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Posts Tagged ‘class’
Law of Value 5: Contradiction
August 20, 2010Contradiction and the Law of Value
This video is part of an ongoing series on the Law of Value.
Marx is always talking about contradictions in the law of value. But these aren’t logical contradictions like “round square” or “military intelligence”. They are contradictions inscribed into the very heart of the social relations of a capitalist society. Some prefer to use the word “antagonisms”.
We are all painfully aware that modern society is full of social antagonisms. There’s poverty amidst great wealth, over-work alongside massive unemployment, banks taking away homes, gentrification, racial tensions, violence against women, labor struggles, environmental apartheid, police brutality, gang violence, hate groups, massive dislocations of populations, and lots of war. Marx was interested in explaining all of these antagonisms, but he doesn’t start his analysis with any of them.
Instead he begins with what at first seems a rather innocuous thing: the commodity. Why? Because the commodity is the most elemental piece of the social relations of capitalism. The productive relations between people take the form of commodity exchanges. The commodity is the basic organizer of social relations. So if we want to understand how all of these different social antagonisms relate to one another we need to start with the commodity.
As we’ve already seen, the commodity contains a contradiction: it has a use-value and a value. (As we saw, value lies behind exchange value. So while at first we said the contradiction was between use-value and exchange-value, we later refined this to use-value and value.) At first glance this does not seem all that antagonistic. Yet as we start to look closer we see more significant antagonisms emerge.
Property, exchange and violence
Why is it that people must sell their labor in the market for exchange value, for money?-Because they can’t produce their own means of subsistence for themselves. This is a distinct aspect of a capitalism. In previously existing modes of production the majority of people had use of some sort of means of production for themselves which they used to make most of the things they needed. (Note that I say “had use of” and not “owned”. This is because much of feudal production happen on common land. This collective use of land has been part of many other pre-capitalist societies.) People sometimes bartered for things but they did so by selling part of the surplus they had created for themselves. (Selling off your surplus product is very different than producing exclusively for exchange.) Over the course of a very long, violent, historical process called “Primitive Accumulation” these means of production were privatized and became the possession of a group of people called capitalists. Whereas before people labored directly for their own use, now they have to enter the market in order to attain their subsistence.
So already the fact that we produce for exchange and not directly for use expresses a social antagonism between the propertied and the propertyless. There is an underlying coercion already at work in the “free market”. And this coercion requires some threat of violence to enforce it whether it be a state, private military, or hired thugs. Violence was necessary to privatize the means of production and it remains necessary to enforce all of the legal aspects of property.
Labor Power
In order for people to buy their subsistence in the market they have to sell something else. Since the means of production are privately owned the only thing they have to sell is their labor. But of course labor can’t really be sold. Instead we sell our ability to labor: our labor power. We sell a definite amount of working time, whether it is measured in hours, weeks or years. This is why value is an expression of labor time.
Our own creative working ability, the very thing that makes us human and links us to society, becomes a commodity that we sell to someone else, a commodity called “labor-power”. Labor power, like any other commodity, has a use-value and an exchange-value, and… you guessed it- there is a contradiction between them. The exchange value is the money paid for our working time, the wage. Wages are set by the cost of our subsistence. They depend on the cost of food, housing, clothes, transportation, etc. But the use-value of our labor power is that it can produce value. These are the two opposing sides of labor-power: On one hand it costs a wage, on the other it produces value. This makes it possible to produce more value than we are paid for.
You could be paid $5 an hour yet produce $20 worth of commodity value an hour. (1) If this happened you would be being exploited. In fact your rate of exploitation would be 400%. Exploitation is made possible by the contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of labor power.
Profit
Exploitation explains a puzzle about capitalism: the existence of profit. Capitalists start off the day with a sum of money which they invest in production. At the end of the day they have a quantity of commodities which they sell for more money than their initial investment. It would seem that they have made a profit just by buying and selling things. Yet profit can’t be made through mere buying and selling. This is because buying and selling is a zero-sum game. When we exchange commodities we are just moving commodities from one place to another. This process does nothing to change the total amount of value in society. Sure it might be possible to rip someone off, to over-charge someone, to charge a monopoly price, etc. But a win for one person in the market is a loss for another. There can be no aggregate profit just be moving commodities around. Yet profit is something that does exist in the aggregate. The total amount of value in society grows each year (GDP) through this expansion of value called profit.
So we seem to have a puzzle, or a contradiction, on our hands. On one hand the market is a realm of equality and symmetry. Market exchange conserves the value of commodities: the total value of commodities is not changed merely by transferring ownership. Any loss by one person is offset with a gain by another so that there is an inherent symmetry to commodity exchange. Yet profit is a phenomenon where value expands through the buying and selling of commodities. Profit is asymmetrical. More comes from less. How is this possible?
To solve this puzzle Marx tells us we must look beyond the market into the mysterious realm of production. It is in production where value is expanded through the exploitation of labor. Exploitation does not break any of the rules of market exchange because it doesn’t happen in exchange. Labor power is bought at its value. The products of that labor are sold at their value. No profit has been made through these exchanges. The profit is not from the market at all but from the labor process. It is the amount of labor preformed over and above the value of wages that determines the amount of profit. While the market remains a realm of equality and symmetry, production is a realm of asymmetry and exploitation. Thus there is a contradiction between production and exchange. And this contradiction is made possible by the contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of labor power.
Class
This antagonism between the use and exchange value of labor power expresses a social antagonism between capitalists and workers. Capitalists and workers have opposing interests. Workers want their means of subsistence: housing, food, clothes, beer. They want use-values. Capitalists aren’t interested in use-values. They are after exchange-value. They want to expand the size of their capital by making a profit. In order for either class to get what the want they need the other. The workers must sell themselves for a wage in order to survive. The capitalist must hire workers in order to exploit them for profits. Yet despite this codependence their interests are entirely antagonistic. The more the workers are paid in wages the less profit the capitalist makes. The more profit the capitalist makes the more impoverished the working class. (This isn’t because capitalists are bad apples. It’s because they personify the interests of capital.)
Clearly the struggle between capital and labor has always been present in capitalist societies whether it takes the form of day to day struggles over the amount of work we consent to, or long-term battles for better wages and working conditions. But even outside of the workplace the class antagonisms of capitalism are clearly ever-present. The distribution of the value created by the working class into wages, profits, rent, interest and taxes has everything to do with the standard of living we are able to enjoy, the kinds of neighborhoods we live in, the type of life-chances we have, and the quality of our lives. In a society structured to maximize profit for one class rather than produce use-values for social need the quality of our lives is inversely proportional to the needs of capital. In the past 30 years, as neoliberalism broke down barriers to the free flow of capital, massive sums of wealth have been consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller class of uber-capitalists, while the standard of living for the rest of the world has steadily worsened.
Society has enough food, housing and technology that the entire world’s population could work a lot less and still have all of the basic amenities of life. (Maybe we couldn’t all have mansions, fancy cars, and all the expensive cocaine we wanted, but we could live comfortable lives.) And they’d probably be more fulfilling if we didn’t spend our whole life working for someone else. But we don’t have such a society because our labor is not aimed at creating use-values for society but at creating profit for capital. The constant revolutions in technology and productivity are not aimed at making work easier or improving the quality of our lives, but in creating more profit by submitting labor to greater control. Thus the workplace becomes increasingly dominated by machines, assembly lines and computers all designed to discipline labor to its task of creating more value.
The Labor Process
As the knowledge of work is removed from the worker it is placed into the machine. The worker loses control over the labor process, becoming just a minor cog in the machine, easily replaceable. Another contradiction is revealed: that between the conception and execution of work. Our own knowledge of the labor process is taken away from us and placed in a machine which dominates us, reducing our work to a job- the carrying out of routine tasks with no meaning to us except that they are a means to a wage. This is a contradiction which fascinates popular culture: man vs. machine. But behind the machine lies a social relation between ourselves and our own creative powers that have been taken from us, alienated from us, standing over us, dominating our work.
Crisis
And with this steady accumulation of capital in the form of machines comes another contradiction, this one between the capital invested in dead labor like machines and raw materials, and the capital invested in living labor. Though an increase in machinery allows capitalists to better exploit workers (and to appropriate value in competition as super-profit) machines can’t create value. As more and more capital is reinvested in machines and raw materials and less and less on labor, the actual value-creating substance of society is crowded out. This is the starting point for Marx’s theory of crisis. As the mass of capital that must be constantly reinvested in expanding production grows it becomes increasingly invested in dead labor rather than living labor. This sets the stage for massive crisis that require the destruction and devaluation of capital in all of its forms.
Conclusion.
All of Marx’s model of a capitalist society is derived from his basic starting point: the analysis of the commodity. From this basic idea of value as the organizing principle of a commodity producing society he establishes the contradiction between the use-value and value of a commodity. And then, over the course of multiple volumes he shows how the unfolding of this contradiction reveals all of these other contradictions: contradictions between classes, between society and itself, between people and machines, and between the conception and execution of work. What begins as a seemingly innocuous distinction between use and exchange becomes the substance of class struggle and crisis.
This doesn’t mean that every problem in society is directly explained by the law of value. Yet, how can we really understand any discussion of inequality without first understanding the way in which social wealth and power is created and distributed? How can we understand violence without understanding the coercive nature of the market, the deep inequalities generated by commodity exchange, and compulsion of capital to accumulate at all costs? How can we discuss a solution to the environmental crisis without discussing the way the productive relations of a capitalist society are organized? The problem with the left is not that there are not enough people who care about these things. It is that not enough people have the theoretical tools to think about these things in terms of the basic structure of our society. That is why the law of value is so important to understand today. If we want to overcome the antagonisms of society we need to understand how these antagonisms are related and to do this we must start at the beginning with an analysis of the commodity.
35:40
Footnotes
1. Of course the price of a commodity is more than just the immediate labor that goes into it. There is also the past labor that went into the raw materials and the instruments of production like machines. The price of the commodity is the sum of the money laid out for dead labor (raw materials, machines and other products of past labor) and living labor (wages for workers) plus the amount of surplus value, unpaid labor, performed by workers.
Law of Value 6 (or 5): Contradictions – a draft
August 10, 2010An exchange I had with someone regarding my draft of a Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT) script has made me think that I should probably do this video first before discussing SNLT. Here is the reason: Since SNLT is a fairly simple concept I wanted to expand on the topic and talk about the way capitalists get a super-profit by producing under the SNLT. But talk about super-profit before talking about profit in general might be confusing. So I think I will make the 5th video in the series this one on “contradiction” since there is a bit about exploitation and profit in this video. This is a draft and, as always, all comments are much appreciated, especially criticism.
Contradictions and the Law of Value
Marx is always talking about contradictions in the law of value. But these aren’t logical contradictions like “round square” or “military intelligence”. They are contradictions inscribed into the very heart of the social relations of a capitalist society. Some prefer to use the word “antagonisms”.
We are all painfully aware that modern society is full of social antagonisms. There’s poverty amidst great wealth, over-work alongside massive unemployment, banks taking away homes, gentrification, racial tensions, violence against women, labor struggles, environmental apartheid, police brutality, gang violence, hate groups, massive dislocations of populations, and lots of war. Marx was interested in explaining all of these antagonisms, but he doesn’t start his analysis with any of them.
Instead he begins with what at first seems a rather innocuous thing: the commodity. Why? Because the commodity is the most elemental piece of the social relations of capitalism. The productive relations between people take the form of commodity exchanges. The commodity is the basic organizer of social relations. So if we want to understand how all of these different social antagonisms relate to one another we need to start with the commodity.
As we’ve already seen, the commodity contains a contradiction: it has a use-value and a value. (As we saw, value lies behind exchange value. So while at first we said the contradiction was between use-value and exchange-value, we later refined this to use-value and value.) At first glance this does not seem all that antagonistic. Yet as we start to look closer we see more significant antagonisms emerge.
Property, exchange and violence
Why is it that people must sell their labor in the market for exchange value, for money?-Because they can’t produce their own means of subsistence for themselves. This is a distinct aspect of a capitalism. In previously existing modes of production the majority of people had use of some sort of means of production for themselves which they used to make most of the things they needed. (Note that I say “had use of” and not “owned”. This is because much of feudal production happen on common land. This collective use of land has been part of many other pre-capitalist societies.) People sometimes bartered for things but they did so by selling part of the surplus they had created for themselves. (Selling off your surplus product is very different than producing exclusively for exchange.) Over the course of a very long, violent, historical process called “Primitive Accumulation” these means of production were privatized and became the possession of a group of people called capitalists. Whereas before people labored directly for their own use, now they have to enter the market in order to attain their subsistence.
So already the fact that we produce for exchange and not directly for use expresses a social antagonism between the propertied and the propertyless. There is an underlying coercion already at work in the “free market”. And this coercion requires some threat of violence to enforce it whether it be a state, private military, or hired thugs. Violence was necessary to privatize the means of production and it remains necessary to enforce all of the legal aspects of property.
Labor Power
In order for people to buy their subsistence in the market they have to sell something else. Since the means of production are privately owned the only thing they have to sell is their labor. But of course labor can’t really be sold. Instead we sell our ability to labor: our labor power. We sell a definite amount of working time, whether it is measured in hours, weeks or years. This is why value is an expression of labor time.
Our own creative working ability, the very thing that makes us human and links us to society, becomes a commodity that we sell to someone else, a commodity called “labor-power”. Labor power, like any other commodity, has a use-value and an exchange-value, and… you guessed it- there is a contradiction between them. The exchange value is the money paid for our working time, the wage. Wages are set by the cost of our subsistence. They depend on the cost of food, housing, clothes, transportation, etc. But the use-value of our labor power is that it can produce value. These are the two opposing sides of labor-power: On one hand it costs a wage, on the other it produces value. This makes it possible to produce more value than we are paid for.
You could be paid $5 an hour yet produce $20 worth of commodity value an hour. (1) If this happened you would be being exploited. In fact your rate of exploitation would be 400%. Exploitation is made possible by the contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of labor power.
Profit
Exploitation explains a puzzle about capitalism: the existence of profit. Capitalists start off the day with a sum of money which they invest in production. At the end of the day they have a quantity of commodities which they sell for more money than their initial investment. It would seem that they have made a profit just by buying and selling things. Yet profit can’t be made through mere buying and selling. This is because buying and selling is a zero-sum game. When we exchange commodities we are just moving commodities from one place to another. This process does nothing to change the total amount of value in society. Sure it might be possible to rip someone off, to over-charge someone, to charge a monopoly price, etc. But a win for one person in the market is a loss for another. There can be no aggregate profit just be moving commodities around. Yet profit is something that does exist in the aggregate. The total amount of value in society grows each year (GDP) through this expansion of value called profit.
So we seem to have a puzzle, or a contradiction, on our hands. On one hand the market is a realm of equality and symmetry. Market exchange conserves the value of commodities: the total value of commodities is not changed merely by transferring ownership. Any loss by one person is offset with a gain by another so that there is an inherent symmetry to commodity exchange. Yet profit is a phenomenon where value expands through the buying and selling of commodities. Profit is asymmetrical. More comes from less. How is this possible?
To solve this puzzle Marx tells us we must look beyond the market into the mysterious realm of production. It is in production where value is expanded through the exploitation of labor. Exploitation does not break any of the rules of market exchange because it doesn’t happen in exchange. Labor power is bought at its value. The products of that labor are sold at their value. No profit has been made through these exchanges. The profit is not from the market at all but from the labor process. It is the amount of labor preformed over and above the value of wages that determines the amount of profit. While the market remains a realm of equality and symmetry, production is a realm of asymmetry and exploitation. Thus there is a contradiction between production and exchange. And this contradiction is made possible by the contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of labor power.
Class
This antagonism between the use and exchange value of labor power expresses a social antagonism between capitalists and workers. Capitalists and workers have opposing interests. Workers want their means of subsistence: housing, food, clothes, beer. They want use-values. Capitalists aren’t interested in use-values. They are after exchange-value. They want to expand the size of their capital by making a profit. In order for either class to get what the want they need the other. The workers must sell themselves for a wage in order to survive. The capitalist must hire workers in order to exploit them for profits. Yet despite this codependence their interests are entirely antagonistic. The more the workers are paid in wages the less profit the capitalist makes. The more profit the capitalist makes the more impoverished the working class. (This isn’t because capitalists are bad apples. It’s because they personify the interests of capital.)
Clearly the struggle between capital and labor has always been present in capitalist societies whether it takes the form of day to day struggles over the amount of work we consent to, or long-term battles for better wages and working conditions. But even outside of the workplace the class antagonisms of capitalism are clearly ever-present. The distribution of the value created by the working class into wages, profits, rent, interest and taxes has everything to do with the standard of living we are able to enjoy, the kinds of neighborhoods we live in, the type of life-chances we have, and the quality of our lives. In a society structured to maximize profit for one class rather than produce use-values for social need the quality of our lives is inversely proportional to the needs of capital. In the past 30 years, as neoliberalism broke down barriers to the free flow of capital, massive sums of wealth have been consolidated into the hands of a smaller and smaller class of uber-capitalists, while the standard of living for the rest of the world has steadily worsened.
Society has enough food, housing and technology that the entire world’s population could work a lot less and still have all of the basic amenities of life. (Maybe we couldn’t all have mansions, fancy cars, and all the expensive cocaine we wanted, but we could live comfortable lives.) And they’d probably be more fulfilling if we didn’t spend our whole life working for someone else. But we don’t have such a society because our labor is not aimed at creating use-values for society but at creating profit for capital. The constant revolutions in technology and productivity are not aimed at making work easier or improving the quality of our lives, but in creating more profit by submitting labor to greater control. Thus the workplace becomes increasingly dominated by machines, assembly lines and computers all designed to discipline labor to its task of creating more value.
The Labor Process
As the knowledge of work is removed from the worker it is placed into the machine. The worker loses control over the labor process, becoming just a minor cog in the machine, easily replaceable. Another contradiction is revealed: that between the conception and execution of work. Our own knowledge of the labor process is taken away from us and placed in a machine which dominates us, reducing our work to a job- the carrying out of routine tasks with no meaning to us except that they are a means to a wage. This is a contradiction which fascinates popular culture: man vs. machine. But behind the machine lies a social relation between ourselves and our own creative powers that have been taken from us, alienated from us, standing over us, dominating our work.
Crisis
And with this steady accumulation of capital in the form of machines comes another contradiction, this one between the capital invested in dead labor like machines and raw materials, and the capital invested in living labor. Though an increase in machinery allows capitalists to better exploit workers (and to appropriate value in competition as super-profit) machines can’t create value. As more and more capital is reinvested in machines and raw materials and less and less on labor, the actual value-creating substance of society is crowded out. This is the starting point for Marx’s theory of crisis. As the mass of capital that must be constantly reinvested in expanding production grows it becomes increasingly invested in dead labor rather than living labor. This sets the stage for massive crisis that require the destruction and devaluation of capital in all of its forms.
Conclusion.
All of Marx’s model of a capitalist society is derived from his basic starting point: the analysis of the commodity. From this basic idea of value as the organizing principle of a commodity producing society he establishes the contradiction between the use-value and value of a commodity. And then, over the course of multiple volumes he shows how the unfolding of this contradiction reveals all of these other contradictions: contradictions between classes, between society and itself, between people and machines, and between the conception and execution of work. What begins as a seemingly innocuous distinction between use and exchange becomes the substance of class struggle and crisis.
This doesn’t mean that every problem in society is directly explained by the law of value. Yet, how can we really understand any discussion of inequality without first understanding the way in which social wealth and power is created and distributed? How can we understand violence without understanding the coercive nature of the market, the deep inequalities generated by commodity exchange, and compulsion of capital to accumulate at all costs? How can we discuss a solution to the environmental crisis without discussing the way the productive relations of a capitalist society are organized? The problem with the left is not that there are not enough people who care about these things. It is that not enough people have the theoretical tools to think about these things in terms of the basic structure of our society. That is why the law of value is so important to understand today. If we want to overcome the antagonisms of society we need to understand how these antagonisms are related and to do this we must start at the beginning with an analysis of the commodity.
Footnotes
1. Of course the price of a commodity is more than just the immediate labor that goes into it. There is also the past labor that went into the raw materials and the instruments of production like machines. The price of the commodity is the sum of the money laid out for dead labor (raw materials, machines and other products of past labor) and living labor (wages for workers) plus the amount of surplus value, unpaid labor, performed by workers. Etc, explain v+c+s…
Law of Value- Introduction
April 28, 2010Part 1 of the Law of Value series.
Intro:
Marx Quiz:
Addendum:
An economic crisis is also a time of ideological crisis. It’s a time when people start to reevaluate their ideas about the world, questioning some of the most basic assumptions they once had. Every capitalist crisis in history has brought about a rethinking and regrouping of mainstream economic thought. Interestingly this rethinking has always happened within the context of some sort of radical challenge to the economic order.
Marginal Utility theory, which still serves the basis of modern mainstream economic theory, emerged from the Great Depression of the late 1800s (yes there was another Great Depression prior to 1929) as an answer to the challenge of Karl Marx’s thorough critique of capitalism. Keynesianism emerged from the Great Depression of the 1930′s as a response to the failures of liberal economics, the challenge of a successful Bolshevik revolution and strong worker movements in the Western world. Neoliberalism emerged from the crisis of the 1970′s both as a backlash against the failures of Keynesianism to manage crisis and as an assault against the growth of large popular left-movements like the anti-war, student, civil-rights and women’s movements and the power of entrenched labor.
Alan Greenspan:
“Remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one… to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is: Yes, I’ve found a flaw- I don’t know how significant or permanent it is but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
With such admissions of failure from the neoliberal establishment we can’t help but begin to question the dominant economic ideas of our time. Yet it is not clear that we are entering this ideological crisis in the context of any viable challenges to the economic order. The failures of centrally-planned Soviet-style economies have largely purged the idea of alternatives to capitalism from the popular consciousness. At such a time in may be useful to re-exmine the ideas of Karl Marx, to see what exactly he was trying to say in his critique of capitalism- not because we have some desire to repeat the political experiments of Lenin, Mao, Stalin or any of the others who claimed to embody the ideas of Marx, but because Marx presents a systematic, and thorough critique of capital that is wholly different, wholly unique in the history of economic thought. Such radical ideas are crucial in our search for a new understanding of our present condition and possibilities for social transformation. A society without the ability to critique itself is a dangerous society to live in, especially as it enters a long period of crisis.
There is a crucial difference between all the great bourgeois economists and Marx. They all saw crisis (except Keynes maybe) as something that came from outside of capitalism, disturbing the natural equilibrium of the market. When confronted with the reality that capitalism was prone to inequality, exploitation and crisis- that is, when it becomes apparent that there is a discontinuity between their theories and reality- bourgeois economists always blame reality for not conforming to their models. Reality has been poisoned by invading external forces, they say, in the form of state intervention, labor-movements, human greed, etc. We see this same reactionary approach today in rising right-wing populism which blames the invasive influence of foreigners, left-intellectuals, homosexuals, non-Christians, and black presidents for the problems of society.
Marx takes the opposite approach. He sees the social antagonisms of capitalism as internal to the system. These social antagonisms are so basic to the system that they drag all other parts of society into their gravitational field.
Bourgeois economists have always seen the market as a realm of great freedom and equality. The fact that there is so much inequality, crisis and unfulfilled freedom in market societies is seen as an imperfection in reality, not theory. Contrary to what some lay people think, Marx does not start with an analysis of these social bads and then proceed to a critique of market relations. Marx doesn’t begin by talking about monopoly, poverty, exploitation, or state violence. He begins with this same realm of market freedom that his bourgeois critics are so enamored with, and then shows how all of these social antagonisms spring out of this basic productive relation. For Marx it all starts that the fact that capitalist production is production for market exchange. This basic form of production takes on law-like properties that he calls “The Law of Value”.
The Law of Value
What did Marx find so interesting about capitalist societies? It wasn’t just the freedom to buy or sell anything you wanted. It was the fact that in order to participate in the social life of a market society one has to buy and sell things. In order to survive, in order to participate in society, one has to enter the market to buy things and to sell the products of their own labor. This is a distinctly different organization of society than previous societies where working people largely supported themselves with their own labor- that is, they labored to make things for their own use. (Or more specifically, laboring classes supported themselves with their own labor and supported the ruling class.) In a capitalist society people don’t make things that have any use for themselves at all. They produce things in order to exchange them. Thus the coordination of the social labor process happens indirectly through exchange.
In a society of private producers, coordinated indirectly through the market, the social relations between these people take the form of relations between things, of commodity relations. The relations between people become value relations expressed in commodity prices. Economically, people can only relate to each other through money prices, through value. This world of commodity relations takes an independent form, outside of the control of individuals, that acts back upon and directs the flow of human affairs. Adam Smith called it the “hidden hand of the market.” Marx calls it “the law of value.”
What is the law of value? It is the impersonal, blind forces of the economy exerting their influence upon society. It is unique to a society in which the dominant form of labor is production for market exchange. The relations between people become value relations between commodities. And these value relations become impersonal forces which have unexpected consequences for society. For instance, we get capital:
People have always used tools and other resources in their labor. These are called “means of production”. In a capitalist economy means of production become capital. Tools, machines, materials, and even workers are all commodities with values. This makes it possible to buy means of production in the market and sell the products of those means of production for a profit. That is, a person can invest money in production merely for the sake of getting more money. The pursuit of value as an end in itself becomes the dominating force in the society. This is what capital is, the expansion of value for its own sake, regardless of the social cost. Capital takes the form of a class that owns the means of production and another that must produce the profit for capital.
Capital is inherently asymmetrical, great poles of wealth and poverty spreading out from it in geographical and economic space. Capital is also self-negating. Although it represents an impersonal force above society, dominating the worker, it also relies on the worker to create profit for it. There is a social antagonism at it’s root. This social antagonism leads to periodic crisis and constant instability.
All of these radical implications and many more are part of Marx’s theory of value.
This video series will cover various topics in Marx’s theory of value: The difference between use-value, exchange value and value, the relation of supply, demand and price to value, abstract labor, exploitation, crisis, socially necessary labor time, and even what an understanding of value can tell us about changing the world. It is hoped that they can contribute to a better appreciation of the importance of value theory to radical movements today as they seek ideas with which to articulate their demands and strategies.
How much do you know?
Many people, supporters and opponents of Marx, think that they already know all there is to know about Marx’s theory of value. Let’s take a brief quiz to find out how much you know. Here are 10 True or False questions. Take out a paper and pencil and keep track of your answers. I’ll give the answers at the end.
True False Quiz:
1. Marx’s theory of value holds that any human labor creates value.
2. Marx’s theory of value is intended to be a theory of market prices.
3. Marx’s theory of value is the same as his predecessor David Ricardo.
4. Marx didn’t believe the forces of supply and demand were relevant to explaining value.
5. Marx’s theory of value is a theory of what workers should get paid.
6. Marx’s theory of value was a theory about how a communist society should be run.
7. Marx didn’t think consumer demand played a role in prices, value or other economic phenomena.
8. Marx’s theory of value doesn’t work in free markets.
9. Marx’s theory of value can’t explain why useless things like mudpies don’t have value.
10. Marx hated babies.
The answer to all of these questions is “FALSE”! If you answered “True” to any of them then perhaps you don’t know enough about Marx’s theory of value to actually make an informed judgement about it. If you are interested in understanding one of the most thorough theoretical critiques of capitalism ever created then perhaps this video series might be a good starting point. If you already know that you are going to hate Marx’s analysis then perhaps watching this video series would be a good starting point in educating yourself so that you don’t sound like a total idiot when you go mouthing-off all over the internet.
How you should watch these videos
The internet has given us access to more information than any generation before us. It has allowed for a great leveling of our access to information, allowing everyone to contribute to the sharing of information. But this hasn’t necessarily made our culture better informed, more intelligent, or better at critical thinking. In our rush for instant information we are losing our ability to properly contextualize information, to synthesize ideas, and to discern what sources of information we can trust. Let’s face it- in our consumer-culture we are conditioned to want instant gratification for no effort. We want easy answers that don’t require any personal sacrifice. (Neo, matrix, downloading information into his brain.)
You can’t learn everything you need to know about capitalism from a YouTube video. On the internet any fool can and will explain their inarticulate and half-formed personal theories into a web cam. These videos are not like that. They don’t represent my ideas at all. I am trying, to the best of my ability, to explain a complex body of intellectual work that spans a long history of debates as people grappled with these ideas. By acquainting ourselves with the history of ideas we can make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, and that we are aware of the implications of our arguments.
But a video or a blog cannot substitute for the real thing. I am dealing with complex, difficult ideas and I am not perfect. I may make mistakes. I may leave things out. If you really want to understand Marx you must go to the source.
We should also be aware of the ability of video to manipulate us on an emotional level. Images, tone of voice and background music can all be helpful in helping us understand things. But they can also evoke emotional responses that are not necessarily rational. We should be aware of the way media effects our understanding of material and not let this get in the way of rational intellectual thinking. There is already enough of a shortage of rational thinking in our society.
There are a lot of ideas in each of these videos. One viewing may not be sufficient to absorb everything. That’s why I post the full text on my blog. The blog sometimes also contains tangents and side-arguments that were cut from the video as well as references and suggestions for future reading. I hope that the references on my blog might be a good starting point for people who are interested in learning more.
As we move through these different topics in the Law of Value our understanding of the Law of Value will deepen. At the end of each video there is a summary of the new layer of meaning we have added to the law of value. It would be wise to keep returning to this basic question as we progress through these videos: What happens when the relations between working people take the form of value relations between commodities?
Additional Reading:
Does the Internet Make You Smarter- Nicolas Carr, Wall Street Journal
Rethinking Marxism: Temporal Value Theory in a Moment of Crisis; Roundtable on the Economic Crisis
November 17, 2009Andrew Kliman: Contradictions of Capitalist Value Production: Internal, Inevitable, Insuperable
Alan Freeman: How Did 1929 End?
Radhika Desai: The Demand Problem in the Current Crisis
David Calnitsky: Capitalist Competition, Self-Organization and Crisis
Brendan Cooney: Crisis, Value and Marx’s Order of Operations
This is video from a roundtable on the economic crisis held during this year’s Rethinking Marxism conference in Amherst Mass. Each panelist’s presentation stands on its own so they need not be viewed in any specific order. A brief bio proceeds each video as well as my own short summary of their argument. This is merely to help viewers decide what to watch and to give some brief context for the uninitated. The paper which my own talk is based on will be linked beneath my video.
Andrew Kliman is a professor of economics at Pace University in New York. He is a leading figure in the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) which seeks to refute various claims of inconsistency within Marx’s value theory. His book “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital” is an important work in the field. I have discussed these ideas in my video “What Transformation Problem?”. I have posted an interview with Kliman from April of 2009. The TSSI also has important implications over debates as to the validity of Marx’s theory of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. Kliman has just completed some important empirical research into the origins of the current crisis which claims that the profit rate has been falling since the 1940′s and that this long-term decline in profit rate sets the context for understanding this crisis. Kliman’s paper for the Rethinking Marxism conference connects the theory of the falling rate of profit to the contradiction within the commodity form itself, between the use-value and exchange value of a commodity. He then meditates on the political implications of such an understanding of capitalist crisis.
AlanFeeman works as an economist for the Greater London Authority and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Manitoba. He and Andrew Kliman edit the journal “Critique of Political Economy”. He and panelist Radhika Desai co-edit the book series “The Future of World Capitalism”. Freeman is an influential figure in the TSSI field. You can find his papers at his website. In this talk Freeman extends his critique of contemporary marxist academia into a critique of the way in which the concept of an economic “law” is understood. Seeking to distance Marx from positivist conceptions of law Freeman invites us to think about the way in which free will and human action are brought to the foreground during a crisis, requiring great, potentially violent, exogenous acts in order to restore capital accumulation. As far as I know Freeman has not published any papers on this topic yet though you can hear him speaking about similar matters at his Left Forum talk. If you write to him he might be able to send you a finished draft of this paper.
Radhika Desai is professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba. As well as fore-mentioned collaborations with Alan Freeman, she is author of “Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics” and “Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party”. Interested viewers might check out her article Neoliberalism Self-Destructs and her inteview on Against The Grain on the topic of imperialism. Desai is a defender of Keynes and sees him as presenting a more radical critique of capitalism than is usually acknowledged. See Desai and Freeman’s “Keynes and the Crisis” for more on this angle. Her paper in this panel follows in that spirit, arguing that a full understanding of this crisis is not possible without addressing problems of effective demand. The relevance of the demand problem is much debated among Marxists so viewers may want to pay extra attention to her argument.
David Calnitsky is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is one of the people behind the fantastic website “Radical Perspectives on the Crisis” which I highly recommend. Calnitsky’s paper was a critique of the “Monthly Review school” and their theory of crisis. This is a theoretical tradition associated with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and their notion that in the 20th century capitalism entered a monopoly stage which differed in key ways from the competitive capitalism of Marx’s time. Monopoly prices meant that the law of value did not hold in the same way and that capitalism’s crisis came, rather than from a falling rate of profit, from long stagnation caused by underconsumption. Calnitsky’s paper deals less with a critique of underconsumption and more with a critique of the notion of monopoly used by the Monthly Review school.
Brendan Cooney is the handsome author of this blog. The text of my paper is here.
Robots vs. Luddites
May 21, 2009part one:
part two:
Robots vs. Luddites
1812 Nottingham England
In 1812 sabotage crept through the British countryside. By the cover of darkness gangs of weavers organized under their anonymous leader “General Ludd” broke into factories by night and smashed the new automated looms to pieces. Cloaked armies of “Luddites” appeared at factory gates in the day to demand better wages, better working conditions, and the right to produce higher-quality fabric. The weavers had not always been guerilla fighters. For 300 years they had passed down their craft from generation to generation of skilled artisans, weaving fine silk and stockings in the comfort of their own home. But now there was a machine that could do all that. It was called the power-loom.
But why would a worker break a machine? A machine is supposed to make work easier and make life better. To understand the violence of the Luddite rebellion we need to remember that when a worker uses a machine he/she enters into social relations with people. Work is always a social process entailing some sort of social cooperation. (In a capitalist society we can’t understand this social dimension without understanding the relations of private property which define it.) A machine conceals a social relation. Lift the veil and we see that the machine is an expression of the relationship between capitalist and laborer.
Throughout human history the social relations which we labor under have changed, from the primitive hunter-gatherer, to feudal societies, to modern industrial capitalism. We call these different organizations of social labor the “relations of production.” Different relations of production are characterized by different types ownership, different divisions of labor and different organizations of work.
Throughout human history the relations between people and the tools and machines they use has also evolved. From stone axes and knives to the automated loom to the personal computer the technical “forces of production” have undergone numerous revolutions.
These two aspects of work- the forces and relations of production- form the inner dynamic of human history. We might make some obvious observations about the two: Modern capitalist social relations couldn’t survive if we were constrained to the use of stonge-age tools. Conversely, the internet wouldn’t find much fertile ground for use within the social relations of 16th century European feudalism. We might use these obvious observations to make a more interesting observation: that the forces and relations of production co-evolve over time. This means that changes in one can have a profound effect on the other and that the inability of one to change can constrain the ability of the other to change.
By examining the coevolution of the forces and relations of production we can illuminate much about our history and our future.
So back to our question: why did the mysterious General Ludd and his followers steal through the English countryside under cover of darkness smashing the machines which were intended to make their work easier? To answer this question, let’s take a closer look at the machine in question.
The power loom did something that no loom before had done. It replaced the hands of the weaver with a mechanical hand that moved faster and more efficiently than the the most skilled of weavers. (figures?) The power loom didn’t just happen by accident. It appeared at a distinctive time in history when capitalists were introducing automated machines into production to replace the hand of the worker. Thus behind the machine, lay a social relation: a social relation between capitalists and workers.
By replacing the hand of the worker with the cold steel of a machine the skilled craftsman, the master weaver, was transformed into an unskilled machine-tender, an appendage of the machine. Unskilled workers could be paid lower wages. The pace of work could be dictated by the speed of the machine, not the pace of the human. Thus work could be sped up and intensified. Because less labor went into the product the prices of products fell making it impossible for independent craftsmen to compete with the new machines. In short, the replacement of the human hand with the automated tool meant a huge revolution in the social relations of 19th century Europe as the system of skilled craftwork was transformed into the large scale capitalist industry with its shopfloors of roaring machinery and the unskilled proletariat that tended these machines. The Luddite attack on the powerloom was a last-ditch defense of a dying labor process, a labor process quickly being replaced by modern industrial forces and relations of production.
And the Luddites weren’t the only barrier to the emergence of large-scale capitalist industry. The 19th century was filled with social conflict between capital and labor as workers resisted the impositions of the industrial labor process. The deskilling of work, the disciplining of the labor force and the acclamation of the population to the labor process continued into the 20th century inspiring innovators like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford to lend their efforts to the problem. These were the major social problems of the times. The need for state regulation of labor conflict was a major factor in the emergence of the modern capitalist state. But of all the political and social attempts to regulate this conflict it may have been the machines themselves that did the most to discipline humans beings to modern capitalism.
But it would be a mistake to say that all of these changes were brought on by machines themselves, as if machine evolution was dragging human history along with it, kicking and screaming. Machines were introduced into production because they gave capitalists power in their conflict with workers. If you can be replaced by a machine you are much less likely to form a union or go on strike. If you are an unskilled machine-tender you can’t bargain for high wages like a skilled craft worker. Before the large-scale Industry of the 1800′s lay a tumultuous 200 year history in which capitalism ate away at the institutions of feudal property, creating the conditions for a modern labor force. The Manufacturing period which preceded the 1800′s still retained some held-over characteristics from the feudal period: There was still a lot of semi-skilled handicraft work, machines were used in a piece-meal fashion, and the size of the workforce was still relatively small.
But as more machines were introduced into the Manufacturing system, that system of production became less and less able to handle the demands of the machine. The powerloom, for instance meant that suddenly a factory could produce a lot more output than before. But this required increased input of raw materials. The sudden increase in demand for raw materials meant that those industries that produced raw materials were also under pressure to automate production. Increased output also meant finding new markets for goods. This required revolutions in transportation and communication: canals, railroads, and eventually automobiles and airplanes…
Automated production eventually meant the linking of all the machines in one workplace together to form one massive mechanical monster. This meant finding a regular, controllable motive power like the steam engine or, later, electricity to power production. Such a motive force became the regulator of the speed of production- the entire factory, its machines and human appendages, fell into rhythm with the rhythm of the steam engine. Once electricity became the prime moving force of production this meant revolutions in the system by which power was transmitted to production: power lines, power grids, etc. By the dawn of the 20th century the entire globe was linked up in interlocking power grids all coordinating the speed of production with a single motive power. Human life changed too, our movements falling into rhythm with the gentle hum of the power grid.
The demand for machines which would all be linked together in one big factory, powered by a uniform motive power, required both a huge increase in machine production and a uniformity of production that the semi-skilled workers of the manufacturing system couldn’t provide. It wasn’t until these workers were replaced by a less-skilled automated production system- the production of machines by machines themselves- that the Industrial Revolution could truly revolutionize European society.
The Luddite movement ended with violent repression and the hanging of its leaders. It seems that the defense of private property was more important to the emerging social order than human life. We see a curious relationship here. The technology that was to make life easier for humans becomes the source of the most violent, anti-human behavior. The social conflict that required the evolution of the machine in the first place is altered by the machine itself. But the conflict between labor and capital isn’t resolved, it’s merely transposed to another level: the social conflict of modern, industrial capitalism. The question then becomes, in this coevolution of the forces and relations of production, of machines and people, is there ever a point in which the technical basis of society can no longer support the class antagonisms of capitalism, in which the tremendous productivity and abundance made possible by technology can no longer function within the distorted social relations of private property?
Why should you care about the coevolution of the forces and relations of production in the 19th century?
Because these are the laws of motion of human history, laws we can see operating right now. We are living in the midst of a similar revolution in productive forces.
If the automated tools of the 19th century replaced the human hand what does a computer replace? The modern computer is the descendent of the Turing Machine. A Turing Machine, put simply, is a machine that can follow changing instructions. Feed in one set of instructions and the machine does one thing. Feed in another set of instructions and the machine does something else. Defined this way, a human being is also a turing machine. Tell Jim to lift pig iron and Jim lifts pig iron. Tell Jim to answer phones and Jim answers phones. With the advent of the Turing Machine it became possible to make a single machine which could do almost anything: a laptop that can check email and edit video, an iphone that can record music and get directions to the airport. One of the things about human beings that had made them so distinct from machines in the 19th century- their ability to follow instructions- had been eliminated.
There is a central contradiction in the replacing of humans with machines. Machines can produce commodities but they can’t create value. So while capitalists replace humans with machines in the search for more short-term profit, in the long run less value is being produced. The prices of commodities fall as less labor goes into them. If the turing machine can follow any set of instructions, the only labor that needs to go into the production process is the creation of these instructions themselves. The production of instructions, or information, then becomes the source of value. [Because the machine can do any task, the information we feed to machines becomes the most important aspect of production.]
Enter the information age- an age where the production and ownership of knowledge is the central thing around which all production revolves. If the speed of life in the industrial age was dictated by the pace of the steam engine or electricity, the speed of life today is dictated by the speed of information transfer. This speed of information transfer has increased rapidly in the last few decades to the point where huge amounts of information can now be sent across the globe with the click of a button. We are only beginning to see the tremendous revolutions in social relations that will be created by this evolution in the forces of production.
The race to improve the speed of information transfer to machines has led to revolutions in all sorts of industries like micro-processing, data storage, personal electronics, and the information infrastructure (cable, wireless, DSL, ethernet, etc.). It’s also causing the destruction of many older industries, industries which derived their profits from their exclusive ownership of the “means of duplication” like the record industry or print media. Recording a phonograph and pressing it used to require a great deal of capital. A record company’s profits relied not just on their ownership of the masters of a record but also on the fact that they had a monopoly over the ability to make more copies of that record. Now a musician can record their own album in their kitchen and distribute it online relatively cheaply. A fan can duplicate that recording a thousand times over with the click of a button. An entire generation of music listeners is now growing up with the expectation that they should be able to listen to any music they want at any time for free. Is this not proof of Marx’s argument that when human labor is removed from a task, the social value of that task falls to zero?
The newspaper industry is facing the same problem. Nobody wants to pay for the duplication of print media when they can get it for free online. Of course recording an album or writing a news article still requires labor from musicians and reporters. This is the information part of the commodity. But the crisis in the newspaper and record industry reveals an interesting aspect of information as a commodity: Information can only be bought and sold as a commodity if the seller has a monopoly over the right of duplication. When printing a newspaper required an expensive printing press and a complicated labor process it was a given that a newspaper was a commodity. But now that the duplication of news can happen at the click of a button that monopoly over duplication has disappeared.
For the newspaper industry the only solution so far has been to give news away for free online and rely on advertising for revenue. Meanwhile the recording industry has resorted to extravagant lawsuits against internet “piracy” and increasingly exploitative recording contracts with musicians called “360 deals” which demand a cut of all a bands revenue from merchandise sales to ticket sales.
If the monopoly on duplication is the only thing that makes information a commodity we are left wondering what is the true nature of information when this monopoly disappears. It seems increasingly obvious that information has an inherently social dimension. Where social knowledge leaves off and one person’s private contribution to social knowledge starts seems an increasingly arbitrary distinction defined by a narrow legal definition of intellectual property (a definition based in old-fashioned notions of commodity duplication.)
It’s not just that newspapermen and record industry executives are old-fashioned, or aren’t savvy enough with computers. It’s that the basic parameters of production and profit, the social relations, are changing as the forces of production evolve. As many times as they sue Napster or PirateBay the reality is that Napster and PirateBay represent the inherent nature of the new technology and the emergence of a new type of social relation that suggests a collective ownership of information. From wikipedia, to the blogosphere, to Linux, to the open-source software, new models of production and distribution are being experimented with on a collective level never before seen. But what kind of society is emerging? Clearly there are all sorts of problems with the way knowledge is created on the internet and there is a great deal of room for capitalism to expand into the internet for its own purposes of commodification and control. And outside of the internet there is still a great deal of real production that is done by human labor. What do the emerging models of information transfer of the internet-age have to offer the real-world labor process?
Industrial capitalism emerged from the manufacturing system of the early 1800′s spurred on by revolutions in the forces of production. But in order to come into its own as a new system of social relations it had to revolutionize the existing social relations. Today we can see the new forces of production overthrowing the established economic order. But what sort of society will emerge from this is yet to be seen.
Marx saw that despite of all the misery and exploitation of the Industrial Revolution that there were great socializing processes at work. The working class was being stripped of its antiquated, local superstitions. In being reduced to an unskilled, proletarian appendage to the machine, all workers were equalized, sharing the same social solidarity and common material interests. The labor process was becoming increasingly collective even as it became more degrading. Capital on the other hand was encountering greater and greater crisis and causing more and more people to question whether it could survive for much longer without destroying itself. But the great revolution that Marx had hoped for didn’t happen. It seemed that capitalism was not done learning how to displace crisis and finding new avenues of growth. And it seems revolutionary theory wasn’t ready to live up to the potential Marx saw in a post-capitalist society.
We have a lot of work to do in our time. These tectonic shifts in the forces and relations of production have coincided with global economic crisis and environmental crisis. At such times the future is uncertain. Anything can happen. If the left is to seize the initiative in the 21st century it has much theoretical work to do examining the trajectory of these new forces and relations of production and discerning what sort of possibilities they present for radical breaks from the present order.
Recommended reading:
Das Kapital, Karl Marx, the chapters on manufacturing and large scale industry
Cutting Edge, Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution; ed. Jim Davis. This is a great collection of essays about the information age and value theory.
“Digitalization and the Monadization of Power”, a lecture by Dylan Suzanne: http://www.archive.org/details/suzannemainelecture2 . I am curious to acquaint myself more with Suzanne’s work. This is a good lecture.
Soderberg, Johnathan. “Copyleft vs. Copyright; A Marxist Critique.” First Monday volume 7, number 3 (March 2002) URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/index.html This is an early work of Soderberg’s which eventually turned into his book Hacking Capitalism which I haven’t read yet because it’s way too expensive. If anyone has access to a digital version please let me know.
The P2P Foundation blog has a lot of interesting stuff: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/
music by a great Trio from the West Coast called “Beep”. Check them out at myspace.com/beeptrio
Left Forum ’09- Marx’s Capital and the Economic Crisis
April 28, 2009I was quite fortunate to be invited to speak on a panel at the Left Forum this year (4-18-09) with some writers I greatly admire. Here I have posted the videos of all four speakers, the text to my portion, links to other speaker’s work (when available), and video of the discussion that followed.
Chair: Radhika Desai
Radhika Desai is a professor in the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004) and of numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals. With Alan Freeman, she is currently working on a book series on The Future of World Capitalism. Here’s a recent article by her on neoliberalism’s crisis.
Speakers:
Andrew Kliman, author of “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital” and a leading figure in the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI). Regular viewers will recognize Andrew’s name from my video on the transformation problem. His book was the main source of my arguments in that video. I highly recommend it. Andrew presented some research he is still engaged in which charts profit rates since WWII. His research shows that profit rates have declined steadily since the recovery after the Great Depression, falling toward what he calls the “long-term-labor rate of profit”. This is striking evidence of the explanatory depth of Marx’s theory of the Falling Rate of Profit.
Alan Freeman, co-editor of “The Politics of Empire: Globalisation of Crisis” is another influential figure in the TSSI field. He has a number of great papers on the falling rate of profit and crisis theory here. There are also some videos of him already on youtube. He is also co-editor of Critique of Political Economy and coordinator of the Association for Heterodox Economics (UK). Along with Radhikha Desai, he is working on a book series called “Future of World Capitalism.” Alan spoke about how WWII got the global economy out of the Great Depression and about the sort of progressive alternatives to war that we might currently be pushing for. Pay close attention to how Alan conceptualizes the role of the state in capitalist crisis.
Brendan Cooney- that’s me. I talked about bourgeois ideology and how it fails to explain crisis. And then of course I talked about how well marx’s value theory explains crisis.
The second speaker on the panel asked not to have his portion posted online.
Brendan Cooney’s text:
Left Forum talk
As leftists we’ve all had the experience of being told “Hey man, that’s just the way things are.” In the middle of some brilliant analysis of how lame Obama is, or how much the prison industrial complex sucks someone says to us “Hey man that’s just the way things are.” Is this not the essence of any dominant ideology? The point of a dominant ideology is the idea that the present is eternal and unchangeable- that the existing institutions, power structures and injustices are as natural as making babies, that any attempt to critique them or change them is futile. [Though ideologues may try to dress up the message with fancy theories of Pareto Optimality, or fancy algebra, the message is still the same: "Hey man, that's just the way things are."]
In order to do this ideology has to paint the present as something static and unchanging. The feudal landlord had the catholic church which imbued the class relations of society with an eternal christian mysticism. Today we have mainstream economics which projects its own categories backwards and forwards in time to create the illusion that there is nothing unique about modern capitalism and that there are no alternatives to the present.
There is a great, unfinished task before us- not just of how to understand this crisis, but how to understand capitalist crisis in general; and then, specifically to understand the future of capitalism, the openings that will arise for radical breaks from the present order, and the sort of new social orders that might emerge. This task of understanding capitalism also must be a radical critique of dominant ideology- bourgeois ideology. This is why Karl Marx subtitled Kapital “A Critique of Political Economy”. He was very clear that alternative ideas develop in relation to hegemonic ideas. When we aren’t clear about how our ideas relate to dominant ideology we run the risk of allowing bourgeois ideas to subtly influence our own thinking. And I think this is why a lot of leftist takes on the current crisis fall short of being truly radical- that they are not fully conscious of the master narrative and its influence on their ideas.
How does ideology paint the present as eternal? It does this by misusing the process of abstraction. It must abstract away from its description of the present anything which is historically specific, leaving only those vague categories that transcend time.
For instance, take the modern, neoclassical definition of capital which basically says “Capital is stuff that you use to make more stuff.” Now it is true that we can observe throughout human history the phenomenon of people using (stuff) tools to increase the productivity of their labor. According to this vague bourgeois definition there is no real distinction between the bows and arrows wielded by the Iroquois Nation and a Ford Motor plant. And so this definition passes the test of ideology: it makes capital seem universal, timeless, natural and stable. And it does this by abstracting away all historically specific production relations.
By such a definition there is really nothing in capital that could cause a capitalist crisis. How can there be a crisis between a man and his tool? And this is why bourgeois economics must always paint crisis as something external to the system: famine, drought, or maybe malevolent manipulations of the market by governments or unions. But rarely do we hear anyone dare suggest that capital itself might be causing the crisis. (Even some self-proclaimed Marxists are hesitant on this point.) Such an explanation would suggest that there was something historically unique about capital. And after all, what could go wrong between a man and his tool?
The problem is that in a capitalist society those tools are not the property of the people who wield them. The means of production are privately owned by the capitalist class. Class relations are basic to the way production is organized. We might also note that work is a social process mediated through wage labor, not just a relation between individuals and tools. But now we are talking about people in groups, something bourgeois economics avoids at all costs.
Bourgeois economics treats society atomistically in a souped-up version of supply and demand: demand is the product of isolated individuals interacting with commodities; supply is the product of isolated individuals relating to tools. And because people have always wanted stuff, and because there has always been a limited amount of stuff on the planet this is considered all we need to know to understand the economic universe. Mainstream economics substitute some eloquent algebra for what should be the fundamental question: what determines demand and supply? Demand is a function of one’s income from working and socially conditioned preferences from a consumer-driven culture. Supply is determined by the amount of labor apportioned to various tasks and the productivity of this labor. So we see how quickly the image of the atomistic individual falls apart and is replaced by a vast mode of social regulation all regulated by the class relations of a labor process. The picture of the individual, atomistic consumer/producer can only be sustained by abstracting away all mention of these social relations.
This is Marx’s starting point in Kapital: this world of individuals interacting with commodities conceals a deeper world of social relations. By ignoring these relations ideology paints a picture of an eternal world of people interacting with objects in perfect equilibrium. All other factors are considered an external interference. [When a union organizes for better wages, this is not seen as a a direct result of the antagonisms of private ownership of property, but instead as something external to the picture which interferes. When the state intervenes to open markets, or protect capital from itself (like it is currently doing) this is not seen as an inherent reality of a crisis-prone capitalism, but as an external interference.]
Let’s take a look at an actual society with no internal crisis: the primitive hunter-gatherer society. Here work was a collective effort with little or no differentiation of activity. [This undifferentiated form of social labor was probably the simplest of economic systems.] It was immune to internal crisis because, as a large undifferentiated whole, there were no different internal parts to go awry. Crisis then was purely external- drought, famine, earthquake.
The productivity of capitalism is such that we rarely have to worry about an external threat causing a crisis. Hurricane Katrina was horrible but it didn’t make global stock markets tank. In our ability to store up enough social surplus to survive against these external shocks the crisis has been internalized. Now crisis is a problem with the internal mechanisms by which social labor and its surplus is apportioned.
In a capitalist society social labor is wage labor. The ability to work is bought and sold in the market as a commodity as are the products of that labor. Those commodities have value to the extent that they are part of the social labor process. It is in studying this value that we can begin to understand the way capitalism works.
The goal of the capitalist is to amass value, measured in money, for the sake of amassing value. The capitalist wakes up in the morning with money and at the end of the day has accumulated more money. And he doesn’t need to perform any labor at all in order to do this, nor does he care what kind of or how many commodities he has produced. The only question for the capitalist is “Tomorrow what will I do with all this money?” And the answer is always “Try to turn it into more money.”
Thus the total amount of value in society is expanding, by some estimates an average of 3% a year. This is growth for the sake of growth, regardless of the social consequences. Here is where the absurdity of the conspiracy theory becomes clear. The basic idea of a conspiracy theory is: “There is such an amazing coincidence of messed up stuff in the world. This can’t be an accident. There must be some evil will behind it all.” But the conspiracy theorist misses the point. The motor of society, growth- blind, inanimate capital accumulation- doesn’t happen for a reason. There is no will behind it. It’s growth purely for the sake of growth.
But how far is bourgeois economics from the conspiracy theorist? Surely, this is what was most fascinating about the Ron Paul phenomenon: how Ron Paul fused the libertarian and conspiracy causes. If we take libertarianism to be the basic ideological distillation of modern economics isn’t it revealing how close the bourgeois theories of crisis coincide with the conspiratorial notion of an evil, outside force destroying the fabric of society- governments, the FED, jews, aliens. Neither can see that capitalist crisis is indistinguishable from capitalism itself.
When we ask if crisis is internal to capital we are asking if there is a limit to this growth. Clearly capital can only grow at the expense of the laborer. We, the laborers, are the active agents in a vast field of capital comprised of the products of past labor- machines, tools, raw materials, partially finished commodities. Marx called this ratio of past labor to living labor, of machines to man, the “organic composition of capital” and he observed that over time the composition of capital becomes more and more dominated by machines- all intended to improve the productivity of labor. But just because more widgets roll off the conveyor belt doesn’t mean that more value is being produced.
You may know those beautiful Diego Rivera murals in Detroit- his homage to the American industrial worker. In the murals there is a busyness of motion, of swirling gears and conveyor belts, the clanging and rumbling of great industrial machinery. And in the middle of it all, their bodies falling in to rhythm with the machines, are the the muscular forms of the American proletariat. Here is a brilliant illustration of several of Marx’s key insights about capital. In its explosive growth, capital flows through more and more of our reality until everything around us takes on the rhythm of accumulation. In the acceleration of turnover time, the construction and reconstruction of physical space, the gyrations of the stock market and the interest rate, we are always in the presence of the thumping rhythm of “the machine” that is capital. But we are the solitary living ingredient in the equation. As our bodies fall in with the rhythm of the conveyor belt we breath life into the machine.
The bodies in Rivera’s mural are totally dependent on capital for their survival and capital is totally dependent on the exploitation of those bodies for its survival. Yet despite their mutual dependence the two sides are antagonistic. What happens if we perform that careless abstraction of the bourgeoise economist- if we wave our magic wands and make one of the two elements disappear?
If we were to make capital disappear the wage laborer would cease to exist. Yet, human beings would still exist and they would still labor. In fact humans have labored without capital before and hopefully they may again one day. Thus the self-negativity of the worker is that (s)he can say “no” to being a wage laborer. This is what gives a union power- it’s ability to say a collective “no” to capital. This is also why labor creates value in the first place- the ability to say no is the essence of a social contract. The ultimate “no”, the ultimate self-negativity of labor is revolution. This is when we transcend wage labor.
If the human species were raptured this very minute, imagine the world we would leave behind: Diego Rivera’s mural falls silent, the still machines rusting in dark factories; empty schools and prisons, money lying in dark vaults, oil lying still in its barrels- a dead, motionless world. Capital is nothing without the laborer. Thus the self-negativity of capital is that to the extent that it eliminates labor it eliminates itself.
If we were to paint a dozen more machines into Rivera’s mural, the physical output might double. Perhaps we might erase the workers altogether and replace them with machines. What could be better for capital? A machine increases physical output and frees capital of its reliance on labor. But while this may create short-term competitive profits for the individual capitalist it comes at a high price. The less workers we have in our mural, the less value we produce. The more we spend on machines the higher our costs. This is why efficiency is the self-negating part of capital: efficiency destroys the very thing which creates value in the first place.
This may seem intuitively puzzling. If we erased all the workers from Rivera’s mural, wouldn’t cars still be produced? Wouldn’t people still buy them? Wouldn’t profit still be made? This is precisely the argument of those who maintain that profit is physically determined- that an increase in efficiency/productivity must mean more profits. But this is counter to the tenants of value theory: that only labor can produce value and that to the extent that capital accumulates at the sake of labor it is self-negating.
The debate over these rival concepts of productivity, capital and value is crucial. It is important not to dismiss this debate as mere scholasticism. When the bourgeois economist looks at those great murals of Diego Rivera’s he sees only people using stuff to make more stuff, existing in static equilibrium, besieged on all sides by hostile external forces. From the perspective of value theory the roaring machines conceal a social relation which pervades our reality and is contradictory at its core. Those “hostile external forces” are caught up in the gravitational field of capital and become internal to capital. Capital subsumes money, the state, culture and physical space and leaves its mark on all of them forcing them to express its contradictions.
Bourgeois economics may project its categories back and forth in time to create the illusion of a timeless capitalism in equilibrium. But in times of crisis the veil is torn. In a crisis it becomes clear that all things are in flux, that nothing is certain, that social systems don’t grow on trees- that they must be reproduced. We see motion and change all around us. When capital can’t reproduce itself, anything can happen. A crisis is a horrible time for people, but it’s also a great time for radical theory.
Exploitation FAQ
June 17, 2008part one:
part two:
Common questions about exploitation.
Q. I don’t make anything in my job. Am I still being exploited?
Good Question. My videos on exploitation all state that workers produce surplus value for capitalists through the production of commodities. Commodities can be either physical goods or services which are sold by a capitalist. But there are a lot of jobs that don’t produce goods and services- police men, bank clerks, cashiers. The distinction that is usually made is referred to as the difference between productive and unproductive labor. There are many different opinions as to how to make this distinction. I will be making a video on PUPL (productive and unproductive labor) soon. The big question then is… if labor is unproductive, are the workers not being exploited. I, personally, waver back and forth on this question. In my video on PUPL I will venture an interpretation. STay tuned.
Q. Are basketball players exploited?
top 5 07-08 salaries:
1) Kevin Garnett $22,000,000
2) Shaquille O’Neal $20,000,000
3tie) Jermaine O’Neal $19,728,000
3tie) Jason Kidd $19,728,000
5) Kobe Bryant $19,490,625
average top 200 CEO’s make 11.3 million a year.
Basketball players work. They work for large capitalist enterprises. But they make way more money than most workers. It is really hard to believe that they are being exploited.
Well, those large capitalist enterprises are still making a profit above what is paid to the players. The sports industry is a gigantic industry grossing gargantuan profits. They wouldn’t pay players those profits if they couldn’t make a profit from them.
And indeed there is class conflict in the sports industry. Basketball players, hockey players go on strike. This points to the blatant fact that no matter how big the outlays on wages (variable capital) there is always a battle over how much surplus the capitalist takes.
But there’s another angle to the sports question. Basketball players aren’t the only ones who work for their team. From trainers, coaches and pr men to the guys that clean the seats after the game and hose down the locker room, or the guys that work the cameras- there is a massive amount of labor that goes into a basketball game before it is delivered to you via TV. Many of those people are not paid well.
It seems that ball players- because they have a monopoly over a highly prized skill, are able to command much more of the surplus created in a sports franchise than any other worker. Some class theorists refer to this as skill exploitation- that highly skilled workers get some of the surplus value created by less skilled workers. In that sense the skilled workers benefit from the low pay of the unskilled workers. This drives a wedge between the workers in a particular firm, putting them at odds with each other instead of being united against a capitalist class.
This tells us some important things: 1. workers can have different relationships to surplus value due to skills and or their relation to the coordination of production (ie. managers). 2. these different relationships affect objective things like their wages, and subjective things like their class solidarity.
Q. Nobody works at my laundromat. How is profit made?
Good question. I have said that profit comes from the exploitation of workers. But in an example of a laundromat there is no worker. Yes, someone had to make the laundry machines- but nobody works at the machines. And the owner comes in once a day to sweep up and empty the quarters out of the machines, and occasionally a machine needs to be fixed…. but by and large, laundromats are entirely automated. How then can profit be made if there are no workers to exploit?
The answer to this question brings up the concept of automation. You see, the laundromat isn’t really selling a commodity to you. Instead you are renting the use of a machine for 30 minutes. No value is being produced. The same is true for a landlord. A landlord owns a house and charges you to live in it. You aren’t producing a commodity and the landlord isn’t producing a commodity. You are just paying the landlord for the use of his property. Landromats and rental housing can generate a lot of income for their owners. But these owners aren’t engaging in the production of commodities, thus they are not creating new values.
So where does their income come from if they don’t create value? Their income comes out of the wages of workers who pay out a portion of their wages for the use of the landlord’s property. These wages come from their work- productive work which creates value. In a sense landromat owners and landlords are leeches- sucking some of the wages out of society without contributing to the creation of value.
Q. The clothing company Patagonia seems to refute your theory of profit. Patagonia charges more than most clothing companies. But some consumers are willing to pay more for their clothes b/c Patagonia is a model company for environmental and labor standards. Isn’t it possible for profit to be made through exchange, and for workers to be paid fairly?
A.You’ve proposed a more ethical system of capitalism in which profit comes about by charging more for products than they are worth. People then have to be convinced to buy these products at inflated costs because it is more ethical. Assuming you could convince all people to shop ethically instead of in their own economic interests, this would entail some new vision of capitalist competition- somehow capitalists couldn’t compete anymore by lowering prices… or maybe you are proposing that all industries be monopolized, or severe restrictions to competition be enforced by states.
On a more fundamental level our disagreement over this issue highlights a crucial distinction between bourgeois and marxist economics, that is that bourgeois economists consider profit to be a result of different preferences in exchange (marginal utility theory), while marxists consider profit to be a result of the exploitation of labor.
If we take the entire social product (W) we can both agree that workers produce all of W. From a marxist perspective, W is divided into v (variable capital-the amount workers are paid for producing w) and s (surplus value- the amount appropriated by capitalists (W=S+V). S is the profit. You seem to be advocating a system whereby the prices of commodities are all inflated above the value of W so that commodities exchange at W+S.
If the price of all commodities are inflated, isn’t that the same as the prices of no commodities being inflated? (isn’t that like saying that printing more money would create more wealth? It just changes the monetary expression of wealth, but doesn’t create more actual wealth.)
But how do we measure V relative to W and S anyway? In other words, how do we know workers are being paid for the entire social product? We need some way of measuring V and W. They are both expressions of the amount of labor that goes into them, but they are only quantified in society through money prices (with all of the day to day distortions of money prices.) In other words, in your model where the price of the commodity is W+S, how do we know how much of that money price should go to the laborer and how much should go to the capitalist? All we have really done is to change the variables in the equation in order to end up with the same equation…. profit= W+S is the same as saying profit=S+V. The question is always: “how much of the prices of a commodity belong to the capitalist and how much to the laborer?” or “How much is a worker being exploited?”
The only real way to avoid exploitation is for the workers to own the means of production, thus eliminating surplus (s) altogether.
I hope this is not too algebraic and/or academic and answer. I am really glad you asked that question.
Q. I steal shit from my boss. Does that cancel out exploitation?
No. Stealing shit from your boss doesn’t change the fact that you are producing more value than you are paid for. It’s very unlikely that you could steal enough from your boss to make up the difference. If everyone did this the company would cease to make a profit- so this isn’t really a long run strategy for economic justice.
The more important point though is probably this: there are lots of ways in which workers resist exploitation. They work slower, they don’t let their managers know how fast they could work, they sabotage things, they milk the clock, in short they play lots of little games that give them the subjective sense that they are maintaining some of autonomy and dignity within the degradations of wage labor. These games are a double-edged sword: on one hand workers are carving out autonomous space that allows them to survive psychologically in a realm where they have little control over their labor; on the other hand, this works as a temporary pallative that gives workers a false sense of control and comfort, keeping them from addressing the real problem: capitalism.
Q. The bars downtown charge more for the same beer than the ones in west philly. Does that mean they are exploiting their workers more even though those workers do the same amount of work?
Differences in price can be attributed to many things. Exploitation needs to be seen as an underlying process expressed in prices which fluctuate around an equilibrium. In your case rent is probably the biggest factor in the difference in price. Rent is another big issue that I hope to address at length elsewhere.
Q. I am self-employed. Do I exploit myself?
A:No. You are not creating value for a capitalist who then pays you for only a portion of that value. Self employed people are an autonomous class separate from workers and capitalists. Of course, many people who are are nominally self-emplyed sub-contract or do part-time work as wage laborers. Self employed people are often put in the same category as the petit bourgeois. There are many types of self employed people: carpenters, piano teachers, house servants,
Q. I work for the government. Am I exploited?
Surely your experience as a government employee is similar to the lived experience of those of us employed by capitalists: you work for a wage and your employer wants to maximize the amount of labor he/she gets out of you. The government seeks to raise productivity relative to labor cost. Yet the government is not making a profit from you when it does this because it isn’t selling your product as a commodity. (unless you work for a government run enterprise.) Thus many government employees- teachers, secretaries, cops- do not produce surplus value for a capitalist. However their jobs are essential to the process of surplus value creation that happens elsewhere in the economy. (teachers train future workers. cops protect private property. etc.) The question then is whether these people who don’t produce surplus value but whose jobs are crucial to the economic order can be considered exploited. I think this depends on our definition of the concept of exploitation and what we are using it for. But I will venture, for now, that the answer should be a “qualified yes”. I hope to go into this further in my future video on Productive and Unproductive labor.
Q. I work for a non-profit. Am I exploited?
Many non-profits still make a profit. Many sell commodities. Others- social services, churches, etc. pay their employees with donated or government money. Though the employees may do useful, purposeful work, they don’t create profit for a capitalist and thus fall outside of the scope of capitalist production relations- they don’t produce surplus value. This then leads to the same answer as the previous question about government employees. But still the bigger question is: if you don’t produce surplus value does that mean you can’t be exploited? Stay tuned for a future video entitled “Who is exploited?” that will address these questions more deeply.
Q. How can I not exploit my employees?
Turn your enterprise into a cooperatively owned and run workplace. Employees vote on their salaries, on reinvestment strategies, etc. Everyone has a say in decisions equal to the degree that those decisions effect them. Then go get a book called Parecon by Michael Albert. Use your vast powers as a capitalist to create the society he describes.
Exploitation and Morality
June 17, 2008part one:
part two:
Exploitation and Morality
intro- Exploitation is a heavy word. The term implies a strong moral critique of capitalism. Many people identify with this, but it turns others off. This video will deal with this problem by attempting to provide the proper perspective for questions surrounding the moral dimension of the theory of exploitation.
Q. Are all capitalists bad people?
A. Some are, some aren’t but they all have to exploit workers in order to make a profit. Class and exploitation are objective concepts. They are meant to explain social phenomena. They also imply a strong moral critique of capitalism in general- as a whole. They are not concepts that are meant to explain the personalities or moral character of individuals. Capitalists are compelled by necessity to exploit workers. They have no choice in this issue. Do we blame them or do we blame the system? Often particularly blatant acts of individual exploitation do seem worthy of individual condemnation- we might condemn the GAP for exploiting little girls in Saipan, or WalMart for not paying its workers a living wage- but these individual condemnations have to be seen as part of a larger critique of capitalism in general. Are the individuals who make these decisions bad people? One often wonders how some CEOs go to sleep at night, but contemplating the subjective mentality of the ruling class is more of an aimless subjective past-time than an important issue for economic or social thought.
Q.Is marx creating a false dichotomy? Doesn’t everyone- including capitalists- work?
A. Yes, many capitalists may perform various tasks in the course of a work day. But it’s not the type of work but the relation to the means of production. Capitalists may perform labor. But because capitalists own the means of production, they own the social product. They can then decide how much to pay workers, how much to pay themselves and how much to reinvest in production. These decisions are based on their own self-interests as capitalists. These decisions have meaningful social consequences.
Q. Is exploitation always bad? My friend owns a used bookstore. He’s not super rich- he can barely pay his mortgage. his 2 employees are well paid and happy. he gets along well with them…. it doesn’t seem like exploitation to me…!
A. We often don’t have a problem agreeing that Exxon, Nike, or GM exploits its workers. The large, impersonal nature of these organizations, their huge corporate profits in comparison to their meager wage bills, the massive layoffs and restructuring that have disastrous consequence all in the name of profit. It makes intuitive sense that these capitalists are benefiting from the exploitation of their workers.
This is not as obvious with tiny capitalists. The French word for tiny capitalist is Petit Bourgeois. The PB differ enough from large capitalists that they are usually placed in a separate class, distinct from capitalists and workers- the PB class. The PB own small businesses, hire just a few workers and do not have a stake in the large productive forces of society where most of the SV is created for the capitalist class.
Working for a small capitalist can sometimes be very exploitative, because the profit margin is so low the workers have to really work hard and don’t get paid all that well. at other times, workers are well paid, develop personal relations with boss, etc. In these later cases, it is often hard to condemn small capitalists.
if all capitalism was petty bourgeois: it wouldn’t elicit the sort of moral outrage that corporate capitalism does. Yet there are still fairer, more democratic models of production. It’s nothing personal (just like when a capitalist does something immoral in the name of profit. Capitalist morality is different.)
is small capitalism possible? no. competition forces capitalists to chase bigger and bigger profits and to grow and grow, centralize. (people often associate perfect competition with an ideal capitalism, but perfect competition leads to the centralization of capital.) In order to check this: strong barriers to capital mobility, progressive tax on profits, things that actually hinder competition. this would result in regional monopolies, pissed off capitalists… relation of capital to the state.
some resources are natural, large monopolies
Instead of asking if small capitalism is possible, picture what it would be like if all enterprises- big or small- were collectively run by workers.
Q. globalization example?- aren’t sweatshops good for 3rd world workers?
A. the function of 3rd world labor: primitive accumulation, industrial reserve army
1stly. The huge amount of SV extracted from foreign workers is not going to those countries to develop infrastructure, improve social spending or in any way better the lives of workers. Instead it flows into the coffers of international capitalists. Are the meager wages paid to 3rd world workers really enough to develop the social infrastructure necessary to bring these economies in line with the 1st world? No.
2ndly. It is wrong to assume that one day the whole world will look like a 1st world country. Capital develops geographical space unevenly as it flows around the globe. It creates pockets of wealth and pockets of poverty- as seen in the disparities between the 1st world and the 3rd world and as seen in the disparities within the 1st world. There are many places in the US which resemble a 3rd world country. If capitalism can’t lift americans out of poverty how do we expect it to lift Chinese workers out of poverty?
3rdly. Much of globalization entails the destruction of subsistence agriculture and the proletarianization of peasntry. ie. by flooding mexico with cheap agricultural products, nafta caused the dislocation of many mexican farmers who then migrated to the border to find work in the maquiladora sector. If the proletarianization of 3rd world workers allows them to buy a modicum of consumer goods this doesn’t mean that they have better lives, more control over their lives, or more social power. It actually means that they are now dependent on a capitalist for their livelihood- forced
to sell their labor for a wage (wage slavery).
4. effect on 1st world workers- drive down wages and break unions. look at american economy. the effect of freer capital mobility is always bad for workers. human beings can’t move that fast.
Q.are we promoting violence against capitalists?
A. no. but capitalism enforces exploitation with violence. therefore the call for its abolition brings a violent response from capital. Of course a transition to a post-capitalist society could, theoretically, by peaceful. But it would require taking away capital (social power) from capitalists. Assuming most capitalists won’t just give away their social power, it will have to be taken by force- state force, armed force, violence, whatever. The question of revolutionary tactics is a tricky one because capitalism is so entrenched, has such a powerful monopoly on economic force and physical force; has such a hegemonic grip on our culture… it seems inescapable. So really, capitalism shouldn’t have much to fear by some people sitting around and talking about the possibility of one day having a more just society. But it does. Capitalism can’t even tolerate a little bit of dissent. I think that is because 1. capitalists know, deep down, that we are right and it bothers them; and 2. they are worried dissent among workers could interfere with profits.
