’s needs are as profound as our own, and to ignore the suffering that capitalism creates because we like really cool gadgets is a fundamentally immoral position. As the anthropologist David Graeber has said:
“The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.”