Really what Marx's contribution was: for him, capitalism was unequal,
unstable and unjust. It didn't reward people according to their needs or their hard work.
It didn't reward people in anything like equality. When Marx analyzed it, you know what he looked at?
Sort of interesting. He looked at the workplace: at the factory, the office, the store,
and he noticed that in those situations were the roots, the core cause of capitalism's inequality,
instability and injustice in the very details of production. What Marx devoted himself to
in volume one of Capital, his major life work that he published in 1867. He looks at that workplace
and he says, 'Here's what's going on.' And you all know this even if you never read a word of Marx.
He says, 'Here's what's going on: a tiny number of people (the owner of the business, maybe
the partnership that runs it, maybe if it's a corporation, the board of directors 10-15 people),
they make all the key decisions. They decide what's to be produced, how it's to be produced,
where it's to be produced and what is done with the output that all the workers help to produce.
But all the workers are excluded from making the decisions. They have to live with the
results. They have to do the work or else they're fired, and their lives are wrecked.
They're not free. They don't have much liberty. They have to come to work,
but all the key decisions are made by a tiny group of people that are in no way accountable
to the mass of the employees. There's no democracy in the workplace, and Marx lays that out.
And then he finishes it. He says to us, and I'm going to paraphrase now:
think about the basic deal between the employer and the employee.
The employee comes and says I want a job. The employer says I got one. The employee says give me
the details. The employer provides them. Then they get to that crucial question. Employee: how much
am I going to get paid? Employer: let's see, would twenty dollars an hour work out? And let's suppose
this employee wants that. After all in the United States, the minimum wage is seven dollars and a
quarter as I speak to you, and twenty dollars is three times the minimum wage, just about. And
the employee agrees. And Marx says this is the "aha moment." Because what has to be understood
is that when that worker gives the employer an hour of his or her labor,
that is an hour of his or her mental and physical effort to produce whatever that employer sells.
Here's what we know, says Marx to us, teaching us, the only way the employer is going to give that
worker 20 for an hour of that worker's mental and physical effort is if that effort yields more for
the capitalist to sell (for the employer to sell) than it cost him to hire that worker the extra
hour. I'll give you 20 but I've got to have more than 20 worth of extra output when it comes time
to sell what you've helped to produce. Because the difference between what I pay you and what I get
from your labor, that's my profit. And that's what I'm in business for, and if that isn't enough,
I'm not gonna hire you. So, the worker gets back what he [or] she needs to reproduce himself.
The capitalist (the employer) gets back the profit each worker's labor helps to contribute.
That's why the workers are perpetually barely making ends meet and deep in debt,
and the employers get richer and richer as they succeed in playing the capitalist game.
So, Marx's conclusion was clear. This system has to be changed and right at the core. In the
workplace, we have got to stop an arrangement in which a mass of people work hard to enable a very
small number of people to control everything and to amass the riches that labor together achieves.
If we don't change that system, we will be looking at inequality, instability, injustice forever.
That's why this system has to be changed. Very similar to the logic of slaves saying, 'Look,
look, look. We're not going to successfully escape the horrible conditions we're in, even if we can
persuade a master to give us a better diet, to give us a better set of clothing, give us a better
place to sleep. What we can persuade him to give us, he can also take away. Why? Because
he's the master, and we're the slave. The only way to finally get out of this impossible,
unjust, unfair situation is to stop a system that divides people into masters and slaves.
And Marx says we're going to have to do something like that here in capitalism
also. Stop some of us from being employers and others the employee. If the 13th amendment to
the U.S. constitution abolishes slavery, then a future amendment will have to abolish employment.
This is an arrangement that has produced many more problems than we as a system are able to solve.