Right now, as you’re listening to this, you are being robbed.
A chunk of everything your hard work creates is being stolen from you.
And it’s a system called capitalism that’s robbing you.
Every day, when you check in to work for your boss, you are being taken advantage of and
stolen from.
You are being deprived of the full value of what you contribute.
Let me break it down.
A capitalist isn’t someone in a top hat burning library books to run a misery factory.
Anyone who puts forward capital – money – to set workers in motion becomes a capitalist,
that is to say, they’re acting as a capitalist.
And what’s their goal?
People will tell you it’s innovation, or competition, but down in the real world it’s
pretty simple: capitalists have one goal.
And that goal is to turn a profit.
Pursuing profits to accumulate money is just how capitalism works.
That’s the nature of the beast.
It’s the single impulse of capitalism.
That doesn’t make capitalists personally greedy, though some might be.
We’re not even talking about good or evil here: capitalists need to maximize profit,
to the exclusion of all other considerations, or they’ll get eaten up by capitalists who
are smarter or more ruthless than them.
That’s the jungle law of the market.
So capitalists need profit to survive.
But where does this profit come from?
That’s where you come in.
Literally.
Profit comes from YOU.
Here’s a little thought experiment.
Meet Harold.
Harold has a chain of buildings full of kitchens full of ingredients.
But Harold doesn’t know how to make a burger himself.
How does Harold get someone to make enough burgers that he can sell them and turn a profit?
It’s not a trick question – he pays you!
Because you know how to make really good burgers.
The money he uses to pay you is what we call “capital.”
That’s money used to set production into motion.
Let’s say Harold spent $1,000 buying all the ingredients in the restaurant, and after
you work for a few weeks there, turning the ingredients into burgers, they brought in
$3,000.
That’s not bad!
You added $2,000 worth of value to the ingredients.
But wait.
You don’t get all the money.
Because Harold now has $3,000 on his hands.
$1,000 of that is just making up for the cost of the ingredients.
And if you were paid for the full value of your labor, you’d be making $2,000.
But then Harold would only be breaking even on the burgers.
And he needs to make a profit in order to survive.
So Harold decides NOT to pay you for the full value of your labor.
Maybe he pays you just $1,000 of the value you produced.
Maybe he pays you $1,500.
No matter what, you’ve been stolen from.
You spent more of your labor than you were compensated for.
But here’s the dirty truth: the story doesn’t end with you and Harold.
This process plays out across your city or town, your state, the country and the entire
world – the rich get richer and the little guy barely gets by.
We call the process - a boss’s stealing from you - “exploitation.”
We don’t mean that in an emotional sense about how we feel about it, but something
that’s actually a documented economic phenomenon – the gap between how much the worker produces
and how much they get paid.
Exploitation is a universal feature of capitalist economies.
And it never ends: the system requires more and more exploitation – paying workers less,
making them work more, or making them more productive without increasing wages.
When you see in the newspaper that a corporation’s recording record profits, that is what they
are doing: your hard work is producing more value, but you’re not getting enough compensation
in return.
There are tens of thousands of Harolds out there.
But billions of people just like you.
You and Harold are two different types of people.
You belong to two different classes.
There’s a capitalist who owns the means to produce goods and services, and there’s
workers who only have their own labor to survive on.
The capitalists appropriate the value that the worker’s labor creates and keeps it
for themselves.
And you are not immune from it.
At any job you work at, the condition of your employment is that you produce more by your
labor than you get paid.
So in the capitalist system, no one is paid what they’re worth.
Capitalism means they get paid significantly less.
All profit is value extraction.
And that means that all profit is theft -- from you.
This is Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and founder of Democracy
at Work, for the Gravel Institute.