In the past several weeks, dailykos readers have been kept current on the day-to-day realities in the world of Big Box stores.Lightbulb has been reporting almost daily on the nuts and bolts of his life as an exploited non-unionized laborer in an un-named retail monolith, while Laura Clausen of the AFL-CIO’s Working America has reported on events affecting the labor movement, detailing how the massively big-box Walmart is so vigilant to stop unionization in its stores that it trains its supervisors to squelch even employee baby-showers.
Meanwhile, bobswern has kept us all current on the latest machinations of the big banks, with his discussions of the many excellent analyses from www.nakedcapitalism, for example, see here.
First, the big bank scandals. The continuing exposure of the multiple fraudulent schemes by the big banks to increase their profits has revealed that top financial managers in our country successfully defrauded, in a multiplicity of creative ways, not only those borrowers whom they induced to buy high-priced, sub prime mortgages, but state land recording agencies, and the investors who purchased their unsupported mortgage-backed securities and other similar collateralized debt obligations. These weren’t run of the mill ruffians who defrauded millions of citizens, but the very same top CEO’s who frequently frequented the highest offices in our government as top economic advisors and regulators. They were part of a revolving door, going back and forth from captaining our biggest banks and brokerage firms to writing and regulating our banking laws.
The CEO’s wrote the laws that enabled them to avoid detection and prosecution of their fraudulent schemes, then had their campaign donation-purchased legislators pass those laws.
The same CEOs had selected and placed, through the efforts of their corporate lobbyists, the putative “regulators” whose official job was to expose such frauds. They simply declined to act against the corporations. After the regulators had successfully carried out their non-supervision of the corporate thefts, the CEOs then hired their chosen “regulators” into million-dollars corporate jobs; the rewards for their satisfactory non-regulation effectively signaling to all other government regulators that compliance with the wishes of the CEOs yielded millions in direct benefits for failing to do their government jobs. The corruption appears to be total, and is totally systemic.
Total, Systemic Corruption
The CEO’s own direct benefits were counted in the billions, not millions, so buying off a few thousand legislators and government regulators was chump change, a business expense which the corporations would write off as tax deductable business expenses. Ultimately, the U.S. taxpayer is not only the direct victim of corporate fraud, but is also paying for the very mechanism that defrauds them.
Whence Comes The Total, Systemic Corruption?
But how did theft and corruption on such a humungous scale arise? It flows from the very nature of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism runs on legalized theft. The powerful owners have always written the laws. In every instance of corporate production, the labor power of those working for the corporation is being stolen from them as “surplus” value extracted from each and every productive worker, and it has all been perfectly legal.
Karl Marx analyzed the process of this theft in the 1840’s in his early writings in the “Grundrisse” and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” and then elaborated on the analysis in his later three volumes of Capital. (See www.marxists.org for accessible PDF versions.)
Capitalism is theft. The proceeds of the theft is protected under the rubric of “private property”. A simplified example based on an 1844 reality: the worker sells to the company owner his labor power for a 12 to 16 hour day’s work. The worker is paid only the minimum amount to keep him alive, which he repays to the owner in the first two or 3 hours of the workday. But he must work 9 to 12 hours more for that day, the value of all the commodities produced in that “surplus time” is appropriated by the owner as “surplus value”, from the sales of the commodities so produced.
Today, the theft continues, it has just gotten more enormous, as the new sophisticated machines produce more and more commodities using fewer and fewer human workers. From the massive surplus value extracted, the owners allocate for the purchase of more machines and factories, the costs of marketing, the purchase, through campaign donations, of favorable national policies, such as war and colonialism, favorable legislators, favorable legislation (think tax code deductions and regulations or de-regulations) and the like and to pay investors and CEOs). Very, very little is allocated to the improvement of communities or the lives of human beings. Corporations only legal duty is to provide as much profits as possible to their owners/investors.
(Marx discusses at length in “Wage Labor and Capital” and elsewhere why competition among business owners and the existence of a vast army of the unemployed competing with each other for jobs, on average across various industries, keeps workers’ wages to the cost necessary to keep them alive and reproduce them. But it is not merely in the distribution of profits that the theft occurs, but in the very alienation of the work itself from the worker’s control. The object of his labor is totally beyond his control, as are the conditions of labor, divesting him of his humanity as well as his labor time. The capitalist production process steals the worker’s body and mind from himself. He is treated like a mindless cog, even though it is his/her labor that fuels the entire economic system. The accumulated dead stolen labor embodied in the machines and factories becomes the mechanism to extract even more stolen labor from now living labor. See Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” for a complete discussion of the horrors of alienated, dehumanized labor under capitalism.)
Past Thefts, as Accumulated Capital, Engender Continuing Thefts, Just Bigger.
The company owners compete with other owners within their industries to garner the biggest market shares. The most successful owners (those who can pay their workers the least and extract the most surplus value from them) drive out the less successful ones by under-pricing them due to their ability to produce greater volume, and then buy up the bankrupt businesses and their capital at fire-sale prices, then enabling the successful owners to accumulate more and more capital, thus more and more power in their industry. (This concentration of capital can be readily seen in the recent buy-outs and take-overs in the big bank industry and in the push to concentrate ownership in the communication and media industries. The Murdoch empire is concentration writ large.)
Thus does big capitalist eat and absorb the smaller capitalists, increasing the size of their companies, the number of their productive machines, and their potential cheap labor forces. As each small capitalist is killed off and eaten by a bigger capitalist, its work force is terminated and added to the ranks of the unemployed, so the big capitalist now has an even larger pool of workers who are in mutual competition for jobs, lowering the cost of labor power to the now even bigger capitalist owner.
If a worker produces $100 worth of value to his employer in one 12 hour day, and only $20 of that $100 goes to the worker, $80 per day (minus perhaps $20 for the expenses of materials, machine maintenance and replacement, and marketing costs (purchase of legislators and regulators might be categorized as simply another marketing cost), leaves the owner with perhaps $60 in profits, from which, if it is a public company, the shareholders get a share and the CEO’s and their top minions get not only huge salaries, and even huger bonuses. The bonuses are calculated based on the margin of profit (read margin of theft) the CEO’s can extract from their workers. The fewer workers employed, working the maximum number of hours, increases the profit margin – provided the companies can actually sell all the goods their machine produces.
Automation Decreases Workforce, Increases Speed of Production.
It is in the interest of the owners and CEOs to reduce the number of workers to the minimum, while increasing their production to the maximum allowed by their machines. (Thus making it hardly likely that companies will be inspired by Obama’s tax credits to hire more workers, unless they can make twice or three times as much from the credits as they can by over-working the existing workforce. This “particular “socialism for the rich” scheme is unlikely to solve our unemployment problem!).
Thus, Charles Denby, a black Detroit factory worker wrote in 1960 in his pamphlet for News & Letters Marxist-Humanist group, "Workers Battle Automation" in which he discusses how increases the speed of production through the introduction of sophisticated technology had not decreased the length of the working day or the pressure on workers to produce more with a smaller work force:
" It is time to expose the lie behind the fancy talk of " every worker an engineer". To the production worker, this type of talk is as phony as the talk about "prosperity" . Profits may rise, but not the money in the workers' pockets, and even less the groceries they can buy with it. Production statistics may rise, but the army of the unemployed does not decrease.
In Detroit in the 1960’s, workers were repeatedly out on wild-cat strikes protesting, not their wages, but the speed of the machines and the inhuman working conditions. The union seemed to bargain only for increased wages and benefits, but never dared to touch the issue of company control of the conditions under which their members were forced to work.
Strikes over working conditions were an attack on the very heart of capitalist production.Thus we can understand the corporate push for access to the cheapest, unorganized labor force possible. Thanks to our once strong unions, the price of the average worker in the U.S. was very high as compared to that of a worker in Mexico, Taiwan, Cambodia, Vietnam or China. Thus, with the help of government’s Free Trade Agreements, sending their production to foreign, cheap labor countries lowered the cost of their commodities considerably. The average monthly salary of a Chinese worker is $104.00 per month or $1248.00 per year, workers in Mexico and Brazil make three or four times more a year]. The AFL-CIO reported in April, 2011, that the average American salary was $33, 236.00 per year. And, though figures are hard to find for how much an average American worker produces in a year, one blog put the figure at $180,000 worth of value. An inevitable consequence is that the formerly relatively well paid American production jobs were lost to foreign workers. Our unions too lost their worker-members, thus reducing their strength. Over-all, an ideal situation for the capitalist owners --as long as there is a market for the commodities they produce.
Hail the Cheap Labor of State-Capitalist China, And Billions of Potential Consumers.
Given that millions of machines are contributing to the production of billions of commodities, however, the capitalist owners must be able to find markets for their goods in order to maintain their profits and increase them. This explains, for example, the glee with which American capitalists discovered the wonders of China’s state-capitalism. Yes, Chinese workers might be unionized, but the unions were organized and controlled by the state-capitalist government directly and the government would never allow attacks on the heart of capitalist production.
Not only do they find in China and other parts of Asia, literally billions of potential cheap workers, but billions of prospective consumers for their goods. Goodbye American pie! Lots of Chinese take-out is much, much more profitable when the scale of potential workers and consumers is billions, not mere millions.
Where heretofore, U.S. capitalists had been able to obtain cheap raw materials through cheap stolen labor from third world countries, now modern technology made it possible to ship their factories off-shore and obtain cheaper labor there as well. So the global theft goes on.
Will Global Capitalist Theft Be Up-Ended By Global Communications?
It is the advances in communication technology, especially the internet, which has made it relatively easy to transfer production and marketing to foreign countries. But it is also the same communication technology which will likely bring the thieving capitalist economic system to a halt, internationally. Workers of the world can now communicate internationally too. Thus striking Egyptian workers could send pizza deliveries to their striking brethren in Wisconsin.
The internet news, so long as it remains independent of the capitalist-owned media, routinely exposes the criminal acts of the big capitalist owners and the governments they control. Inevitably, we will have one, two, many WikiLeaks types exposures, as long as the internet remains relatively independent. Revolutions can travel from Arab countries to Europe and the U.S. in nano-seconds. And, as Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
So, if capitalism is being exposed as simple theft of another’s labor power, property, and political rights, from the very point of production to the highest levels of the financial system, what can be done to end this systemic crime against humanity?
Time to Take Back the Stolen Goods.
All of the wealth the capitalist owners and their CEOs and financiers have accumulated – the trillions of dollars that they trade on Wall Street every day, month, year, actually belongs to those whose work originally produced that value. We must take it back and put it to work for the good of the whole social community. Call it social property.
We can take the factories back and organize worker’s cooperatives to run them, with the money from sales going to the workers themselves and a portion to the community.
We can take the billions, if not trillions, the financiers have accumulated from stealing from workers’ pension funds to use to fund alternative energy development, restoration of our schools and infra-structure, re-housing of those who lost their homes in foreclosures, increasing school and university budgets so more and better trained teachers can be hired.
The possibilities for human betterment are limited only by our imaginations. These beneficial uses of the accumulated, stolen labor of our forefathers and foremothers can be put to the use and control by our communities for the benefit of all.
Accumulated Capital Must Become Social Property for Benefit of All.
If the criminal expropriation of our labor through capitalist production were abolished and workers and community members put in control of their labor and their lives, we would be free to develop all the potential talents and creativity of every individual. We could relate to each other as human beings rather than as competitors. If sharing the benefits were the watchword instead of profits for a tiny minority, what wonders humanity could create!
It is time to leave this capitalist pre-history of the human species behind, and organize a new economic and social system which will give the widest possible freedom for the full creative development of each individual.
The human community was the unit which provided for our initial survival as a species. This capitalist economic system is not providing for our survival but is killing us as a species. The wealth and the means exist. It is time for our human communities to restore our humanity and save our planet by taking back all the wealth that has been stolen from the majority of us, eradicate the capitalist economic system, and produce for the benefit of all, not just for a tiny fraction of our population.