Wobbly times number 173

"Value, Price and Profit"

a speech given by Karl Marx to citizen members of the International Workingmen's Association in September, 1865

By way of introduction, I think I should provide a bit of the historical context in which this speech/debate took place.  The links above and below in blue will take you to original documentation.

 The Minute Book of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association
on August 1, 1865.

When Marx is addressing Citizen Weston and his arguments in this speech, he is also making a critique of Ferdinand Lassalle's theories which were having a great influence in some circles of the workers' movement. Lasalle accepted the idea, first posited by the classical economist David Ricardo, that wage rates in the long run tended towards the minimum level necessary to sustain the life of the worker and to provide for his reproduction. In accord with what he called, "The Iron Law of Wages", Lassalle argued that individual measures of self-help by wage workers, such as strikes and organisation into unions, were destined to failure and that only producers' cooperatives established with the financial aid of the political State would make economic improvement of the workers' lives possible. From this, it followed that the political action of the workers to capture State power was paramount and the organization of trade unions to struggle for ephemeral wage improvements was more or less a diversion from the primary struggle.

 see: Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875  

As I give voice to Karl's speech to workers (aka 'citizens') organised in the International Workingmen's Association, you will hear Citizen Weston's name mentioned quite a bit, especially in the first few segments. Weston's arguments were influenced by Lasalle's theory that there is an 'iron law of wages' to wit: that the amount workers can get from the economic pie is fixed and that the class struggle over that pie in terms of improving wages and working conditions is  futile. All of Weston's arguments are still being promoted today and are still being accepted by most workers as 'commonsense' e.g. that high wages cause high prices etc.

"Value, Price and Profit" remains the best introduction to Karl Marx's CAPITAL that you'll ever find.  Listen to what Marx had to say here and you will have a head start on grasping his critique of political-economy in CAPITAL volumes I-III and THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE which form what might be called the fourth volume of CAPITAL. Read "Value, Price and Profit" again, after having read CAPITAL and you will truly appreciate what a brilliant speech it  was and how relevant the topics Marx addressed are to the economic and political issues being spoken about and debated today.  You will also discover a Marx most on the left and right have never heard of, a Marx focussed on the primary issue facing workers, their self-emancipation from the wage system, a feat which cannot be accomplished other than through workers themselves becoming class conscious enough to grasp just how enslaved they are.  And now, on to the "Value, Price and Profit", which I have divided into 19 eight or so minute segments.

Wobbly times number 159

The Soviet Wage System:

a snapshot of changes in average monthly wages and pensions in the U.S.S.R. from 1965-1973

(in rubles)

Group                                1965                                         1973                       %increase

________________________________________________________

state apparatus             106                                            126                            19%

engineer/techno            148                                            185                             25%

education/culture         94                                              121                             29%

service/trade                   75                                               102                             36%

white collar                      86                                               119                              38%

blue collar                       102                                              146                              43%

state farm                          72                                              116                              61%

collective farm                49                                                87                               78%

all workers average       97                                               135                              39%

(excluding collective

   farmers)

Total expenditures      101                                              184                                82%

on pensions

________________________________________________________

sources: most from Narodnoye Khozaystro SSR v. 1973  and "Problems of Communism" March/April 1973, p.13


Putting the Soviet wage system in its best light, what one can discern from looking at this statistical collection is the intent of the CPSU leadership to use their very controlled wage system as a means to bridge the rural/urban producers' wealth divide. Compare the higher the percentage increase in 1973 with the lower the wage in 1965.  NB: collective farmers percentage increase verses pecentage increase for workers in the state apparatus.   

CPSU State controlled commodity production also included controls on the prices of commodities which were to be marketed to the producing wage-labourers.  For example, rents paid to the collective State landord were extremely low.  The price of bread was also kept extremely low as were a whole host of commodities e.g. public transport.  Many services, like education and health care were taken out of commodity production and distributed freely on the basis of need.  At the same time, many luxury commodities like furs were kept at prices higher than their exchange-values.  Of course anomalies occurred with respect to the wages and privileges of more valued members of Soviet society e.g. top scientists and bureaucrats of the politburo.

Production was planned but, not by the rank and file producers.  The producers remained wage-slaves, the social product of their labour remained alienated from their control, from common ownership.  Rather the CPSU appointed bureaucrats to plan production/consumption of both commodified and non-commodified goods and services. This pattern of political power between subaltern wage-slaves and party bureaucrats as  wage-slave drivers and rulers became the time-tested formula for implementing Leninist models of socialism.  Marx and Engels critiqued the wage system as being the foundation of the capitalist mode of production.  Marx and Engels proposed changing the mode of production to one where wealth was not commodified and sold rather, wealth would be produced for use and distributed on the basis of need.  (See Wobbly times number 88-89)

One of the worst things about the Soviet wage system was the lack of freedom and power allowed the working class by the ruling party. This led to the typical dominance and submission social psychological character structure one sees in all class dominated societies.  Dominance and submission is a dialectical tension against which the instinct to remove the collar from one's neck continually batters. For example, unemployment was, for all intents and purposes non-existent, indeed, it was against the law to be unemployed.  As the propaganda of 'actually existing socialism' was experienced in daily life as wage-slavery, the body politic moved increasingly over time toward a favourable view of  the realities of the higher standard of living and civil liberties in what were officially labeled, 'imperialist countries', the industrially developed capitalist States.  Thus, the much touted transition from, the CPSU version of socialism to, the New Jerusalem of the higher stage aka 'communism', came to be seen for what it was, a lie used to maintain the power and wealth privileges of those at the top of the Soviet wage system.  If one was an astute wage-labourer in the USSR, one could readily see in the works of Marx and Engels (works widely available in the USSR) that there was no theoretical distinction made between what they termed 'socialism' and 'communism'--the concepts were used interchangeably to mean a classless society where the collective product of labour was owned in common while production would be engaged in for use with wealth distributed on the basis of need.  In fact, the abolition of the wage system and commodity production were Marx and Engels' theoretical foundation of socialism/communism, viz: "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." 

On top of this, the obvious contradiction of maintaining a political State and calling it 'socialist' added insult to injury, as Marx and Engels continually point out in their very own writings.  

"The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”"   Engels' letter to Bebel, 1875

In the world at large, the capitalist propaganda about 'socialism' meaning a system of bureaucratic State despotism more and more took on the mantle of  THE TRUTH thus feeding right-wing conservatism both inside and outside the USSR.  At the same time, Soviet anti-capitalist propaganda increasingly came to be seen  as, a BIG LIE both within and without the USSR and other 'actually existing' socialist States.  The result of all this all too obvious attempt to manipulate workers' consciousness was the more or less unanimous embrace by the workers of capitalism in M-L State after M-L State in the historical approach to 1989.

For a more complete analysis of the Soviet wage system see:
Seongjin Jeong's paper:

 https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/sovietplanningltc_seongjin_urpe20180928.pdf

Wobbly times number 150

On progressive nationalism

"The right of self-determination means that a nation may arrange its life in the way it wishes. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign, and all nations have equal rights."  Stalin, Marxism and the National Question

To speak or write about 'nations' doing this or that or having rights is a prime example of reification.  Stalin was a revolutionary social democrat in 1913 when he wrote the above and like Stalin, most social democrats of the time thought similarly about the right of national self-determination.  The ever growing move away from promoting class conscious praxis for the abolition of the wage system, toward what might be called 'progressive nationalism' on the eve of World War I, demonstrates how far the socialist workers' movement which Marx and Engels had been part of, had been coopted and folded into the dominant ideas of the capitalist epoch through reified thinking in general and political opportunism in particular.  

As Marx critically observed about reification in The Holy Family Chapter VI

"Once man is recognised as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations, only 'Criticism' can invent new categories and transform man himself into a category and into the principle of a whole series of categories, as it is doing now. It is true that in so doing it takes the only road to salvation that has remained for frightened and persecuted theological inhumanity. History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims."

Nationalism is the political movement of the capitalist class (aka the bourgeoisie) to achieve domination of the producing classes through the establishment of its own political State.  The conception of national sovereignty for the capitalist class develops within and emerges from the womb of feudalism, the system the bourgeoisie sublates via political revolution.  Under feudalism, political power is held by the aristocratic class and sovereignty is in the hands of a monarch, aka the sovereign.  Thus, the 'right of national self-determination' is the political program of those rulers in waiting who wish to impose the wage system on the majority, the working class.    

Colonialism grew out of aristocratic class rule and the well learned historical examples for the projections of class power presented by the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerian etc. slave owning classes.  The primary difference between the ancient domination of slave producers within empires, from feudalistic empire building, was the ever growing wealth and consequent political power of the capitalist class, a class which began to seethe and chafe under aristocratic rule as its colonialist mercantilism expanded in historical tandem with the closing of the commons by aristocrats in search of private sources of wealth.  Privatisation by class ruled governments is hardly a new concept.  Henry VIII made vagabond (read 'unemployed) peasants criminals, having them hanged along the roadsides of his kingdom. However, the major political-economic consequence of the closing of the commons was the ever growing employment of displaced peasants as wage-labourers, the workers who created the product of their collective labour as commodities, owned by the employing class and made available in markets for sale with a view to profit.  In the West, this roiling, ever wealth accumulating capitalist class began to show its political face in alliance with the landlord class in parliamentary institutions. In the ideological sphere the decline of feudalism was marked by the gradual decline of feudalist legitimising religions e.g. in Europe, the Catholic Church and with that decline, the rise of the Protestant movement with its work ethic and the ever dominating ideology, bourgeois individualism.  "Dieu et mon droit" was dying.

Whether or not it is labeled 'progressive', nationalist ideology is based on the notion that the employers and the workers have class interests in common.  But within the inherently exploitive wage-system, exploiters and producers have no class interests in common: Buyers do not have interests in common with sellers when they come to the marketplace for commodities.  Anti-colonialist nationalism has been and is the struggle of nascent ruling classes to cement their sovereign rule over the producing classes of workers and peasants through the establishment of a political State.  While the establishment of a capitalist political State may liberate the bourgeois from domination by monarchists or faraway colonial ruling classes, it does nothing, in terms of promoting the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery.  

"The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves"   This was the principle on which the First International was based.  That principle is as true now as it was then.  The wage-system existed then and it exists now, even within political States labeled, 'socialist'.  

In order to emancipate themselves, the workers will have to abandon contemporary leftist mythologies concerning 'progressive nationalism', 'boring from within' the pro-capitalist trade unions and parties, as well as the absurdly conservative notion of, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.'  Until they do, they will continue to spend their lives, as they spend their money, as wage-slaves, all equal under the law, in their own identities, democratically voting for bourgeois to lead them in government, while competing with each other for approval-votes from employers--because, as bourgeois ideology goes, the only way one can be free is if, some other one is un-free.  C'est la vie under the rule of Capital.    

Wobbly times number 144

The top graph is taken from "Left Business Observer" .  Real income is adjusted for inflation.  So, the working class, or 95% of the population, the part who actually produce the wealth of the USA have had their wages/income flattened since 1967 whereas the top 5%, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class have seen their real incomes increase quite a bit.  


The second graph shows the real productivity increases of the working class over the years since the 1940s.  Note how productive of wealth you and your fellow workers are and how you're becoming ever more productive as a class.  


Aside from our rulers' increasing income, a lot of the wealth we produce goes into expenditures for capital equipment and a major chunk is devoted to military killing efficiency too. ;p  Atom bombs and funny little armoured vehicles which get blown up by roadside bombs, night vision goggles and so on.....


As a friend of mine quipped, "With the rising ratio of constant capital [machines, supplies] over variable capital [wages], expressed as 'C/V,' more wealth must be transformed into constant capital to keep up with competition (i.e. make workers more productive of wealth in less socially necessary labour time thus, cheapening the commodities representing that wealth on the market.  Less labour time=cheaper prices when price equals value MB). This tendency would also show up as a drive to reduce the wage part of the ratio by sending jobs over seas and/or forcing down real wages in the Fatherland. More productve capital means less labour needed per unit output."


Year Weekly Earnings (1982-84 dollars) for U.S. workers selling their labour power to the employing class.
1972 $341.83 (peak)
1975 $314.75
1980 $290.86
1985 $285.34
1990 $271.12
1992 $266.46 (lowest point; 22% below peak)
1995 $267.07
2000 $284.79
2005 $284.99
2010 $297.67
2011 $294.78 (still 14% below peak)
via "Middle Class Political Economist" 

Wobbly times number 112

What can replace the wage system?

"Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' from the Preamble to the IWW's Constitution.

I maintain that the left lost its way sometime after 1910, fishing in the vote getting markets of liberal reformism and shutting out the revolutionaries who spoke of common ownership of the collective product of labour and the abolition of the system of exploitation known as wage labour. The official Marxist-Leninist and Social Democratic left replaced the 'abolition of the wage system' with liberal reformism i.e. with accepting, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' all in the name of 'borng from within' the business unions and the established political States. 'Boring from within' was meant as a tactic; but soon became the strategic goal of the left i.e. to get elected to bourgeois or Marxist-Leninist institutions of politcal power over the wage slaves of the world. To the degree that this point of view triumphed, political amnesia struck the workers' movement. Forgetting that the abolition of wage-labour was the goal of the social revolution, along with common ownership of the collective product of labour, has gotten us to where we are today: with a left composed of radical liberal moralists waiting for a Castro (or fill in some other messiah) to save them, a left that has lost all sense of being part of a social revolution made by themselves and their fellow workers, for themselves as a class. As Marx and Engels put it in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO:

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished [hebt auf (aufheben)] its own supremacy [Herrschaft, rule] as a class."



QUESTION NO. I.
"How will the Co-operative Commonwealth determine the income of each worker?"

ANSWER: --
In order that the answer to the question be understood, two things must first be grasped, and kept in mind. One is the factor which determines the worker's income today; and that involves the worker's status under Capitalism. The other thing is the worker's changed status in the Co-operative Commonwealth; from which status flows the factor which will then determine the worker's income.

How is the worker's income determined today, under Capitalism?

The income of the worker is his wages. That which determines the wages of the worker today is the supply and demand for Labor in the Labor market. If the supply is relatively large, the price of labor-power, that is, wages, which means income, will be relatively low. If the demand is relatively large, then the income, that is, wages, will rise. As the Law of Gravitation may be, and is, perturbed by a number of perturbing causes, so with the Law of Wages: -- combinations of workers, on the one hand, may counteract an excessive supply of Labor in the Labor market, and keep wages up; on the other hand, capitalist outrages, such as shanghaing, not to mention innumerable others, may counteract a small supply of Labor in the Labor market, and keep wages down. In the long, run the perturbing causes cease to be perceptible factors, and the Law of Supply and Demand re-asserts itself.

It follows that, under Capitalism, the status of' the worker is not that of a human. His income being his price, and his price being controlled by the identical law that controls the prices of all other articles of merchandise, under Capitalism the worker is a chattel. In so far as he is a "worker" he is no better than cattle on the hoof -- all affectation to the contrary notwithstanding.

What, on the contrary, is the worker's status in the Co-operative Commonwealth ?

"Co-operative Commonwealth" is a technical term; it is another name for the Socialist or Industrial Republic. He who says "Co-operative Commonwealth" means, must mean, a social system that its advocates maintain flows from a previous, the present, the Capitalist regimen ; a social system that its advocates maintain is made compulsory upon society by the impossible conditions which the Capitalist regimen brings to a head; finally, a social system which its advocates maintain that, seeing it is at once the offspring of Capitalism and the redress of Capitalist ills, saves and partakes of the gifts that Capitalism has contributed to the race's progress, and lops off the ills with which Capitalism itself cancels its own gifts. The issue of wages, or the worker's income, throws up one of the leading ills of Capitalism.

The Co-operative Commonwealth revolutionizes the status of the worker. From being the merchandise he now is, he is transformed into a human. The transformation is effected by his pulling himself out and away from the stalls in the market where today he stands beside cattle, bales of hay and crates of crockery, and taking his place as a citizen in full enjoyment of the highest civic status of the race.

The means for the transformation is the collective ownership of all the necessaries for production, and their operation for use, instead of their private ownership by the Capitalist, and their operation for sale and profits.

The worker's collective ownership of that which, being stripped of under Capitalism, turns him into a wage-slave and chattel, determines his new status. The revolutionized status, in turn, determines his income.

Whereas, under Capitalism, the very question whether the worker shall at all have an income depends upon the judgment, the will or the whim of the Capitalist, whether the wheels of production shall move, or shall lie idle, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, where the worker himself owns the necessaries for production, no such precariousness of income can hang over his head.

Whereas, under Capitalism, a stoppage of production comes about when the capitalist fears that continued production may congest the market, thereby forcing profits down, and never comes about because there is no need of his useful articles, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, use and not sale and profits being the sole purpose of production, no such stoppage of production, hence, of income, is conceivable.

Whereas, under Capitalism, improved methods of production have an eye solely to an increase of profits, and therefore are equivalent to throwing workers out of work, -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth, use and not sale and profits, popular wellbeing and not individual richness, being the sole object in view, improved methods of production, instead of throwing workers out of work, will throw out hours of work, and keep steady, if they do not increase, the flow of income.

Consequently, and finally --The Co-operative Commonwealth will not determine, the Co-operative Commonwealth will leave it to each worker himself to determine his income; and that income will total up to his share in the product of the collective labor of the Commonwealth, to the extent of his own efforts, multiplied with the free natural opportunities and with the social facilities (machinery, methods, etc.) that the genius of society may make possible.
In other words -- differently from the state of things under Capitalism, where the worker's fate is at the mercy of the capitalist -- in the Co-operative Commonwealth the worker will himself determine, will himself be the architect of his fate.

Excerpt from the pamphlet
"Fifteen Questions About Socialism"
by Daniel De Leon (1914)

(see also Engels' supplement to Marx's CAPITAL Volume III.  In it you will read an historical materialist analysis of how labour time developed as the socially recognised value which products of labour were exchanged.)
**********************************************************************************

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

Karl Marx from Critique of the Gotha Programme

"The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile the worker at the base of society is for the first time not materially estranged from history, because the irreversible movement is now generated from that base. By demanding to live the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life."
Guy Debord 'The Society of the Spectacle'

My point is that the whole conceptual orientation of Marx, especially concerning the interchangeable use of the terminology of 'socialism' and 'communism' was changed in the left public mind by the weight of the Soviet propaganda machine, along with Marx's notion that socialism meant the abolition of wage-labour and its replacement with a system which would have the transparency of socially necessary labour time vouchers in the first phase of socialism.

"But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing farther, from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”." Lenin THE STATE AND REVOLUTION.

Equality of wages is something Marx ridiculed e.g.:

"What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as the goal of social revolution?" WAGE LABOUR AND CAPITAL

"Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

"Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other." Marx ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS

"Lenin¹s dictum that 'socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people,' who must of course trust the benevolence of their leaders, expresses the perversion of ‘socialism’ to the needs of the State priests, and allows us to comprehend the rapid transition between positions that superficially seem diametric opposites, but in fact are quite close." I.W.W. member Noam Chomsky

As you may know, equality of wages was more or less the rule in the 1920s in the USSR and inequality of wages was introduced in the 1930s. Marx's critique of the wage system was more or less forgotten:

"One form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself."
GRUNDRISSE by Karl Marx


So, nowadays after decades of boring from within, not only are we under attack from Capital, we’re not even worth being bought off. The fear that workers of the world would unite under the banner of M-Lism has well and truly gone with the wind. And what are we left with? I mean the left. We have a left which is 99% un-conscious of which class they’re in or why it would matter in the first place. We have a left hopelessly tied to liberalism, albeit a more radical form than the official liberals in the Democratic Party. We have a left in the unions and political organisations who never mention the wage system other than to demand a fairer version of exploitation. We have a left guilt ridden about the workers who they claim are suffering from ‘affluenza’. We have a left hopelessly mired in searching for identity and bowing to others’ self-proclaimed identity politics. We have an intellectual left in horror, grasping at a grand narrative which claims to be against all Grand Narratives. We have a left waiting for Godot to emerge from the less industrialised political States. We have a left which has so thoroughly become respectful of religion that it has become religiously authoritarian itself, complete with classless moral trappings and finger waving. In short, we have a left which has been tamed by the dominant ideology: TINA.

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

Wobbly time number 104

West Australian workers were in the streets of Perth, marching on the state Parliament to demand of their polytricksters that they pass laws which would make capitalists hire West Australians and use West Australian based capitalists who employ West Australians for any work which needed doing in mining, shipping and related activities which labour is applied to natural resources based in Western Australia to produce wealth. Surely, the working class united will never be defeated. However, we live in a capitalist democracy which means that Australia is like all nations of the world, a political State controlled by the property owning capitalist and landlord classes. It's not 'our rocks, our soil, our minerals' as some of the protesters screamed. The natural resources of Australia like the political State of Australia are owned/beholden to the ruling class, some of whom happen to have Australian citizenship. Pro-capitalist polytricksters and 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' union leaders promote illusions about the meshing the class interests of workers and the employing class.

Still, it's always good to be with workers in motion, demanding more control of the wealth they produce and the natural resources of planet Earth. The problems of developing the class conscious organisation necessary to implement a social revolution i.e. total control of this wealth are, shall we say, many. In the end, the WA Premier came out of the Parliament building to address the 5,000 and was told, "Go home ya wanker!"

Wobbly Times number 67

IS THE MINIMUM WAGE TOO HIGH?

Wages adjusted for inflation aka 'real wages' are now below what they were in 1964.

see: http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/09/wobbly-times-number-22.html

As for the minimum 'real wage', it's now below what it was in 1958. ... See More
see chart with blue and red diamonds at:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html

Meanwhile, real productivity, output per hour of labour has increased by an average 2% or more per year over the 20th Century up till now. We're always being told via our media pundits and pollies that when productivity rises, wages rise. This axiom is a commonplace which you'll hear constantly coming from talking heads employed by the capitalist class...all part of the infotainment game. Thus, the vast accumulation of wealth continues apace. The lion's share ends up in the bank accounts, bonds, stocks and real estate holdings of about 10% of the population aka the capitalist and landlord classes.

see:
http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/08/wobbly-times-number-19.html

If you believe capitalist propagandists in the corporate and State media then, you're likely to think that the minimum wage is too high. You're likely to fall into the trap of a 'race to the bottom'. "If workers didn't ask so much, Ford wouldn't be shipping our jobs to Mexico and China."

We're really never educated to become class conscious in capitalist society. We're never told that labour creates all the wealth not already found in Nature. We are told that we're mere indvidudal consumers. Our knowledge of production (what goes on in our minds) is such that we attribute wealth creation to capitalist owners of industry instead of the people who must sell their time and skills to the employing class in order to make a lving e.g. Mercedes Benz makes great cars. This phenonmenon is known as 'reification' in philosophy.

see:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

Wobbly Times number 65

What is a Wage-Slave?

A wage-slave a person who has to sell their skills and time for a price to an employer in order to make a living. One has to be educated in order to have skills. Are you a wage-slave?

Employers make their living by selling the goods and services which are made by the wage-slaves whom they employ. Members of the landlord class make their living from renting and selling real property which they own.

To sum up: the employing class makes its living from selling the property which its wage-slaves produce. The landlord class makes its living from renting and selling the real property which it owns. The working class makes its living from selling its skills and time to the employing class for a wage. Only the working class owns a property which can add wealth to what wealth already exists in class dominated society. The workers are forced to sell their skills and time to the employing class because they don't own any other exchangeable property other than maybe the house they live in, if the bank doesn't own it, or their socks and shoes. The employing class owns the places and machinery needed for the production of wealth. The employing class could be nested in the State apparatus or, more likely in privately owned corporations or small businesses. It is because the working class is obliged to sell their life-time to another class that they are wage-slaves. They are in bondage to their employers during the time they've sold themselves for.

Of course, the working class is also free. After all, the working class are not chattel slaves. The working class is free to go homeless and collect cans for the recycling industry in order to keep body and soul together. But this is just a sub-minumum form of wage-slavery. The working class is free to sleep under hedges as opposed to buying a home from the banks or renting from landlords--using their wages of course. The working class is free to travel to another country where the political State uses its hired, armed bodies of men to enforce capitalist property laws. The working class is free to use its time and skills to grow vegetables. The working class is also free to become members of the capitalist class, if they can get enough capital together by saving their wages or engaging in selling illegal commodities. Risk ideology is big amongst the promoters of capitalism. But, in essence, most of the working class are wage-slaves and will remain so, until they become class conscious enough to organise One Big Union.

Wobbly Times number 64

ALIENATION

The wage system, which Marx said was the foundation of capitalism, is also at the root of alienation. In German, alienate means to separate and the separation of the product from the producer is the essence of the wage system. This separation leads to the workers, the real producers of wealth, to be alienated from political power for political power, no matter what the mode of production is in civilised, class dominated society, is always organically connected with the ownership and control of the wealth which the producers create. Thus, the feeling of powerlessness which accompanies what we call alienation is founded on the wages system of slavery. Thus, the alienation from each other which we feel in our everyday lives and which manifests itself in various stabs in the back to our fellow workers as we compete in the labour market against each other in front the employing class, for a chance to sell our skills and time in order to make a living.

Marx wrote a profound critique of political-economy. I think he focussed so heavily upon it because he knew that the root of capitalism had to be destroyed before capitalist social relations could be surpassed and common ownership and democratic control of the social product of labour i.e. socialism, could be implemented.

Until the wage system is abolished, alienation will exist in spades. As long as the producers are alienated from control and common ownership of the product of their labour, they will remain powerless pawns in their rulers' political games.

Wobbly Times number 62

MANAGEMENT AS HIRED WAGE-SLAVE DRIVERS



The capitalist system, "interpellates managers as a particular type of subject, from the empirical individuals who hold managerial positions", more and more as the system grows and commodifies EVERYTHING, including nature. Thus, nature and labour become 'resources'/objects for exploitation. A similar process of interpellation occurs with workers as they become 'team members' in e.g. 'the Stanford family'.

As Marx observed, Capital is primarily a social relation with those holding the most control over collective product of labour, being those with the most political power. This interrelation between wealth and poltical power is common to all class dominated societies. The point is that the collective product of labour is turned into the property of the ruling class of any particular system, including the wage system.

Wobbly Times number 49

Capital is a social relation. Just as Slavery was a social relation between master and slave, so Capital is a social relation between the employing class and the working class. As long as the slave is forced to work for his master, Slavery will exist: the master will own the wealth which his slaves produce. And, so as long as the workers are forced by necessity to sell their skills and time to the employing class, Capital will exist and the employing class will own and control the wealth produced by the workers.

He who owns the product of labour, rules. He who owns the lion's share of the wealth produced in a society rules. Political power = the ownership of the wealth produced by the working class in class societies dominated by Capital. Whether these socieities are dominated by Capital from outside their political borders or inside by their own ruling classes makes little difference to the daily lives of wage-slaves.

He who owns the collective product of labour also owns the natural resources of a country, for workers cannot be employed to create wealth outside of Nature. Even finance capitalists depend on Nature to make wealth. Houses and other buildings are built on land from materials which come from natural resources. Without natural resources, nothing is worth being financed.

What workers of Africa need to do is to realise that they will never be free as long as wage-slavery exists. As Brother Malcolm X once observed, the lives of those who became "house niggers" for their slave masters had it easier than those who toiled on as "field niggers"; but they all remained slaves for the master, their owner and the owner of the wealth they created through their labour. Will African workers allow themselves to be divided into hard toiling wage-slaves while others in their class become white collar, 'middle class' wage-slaves for their masters in the employing, capitalist class?

Obviously, a lot of them are doing just that. Really, it's pity that this is so. Are you one of them? Are you satisfied watching the majority of African workers living a low standards of living?

And finally, does it really matter whether your bosses have black skin, white skin, yellow skin or brown skin? Do they not remain your masters? Do you not remain the producers of wealth and as wage-slaves, the producers of your masters' politcal power over you?

What is needed for freedom to prevail is for the workers to own the wealth they produce. What is needed is a free association of producers who hold common ownership over the collective product of their labour. What is needed is social ownership and democratic management of the means of production by a society-wide association of producer-consumers.

Wobbly Times number 47

THE VALUE OF NOTHING by Raj Patel
Published: 27 November 2009
Format: Paperback , 256 pages
RRP: $24.95
ISBN-13: 9781863954563
Imprint: Black Inc
Publisher: Black Inc
Origin: Australia
Categories: Popular Culture Economics, Finance, Business & Management

Raj Patel has written a fine book in which he describes the value of human tenacity, the value of people standing up to their rulers, the value of persistence and the value of solidarity, in other words, the value of nothing. Nothing which has a price that is. Nothing which is a commodity sold for the profit of its owners, unless they’re small owners.

Starting off his critique of the prevailing ideology, which can be summarised in Gary Becker’s concept of ‘homo-economicus’, Patel writes, “The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago, ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of the market.” Patel is keen to link Becker’s prescriptions for realism to commodification, making literally every human activity and nature into commodities for sale. He succeeds quite well and this is important in a day and age when becoming a ‘maximising animal’ in the global market is lauded by capitalist apologists world-wide.

THE VALUE OF NOTHING is chock full of useful insights and history. Patel’s summation of Polanyi’s take on the “enclosure of the commons”, that is, the gradual privatising of what had been land held in common by the peasantry during Britain’s Middle Ages is articulated with verve and clarity . His history includes a fine overview of the British peasant revolt of 1381 and is itself, worth the price of the book. But like Wat Tyler, methinks the flaw in Patel’s analysis and suggested practice is to be located in a reverence for the ruling system of contemporary class political power, the wage system. In other words, the capitalist system which springs from the wage system, the system based on the buying and selling of commodities, in other words, ‘the market’.

Patel accepts markets and prices to value useful things. He sees them as being natural, but he also points to the flaws of equating price with its exchange-value. Bubbles occur in the global, corporate dominated economy and when they do price can become out of balance with value. As Patel points out, the 2008 deflation of the financial bubble in real estate was a prime example of a whole lot of pricey nothingness frothing around value.

In THE VALUE OF NOTHING, the reader will also find easy to read explanations of many concepts used in offhanded ways in today’s capitalist media, ‘shorting’ for example:
“Volkswagen was heading for tough times. Imagine you’re a trader who feels in your bones that the stock price can only fall. One way to cash your hunch in is to sell Volkswagen stock today, and buy it back when the price falls. Since you don’t walk around with Volkswagen stock falling out of your pockets, you’ll turn to someone who does, like an institutional investor. You borrow their stock, for a price, and promise to return all of it very soon. The institutional investor is happy because they make money from lending out the stock, which they will get back in one piece. You’re happy because you can sell this stock, wait for the price to fall, buy it back and with the profit, not only pay back the institutional investor, but make the next instalment on your yacht in Monaco. This practice is called ‘shorting’.”

But, here’s the deal. Raj Patel wants the market for commodities to function in less fickle ways, to wit, in grassroots democratic ways. He wants us to examine our concept of value, price and profit, but not through, “the false prism of markets” prone to corporate driven price bubbles which blow out way beyond asset values. Instead, Patel wants his readers to tame the fickleness of market society by making it operate through their own ideals. There will be a lot of subjective commitment required to keep value in line with price; but Patel believes we can do it. Patel wants us to compare our ideals with actually, existing capitalist outcomes. When we contrast the two, he believes that we can then achieve that primary Ideal of left-liberal discourse, social justice. We will attain this Ideal by gradually reforming our way to a more democratic market system, one where the market is more and more controlled by grassroots organisations and less controlled by corporate capital than they are today.

But, of course, we must change our existing ideals first for, as Patel observes, most of us suffer from “Anton’s blindness” in other words, the ideological domination (hegemony, if you will) which most of us absorb as we mature within capitalist class dominated cultures. In other words, Patel wants people to take charge of markets as opposed to letting the markets rip, a la Reagan or Thatcherite inspired neo-liberalist agendas. He believes this can be done, indeed, that it is already being accomplished in various ways by varying NGOs and peoples’ organisations at the municipal level.

Mr. Patel is a democrat and as a democrat, he wants the people to rule. He rightly sees that corporate capitalism is undemocratic and he believes that small, decentralised, democratically run capitalism is the answer to most of our political, economic and social problems. We, the people can do this, if we can develop and maintain our ideals, as he says the Zapatistas have and the workers’ collectives in Argentina have and, as members of Via Campesina have. If we can be like them, we’ve got a shot at saving the planet from almost everything evil, including climate change. Well, that’s what Raj thinks. In short, Patel’s organising vision doesn’t aim at abolishing wage-labour, but of achieving a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and fair price for commodities which issue out of small businesses. He wants workers, farmers, peasants, women, along with assorted nationalities and ethnic groups to self-manage their own wage-labour and capital through small, democratically run businesses mostly at the municipal level. It seems to this reader that he does so because of his sincere belief that there is no ‘realistic’ alternative to making and marketing useful goods and services as commodities and that a kind of populist, municipal socialism is realistic to work for.

As a result of his faith in the value of grassroots, democratically influenced free markets, free-time is not the focus of his programmatic thrusts. Working small farms to gain Patel’s version of ‘food sovereignty’ plays a major role in thinking behind THE VALUE OF NOTHING. It’s a reformist time sink, in this Wobbly’s opinion. Instead of advancing to a new way of organising time, work and industrial production to maximise free-time, Patel seems to prefer spending free-time away from production in achieving consensus at meetings a la Zapatista or Via Campesina. What is not said by Patel is that no matter how democratic small commodity production is and can be made, it usually means less free-time because the production of goods and services, even just for use and need, takes more human labour time, thus reducing the potential of free-time for ourselves.

Of course, we could always shoot for living with a LOT LESS in the way of good and services and this is a solution which Patel strongly suggests. But what is forgotten is that small scale production is where humanity came from historically and there are reasons why most humans don’t want a return to back breaking, time consuming production and consensus politics as a way of life, when it really isn’t necessary. However, if carried out with enough Idealism, Patel argues that the political trajectory he proposes would take us to a free market society, one always kept small by our idealist convictions. Mindless, conspicuous consumption is being critiqued in THE VALUE OF NOTHING and Patel’s Buddhist angle is presented as a kind of ascetic cure, a kind of generalised monasticism as a way out of mindless, conspicuous consumption.

At the same time another denial is operative in Mr. Patel’s thesis. It is a denial of what has actually occured in history and the inner motivation of humanity to gravitate toward freedom as a whole within class dominated societies. Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have wanted and indeed, worked to move away from chaotic domination by nature by creating more efficient modes of wealth production to release more free-time, especially as humanity has been eliminating the vestiges of feudalism and hurtling into full blown, industrial capitalism since at least the times of the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The drudgery involved in spending one’s life doing laundry with a washboard down by the river; going from human to horse drawn plough and then to tractors; those and other assorted tasks associated with the reduction of the expenditure of human drudge time, have been historical motivators, based on the human desire for more freedom. Over the course of history, these innovations and economies of scale have led to large scale industrialised production. Granted, in class society up to and including the capitalist system of the here and now, the free-time implicit in large scale production has been available mostly to the wealthy and the unemployed, in great amounts with, of course, different outcomes. But in a hypothetical classless society (such as this Wobbly imagines) where there is equal political power amongst humans and common control over socially produced wealth within collective goals (goals which include most importantly the expansion of free-time and living in harmony with the Earth) a free association of producers cannot make a fetish out of smallness and decentralisation without serious consequences for say, the four hour day. Where de-centralisation and smallness function to promote more freedom, fine; where they end up becoming a time sink, they should be discarded. Certainly, we need to have the self-discipline to curb mindless consumption based on competitive status building i.e. the inanity of keeping up with the Jones. We should do this for our own sanity, if not just to promote environmental health and shorter work time. But, we don’t need to do this by adopting Buddhist ethics of ascetic denial. Rather, a free association of producers can kill overproduction by using already existing productive capacity to reduce the labour time necessary to produce the good things of life. Of course, that would mean taking, holding and operating the existing means of production for ourselves, a goal which Patel doesn’t mention nor, it would seem, endorse. Like the Zapatistas, Patel is NOT aiming for a social revolution where the workers take over the means of production and abolish the State, but for fundamental reform of the capitalist system without taking political power away from the ruling class. In THE VALUE OF NOTHING, he is advocating a ‘smaller is beautiful’, grassroots, democratic, class society, based on a left-social democratic market, within an a-historical, mythical, small capitalism which never grows.

Wobbly Times number 44

HOW TO MAKE A SOCIAL REVOLUTION


1. Take out a Red Card. Joining the One Big Union is the first step.

a. study the IWW Constitution and consciously digest the IWW Preamble.

2. Once you've taken out your IWW union card, pay your dues.

a. One Big Union cannot function without your active solidarity and that begins with supporting the OBU with your dues. If you don't pay your dues, you've failed to make even a minimal contribution to your own liberation.
b. If everyone who had ever taken out a Red Card had continued to pay their dues, we'd have the Four Hour day by now. War, sexism, racism and wage-slavery would have come to their well deserved end.


3. Once you've paid your dues; agitate, educate and organise your fellow workers to the point where they see the necessity of getting together to support their One Big classwide Union.

a. Paying your dues is the minimum effort you can contribute toward making a social revolution. Only the workers can make a social revolution happen and 'workers' mean you.


4. Learn Wobbly songs and make them up yourself with your fellow workers and sing them at the picketlines and demonstrations you go to.



If all workers who take out Red Cards do these things and continue to do them, the social revolution can happen in our lifetimes. If workers just take out a Red Card and do none of these things,even the MINIMUM thing of paying their dues, they will be able to say, "Look, I have a Red Card." That's all that will happen. That worker will have purchased another cultural icon which can be safely stored with the other junk in the garage.

REMEMBER!


The job is the only place where you can win your demands.
Organization does not just happen; it is made to happen. Do your part.
The person next to you should be in the union. Have you tried?
The IWW is practical. Let people know about it.
Union literature in your pocket is lying idle. Take it out and put it to work.
If every Wobbly gets a new Wobbly every month, we would have a 4 hour day in a year.
If meetings aren't being held in your locality, you can arrange them.
The activity of the rank and file, and not the "leaders," will advance the cause of labor.
Don't send for a delegate when you can do it yourself.
One who fears is enslaved. To understand the IWW is to know that industrial unionism
will guarantee your protection.
Even on a job that can't be unionized for now there is always something that can be improved,
and collective action can lay the ground work for later organizing.
The strength of workers lies in solidarity.