There are all kinds of people who don't work, who don't help produce, but who consume, and if there
are people who consume but don't produce, then the people who do produce have to produce extra in
order for those who don't work to consume. That's true in every human society. Marx tells us what
distinguishes human societies is how they organize this, how they decide who's going to be a worker,
who's not going to work, who's going to live off the surplus that the working part of the
population delivers to the rest. And let me give you an example from the United States right now.
We say the population of the United States is 330 million people, more or less. The size of
our labor force according to the United States Labor Department is about 150,
155 million. In other words, half. In our society, half the people are producing a surplus
big enough to sustain the other half nor is that unusual. Every society does it, but they do it
differently. And here comes the interesting part: how does a slave society do it? Very interesting.
It makes one group of people, the slaves, do all the work. In fact, the way slavery works,
everything the slave produces- even the slave- is the property of the master.
The master gets it all and then gives back to the slave enough to reproduce the slave,
keeping the rest the surplus for the master. You can have a large number of people producing a
surplus for a small number who live very high on that famous hog. In feudalism,
Marx says it's kind of different but similar. It's different in a sense nobody's a slave,
but it's the same because a small number of people, the lords, the feudal lords,
get the surplus produced by the mass of the workers who are called serfs. And now, Marx draws
the implication for us. Capitalism, he said, was very critical of slavery before it. Capitalism
promised freedom, liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy would come with their changes,
and they believed it sincerely. But what we've come to see, Marx said, was something
different from what was promised. We don't have the liberty, equality and fraternity. What we got
was a new system that's different from the old. We don't have slaves. We don't have serfs,
but we have something called employers and employees. And what that means is that a mass of
people (the employees) do the work and produce an enormous surplus which is in the hands of
the employers who use it to live high on the hog and to hire a vast array of people
that they can sustain, who don't work at all in terms of producing goods and services.
The capitalist sustains... Let's take an example. The capitalist owns and operates a chair
factory. [It] makes chairs. But the capitalist is scared that during the night people may come
and take away the machinery. So, he hires a person to go around and around the chair factory at night
in a little Jeep to make sure nobody messes with things. He takes a part of this surplus he gets
from his chair-making workers and gives it to this fellow in the Jeep. The guy in the Jeep doesn't
help produce chairs [and has] nothing to do with it. Completely irrelevant. How does he live if
he doesn't help produce goods and services? Answer: a part of the surplus is given to him
by the people who gather it into their hands. Those are the employers. Marx says look at that.
That shows us that we haven't broken from the pattern of slavery and feudalism.
Even though we've changed to capitalism, we still have a mass of people doing the work,
producing that surplus as happens in all societies, but giving it to a tiny minority.
Masters were a tiny minority. Lords were a tiny minority, and employers are a tiny minority. And
we allow them to decide who to support with that surplus, what to do with it. Marx says 'Once you
understand that, you can immediately see a powerful punchline.' We don't have to do that.
We don't need a master. We don't need a lord, and we don't need an employer. The workers
could always have done this on their own. You could have a different system. There comes
the critical insight of Marx: making clear what it means to do better than capitalism.