Some Seem to think that Capitalism is About
Buying and Selling Things
Using the market as a way of Distributing good from the folks who Produce it to the folks who Consume it
Markets Are indeed an Important Phenomenon but They don't have Any
Unique Relationship With
Capitalism for example in the American slave South a different system, a slave system
The Goods produced by slaves, sample cotton, were Sold
So you, had a Market in Cotton
They actually had a market in Slaves too, so things were bought and sold all. The markets existed but you didn't have capitalism
You Didn't Have an Employer and an Employee
That's the Core of Capitalism
Slavery is a Different System it's a Master and a Slave. The Master doesn't hire the slave.
There's no need, the Master owns the Slave.
And Capitalism The Employer doesn't own you. May feel like that, occasionally, but he doesn't legally own you.
In Feudalism it's yet again different it's a lord and a serf. A serf who plan belongs on the land
Has obligations to the Lord but the Lord doesn't hire the serf, doesn't pay them a wage, but there
were Markets in serf. The unique thing about Capitalism is not therefore a market,
The unique thing about Capitalism is the Relationship in Production
in how Goods and Services are produced
it's a relationship that is not
Master-Slave, that is not Lord-Serf, it is a very particular
Arrangement
Employer-Employee and in that relationship lies a Fundamental Conflict
Tension
Anger
Resentment. Why? Because some people are doing all the work and producing more than they get.
A more that we nowadays call the surplus, the extra. And if you're
a Capitalist, an Employer, what of course is your interest?
To give the worker the least possible
While Giving the most out of
them because that's the biggest surplus they can get and the more surplus they have the more secure they'll be
In Capitalism it turns out we've got exactly the same kind of system as we had in slavery and feudalism. Why?
Because the worker has to produce more a surplus than he gets
Just as the Master got the surplus per Slave produced or the Feudal lords got the surplus that this Serf produced
It's nobody's fault. It's the way that System is set up
What's the Alternative?
When the People who Produce the surplus. The Workers
Are
Themselves the People who get the Surplus
If all the workers together make a cooperative, then they aren't split between the employers and the employees
But both positions are occupied by every person in the office
There is no Split
How would that work?
Take any factory. Take any office
Take any store
Change it as follow
no more board of Directors
Don't need it.
Here's how we're going to do. You come to work you sit around
making the decisions
All the decisions that used to be made by the
Capitalism
Workers become their own board of directors or to say the same thing another way the Worker Capitalist Division resolves
If you made all the workers
democratically get together and decide how to distribute the wealth they've all together created
They would never give a handful of people more money than they know what to do with, while everybody else is worrying about
sending their kids to college because they can't afford it
When you're discussing the new Technology that might pollute the air or the water. The decision is made by the major
shareholders and the board of directors, a tiny group of people who typically live in gated communities
in a lovely leafy
residence far away from the factory or the office or the store that pollutes, so they can
make the investment in the new Technology and reap the profits if the workers who live and work and depend on the
enterprise made the decisions. They, wouldn't do it that often because
They're the ones that breathe the air and drink the water, so they'd be much more sensitive to the real course
Every technological
invention justified itself on the grounds that by this new machine, we could get more done with
less effort but when those innovations are put into a capitalist economic system, the people who put the Technology in
want to make profit out of it, for example if a machine
allows the workers to do twice as much as before, they fire half of the workforce. The remaining half works with the new Machine
produces as much as before. The company realizes a
fantastic profit because it doesn't have to pay half the workers wages which they can keep for themselves
Here's an Alternative: let every worker do half as much work as he or she did before
Let's run the working day
four hours instead of eight. The workers will have engaged an enormous amount of leisure
to pay attention to their own development, to their families, to their communities, if we use technology that way.
We would use it to help the mass of people enjoy a better life, rather
than a small percentage of the people enjoy a greater profit. The problem
was with Technology. The problem was with the System that decides how to use that Technology?
You're going to have to get rid of the Capitalist system where it lives. In the stores, the factories and the offices