Imagine yourself sitting in front of a potential employer
discussing the job you hope you'll get from that employer,
and you go through a whole lot of stuff about the job
and then you get to the dicey part.
How much are you going to pay me?
You ask your prospective employer.
Let's assume he tells you $25 an hour.
Well, Marx says, you know, even if you can't bring it
into your own head to see it, to face it, to admit it,
to say it to someone else, you know what that means.
Every hour that you work there, your labor added to that of all
the other people gives the employer that much more to sell.
That's why he's hiring you.
You either make it better or you make more of it of whatever the company makes.
And you know that if the employer
takes the extra you help to produce and sells it.
He has to get more than $25 for the extra
you produce per hour because otherwise there's no point in hiring you.
If all he got was $25 more per hour of your labor,
and then he had to turn around and give it to you, there is nothing in it for him.
He’s not going to do it.
In other words - here we go -
you have to produce for an employer a surplus.
You have to do more in the way of creating value for your employer
than he gives you in the wages he pays you.
In other words- here it comes, folks- he rips you off.
Not because he's a not nice guy and not because he's greedy,
which he may or may not be.
It's because it's how the system works.
If he doesn't make a profit out of you, he doesn't hire you.
You know why?
Because he uses that profit in part to struggle
competitively with all the other capitalists
who are doing to their workers pretty much the same.
And they struggle as to how much they can get out of their workers.
How much of the rising productivity of the workers can the employers snatch
to win his battle with other employers
that are doing the same thing?
You would understand much more about the society if you saw that
as the conflict that shapes it.
And the conflict is everywhere.
That's why at every job, whether you see it and face it or not,
the employer is always looking for ways
to pay you less: to move
the job overseas where you can pay a worker less,
to replace you with a machine if that costs them less,
to bring in a cheap worker (a female, an immigrant, the child0.
Child labor was the way it was done for centuries.
It's awful, the endless struggle.
It's also terribly inefficient.
We've organized the production of goods and services
with a core of a conflict, a horrible conflict
that leads to sabotage, to lockouts,
to strikes, to discriminations of every kind.
We've created an absurd system founded on a conflict
ridden economic foundation.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because so many of our problems
come out of these conflicts.
These tensions are personal problems as well as our social problems:
our strikes, our bitternesses, our angers whether they take the form
of finding a scapegoat to blame it all on or not.
That message of Marx?
Your problems come out of a fundamentally inadequate,
unacceptable capitalist economic system that gives to a minority
the surplus that the majority has produced.
That inequality, that injustice
at the core of this society constantly erupts.
Now here, now there, now in this situation, now in that one.
The message?
Marxists argue that the
problems we face in our society,
many of them, many of the most important,
cannot and will not be solved
so long as you allow any economic system, slavery, feudalism or capitalism
that is so unjust in its foundation.
Taking that to heart changes your political life forever.