The Labor Apocalypse And Wasted Profits

Humanity lives and acts under a system, called capitalism, that's full of internal contradictions, some of which are causing the greatest challenges we've ever had to face as a species. And there are no solutions. None.

_{Hundreds of unsold Volkswagens were stored in the Finnish forest in summer 2009. - source: Wikipedia}

What I'm about to talk about isn't new, inventive or clever, as all of it has been predicted by the grandfather of socialism, Karl Marx. Also, it's very easy to understand that capitalism has to end, that we can not continue on its destructive path if our intention is to survive and thrive on this planet in future generations. It has to end because there are no solutions to be found in the system that is the cause of the problems we want to solve. This system fails at its very core, it is fundamentally flawed, but it protects itself so well, that some of its biggest features are seen as bugs, and vice-versa. For example: capitalism's innate tendency to increase income inequality, to create a small owner class that owns almost everything and a large lower class that owns almost nothing, is explained away as a bug, and by both sides of the mainstream political spectrum. The left will say that it's government's failure to adequately regulate capitalism as to suppress its natural excesses, and the right will say that government already regulates too much. In my opinion, as things stand now, as long as capitalism is our default mode of operation, the left is right, and the right is wrong. I'll try to explain why in the rant that's to follow...

Let's take a look at two of capitalism's main characteristics, the things we've all learned to accept as basic truths growing up and as adults. We all "know" that, generally speaking, if you work hard and make the right choices, like finishing school, find a good job or start a small business, everyone can make it in life. We won't all become billionaires, but certainly there's a place reserved for us somewhere in the illustrious "middle class". We believe in the meritocracy that lays at the heart of the capitalist ideology, which brings us to the first giant internal contradiction. Actually, let's take a step back first and explain why the capitalistic view on "meritocracy" is wrong to begin with; the word actually just means that people are rewarded because of what they achieve, rather than because of their wealth. "What they achieve" could be anything, but under the capitalism paradigm we only measure the achievements that translate into financial gains. It doesn't pay well to "just" be a good parent who delivers a new, fully functioning, well raised, potentially productive member to a flourishing society, so parents are excluded. It doesn't pay very well to be a great musician who brings great joy to great numbers of people every day on a street-corner. It doesn't pay very well to be employed as a garbage-collector, even if millions of people cry "Foul!" if the garbage-collectors decide to go on strike. It's simply not true that capitalism rewards people more according to their talents, achievements or how hard or how long you work; this meritocracy is a lie to begin with.

Have you noticed, dear reader, how attempts from the political left to tax the rich more, are always explained as "an attack on success" or "an attack on merits"? They get away with that nonsense because of this deeply rooted belief in capitalism's fake meritocratic features. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that this is a meritocracy, and that it's true that you'll be more successful in the materialistic capitalist sense. This means that we believe in a system under which one's "worth" is measured exclusively as one's ability to make money. And since we can't all be entrepreneurs (this wouldn't make sense in capitalism, nor in real life), this means that most of us can only make money by having a job, by selling our time and energy on the labor market. There goes, by the way, another capitalist lie and contradiction: there's almost no free choice here as the vast majority of people must work for a living, which means they have to find a job and have to accept whatever job they can get, and that job has to be found somewhere around where you live. The argument that in capitalism everyone is free to chose the livelihood they want is, and always has been, a rose-tinted fantasy.

This is the labor apocalypse. The labor we sell on the labor market is, for most of us, the only way to start climbing up the ladder of the so called meritocracy. Also, and this is even more important in this day and age, labor is our only power against the owner class. But this power, this way up the ladder, is ending. This has always been a contradiction in capitalism: to make more money, to climb up the ladder, there's only one way to do that for regular workers, and that is to work more, to work harder so you can save some money to maybe one day try your luck as an entrepreneur, or to give your children a small head-start in life. But capitalism doesn't want you to make more money: the profit-directive, which is the core of the core of capitalism, incentivizes capitalists to pay less, to outsource and to automate. And since the capitalists form the ruling class, they get what they want: since the 1970s productivity has gone up, much of it due to automation and much of it because we are working more hours (all family-members, not just dad, have to work nowadays), but wages have stayed stagnant. In the 1970s a CEO earned 40 times as much as the average worker, now it's more than 400 times as much.

The true labor apocalypse is in the fact that eventually all jobs will be largely automated, even a lot of the white-collar jobs. It's paradoxical to hold on to a system that demands of most of its participants to work harder and work more, when we know that capitalism at its core wants to automate as much work as possible in order to fulfill its main directive, which is making as much profit as possible. It's a contradiction that leads to this tragic fact of life: for many people a job at a sweat-shop, severely underpaid and working under terrible circumstances, is their only way to survive. Now, when those jobs are replaced by robots, which they will be, these wage-slaves will see these robots as a threat to their very survival, when in fact, had we lived in an economy that makes sense, these robots should be welcomed as liberators. ALL automation should be welcomed everywhere as a liberation of mankind, as they free us from having to do dirty and dangerous jobs; only under a paradigm that holds profits and economic growth as the greatest goods in life can such a paradoxical state of affairs exist. And this leads us straight into the next contradiction: the wasted profits.

Just think about it for a minute, and you'll see that "profit" equals "excess". When you accept a job and get paid 10 dollars per hour, you know that your labor produces more than 10 dollars per hour: an employer that hires someone that produces less than they get payed is an ex-employer or a figure in some Utopian fantasy, this employer doesn't exist. All employers make a profit, and all their workers are also their customers. Since those customers get paid less than their labor produces, it is impossible to sell all products that are produced. We live, to make it simple, in a constant state of overproduction, which means that ever growing quantities of excess and waste are inherent to the capitalist economy, to the ideal of growth. To paint a simple and unpopular picture: every dollar that disappears into the pockets of the rich, every dollar that's saved or stored, every dollar that's slung on another spin on the wheels of the nonproductive stock-markets, every dollar that's not spent back in the economy, represents waste. If people had a better fundamental understanding of how the daily economy actually works, this fact would be the best argument for taxing the hell out of the rich. An economy is, ideally, a cyclical system of production and consumption in which we only produce what we actually are able to consume; capitalism is no such economy. We could lift off a great deal of the pressure on the environment by trying to correct that by taxing the capitalists more, as every dollar that's spent, even if it's spent back into the economy by the government, adds to this cyclical nature. Every dollar given to a poor person will definitely be spent, will definitely buy something someone else has produced, reducing the excesses and waste.

What all of this means, is that we simply can not believe that capitalism is "the best we can do"; it's a dead end and we will necessarily evolve toward a post-capitalist world. For some this very thought is offensive, as they really do believe that capitalism represents the end of humanity's cultural evolution, that this really is the best we can do. That we'll do even better if we remove government as much as possible and let markets decide who's worthy and who's not. They don't see that "the worthy" have always been the same people: the small owner class. They believe that there's an extra, imaginary element at capitalism's core that would magically create an equilibrium in an economy that's founded on the concentration of capital in the hands of the few; the individual drive to make profits does just that, and that extra element, the invisible hand, doesn't exist. Only we exist, and we exist together on a finite planet, not alone on an infinite sea of resources and opportunities, and we'd better get a grip on these basic facts. All of the above should also clarify the fallacy of a universal basic income within the capitalist hierarchy; a basic income, enough to not die, but not enough to really live, is a way to cement people in their current class, it's an end to social mobility when we extrapolate this proposal to the not too far away future when most jobs are automated.

Okay, that's enough; I can't even stick to the topic anymore :-) Rant over. Thank you so much if you made it this far! I'll leave you with this brilliant video I found; it explains exactly how Marx looked at capitalism's inherent crises and its business cycle. Maybe some of you will be surprised to learn that the "labor theory of value" is not an idea by Marx, but by Adam Smith, the grandfather of capitalism. Some of you may be surprised to hear that 95% of what Marx has written, is about capitalism and not about communism: just 5% is about a possible future communist society, but he truly shines in his analysis of capitalism.

_{Marx's Theory of Economic Crisis}

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