Basic Lies At The Heart of The System- The Story of Your Enslavement

Capitalism is, of course, founded on a number of obvious deceits.
Deceits so obvious that you can't ignore them, so they just fool you into arguing them away.

The classic one is to convince you that relative poverty doesn't matter.
Only absolute poverty.

In other words, we're all materially better off than our ancestors were two hundred years ago.

So the relative gap between rich and poor doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that our share of the gains has been disproportionately small- because at least we've gained.

But relative wealth matters.
Because- duh!- relative wealth is relative power.

And you have proportionally less of it than a peasant farmer of the seventeen fifties.

And the point of this post, is to explain how. To explain the definition of wage slavery.

Basically, it has to do with the fact that capitalism had its origins in the days when for most people, life was based on a subsistence economy.
Most people provided for themselves, and if they didn't, they starved.
Capitalism offered them a deal. It took away the risk of starvation.

And in return, the masses sold their birthright.

They agreed to have their share of the gains frozen at a fixed rate.

What exactly do I mean by this?
Well, I mean that the people, in the space of a couple of generations, sold THEMSELVES.

At the start of the eighteenth century, everyone is kind of self employed.

The peasant farmer has to spend ten hours a day tilling his field to provide the three turnips his family will eat and the fourth turnip the family will exchange for other necessities.
The weaver has to spend ten hours a day spinning the cotton to purchase enough turnips to feed his family.

Eighty percent of the population pretty much live on turnips. If you keep a cow, you milk it, and only when it is old do you enjoy that rare luxury- meat.

Well, none of this sounds much of a life you say. Ten hours work a day to live in a hovel eating turnips.

But the point is that the overall production cycle, from the point of view of the peasant farmer/weaver, remains something under his control; he controls the value of his labour.
And the point is, if a scientific/technological/agricultural advance occurs that makes it possible to produce twice as many turnips in the same furrow within the same time- what happens?

The peasant farmer gets more free time. He can choose just how much of that free time to put into extra labour, or not, as the case may be. If everyone used the advance simply to do less work, than progress would carry on at the same slow rate it had done for centuries. If however, everyone continued to use the freed labour to carry out more work, the pace of advance would accelerate.

So what was put in place at the end of the eighteenth century, was a system designed to do exactly that. A system designed to ensure that whatever the advance, the vast majority had to labour exactly as hard as before.

Wage slavery.

The interest economy is based as much on continual devaluing of labour, as it is of money.

How does this come about?

Well, in two related swoops, the late eighteenth century seizes two social changes which remove from the average human being the right to determine the value of his efforts.

The enclosure acts kill off the peasant farmer- he now becomes a farm labourer.
Before, he laboured ten hours to produce four turnips.
Now, he will labour ten hours to produce five turnips- and will be paid better, the cost of five turnips. Further more, since he is being paid for his labour, he gets the price of five turnips day in, day out. He is guarded against off days. In the short term, this new life is less precarious.

The weaver too, leaves his cottage. With other weavers, he spends his ten hours producing more cotton than they would have done singly, this pooling of resources gets more cotton spun. And they are paid at the end of the day, more than they would have made from their own efforts.

So initially, everyone is better off, not just in relative, but in absolute terms.

And the motor for rapid technological advance is in place.

Because what happens next, is that soon the former cottage weavers, are spinning three, four, five times as much in their factories as their labours would have done twenty years previously. Thirty weavers produce enough cotton to pay for six hundred turnips every day. But each is paid enough to buy five turnips a day. His labours produce more, but his share of the advance has been set at a limited rate. Because he doesn't sell the cotton that has been produced, he simply sells his labour. And the price for that has been fixed.

Put bluntly, an exchange rate has been set for labour- one we still pretty much follow.
It equals; one hours unskilled labour= one eighth of the tokens needed to purchase a subsistence existence for the day.
The value of the labour can increase if skills are added, but it is the labour time put in that is sold as a commodity, and not the product of such labour.

And this is so much more significant than first appears so. The sale of actual labour as an actual commodity in itself, rather than rewards being issued for the products of such labours has consequences long term that the system hopes you cannot see.
Because the long term consequences are the curious logic of today's society, with that twisted peculiarity that most people have been brainwashed to ignore.

The technology paradox.

The technological advances of today mean that we have much much more labour going begging than we know what to with, in real terms. It's just badly organised. The amount of human labour needed to produce six hundred turnips now is a minimal fraction of what it was two hundred years ago.



Technology. Thats the key. Over two hundred years we have built an infrastructure that actually means, that we can enjoy a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of the eighteenth century peasant farmer. And the amount of human effort needed to be put in to achieve that, is much, much less.

So there is a problem. Your labour in one sense, is worth so much less. But in another, it's worth so much more.
What do I mean by this?

Bluntly, much less of your labour is needed. But your labours achieve so much more.

Let's cut the old and children out of the equation.

Let's assume 2 billion people working to put a roof over their heads every day.

We do not actually need 80 billion man hours a week to keep our society going and not just keep it going, but keep it advancing perpetually.
The point is, the amount of man hours ACTUALLY needed to maintain the status quo, continually decreases.

In fact, we do not need 80 billion man hours a week to keep the entire globe living in a lifestyle the residents of Bel Air would envy.

So what is the point?

Power.

The point is the maintenance of wage slavery. It's not to keep the down the OBVIOUS poor.

But you and me. The ones who THINK we're doing OK.

We think we're the professional middle classes.

In absolute terms, we're well off, compared to the peasant farmer of the eighteenth century.
In relative terms though, we're no better off.
In fact, we're worse off.
Because we don't have the stake in our society that he did. We have far les control over what we get back for our efforts than he did.

We look at all we've got and think we're better off. No. Human culture is more advanced. But our share of that advance, in real terms, is disproprtionately small.

Because in the seventeen fifties, most material wealth was in the hands of people. Some were rich, some were poor. Of course there was a gap between rich and poor.

But today, the real location of much of that wealth is cleverly hidden.
Corporations.
Its hidden, because those in control keep much of the wealth locked in the corporations.

But it means much the same. The bulk of the wealth of the world is in the control of a handful of people.
One shouldn't just look at the salary these people pay themselves, but the actual wealth under their control. And when you do that, you realise that the gap betwen the wealth under the control of a member of the Board of directors of HSBC and YOU, far exceeds the gap between the wealth under the control of George III and a peasant farmer.

The sinister point is this. Wage slavery IS slavery. Of course it is. Hidden cleverly, but the whole point is to keep you controlled by the token system. And not giving your share. By not giving the people the power to determine how their efforts are used, but by fastening as many support structures on to the treadmill as is possible.

The capitalist system has built itself on this premise; work forty hours a week, get the basic necessities. Put a lot more in, we'll give you more.
Not too much more though.

The problem is, what to do with your forty hours.

And the answer is; create a wastage economy.

We don't need 80 billion man hours a day. We could probably maintain things in the appalling condition they are on about 10 billion. If we did a bit of sensible global restructuring, we could all live as the most affluent in the West do, on 20 billion man hours.

The system carries on ploughing towards its own destruction, because it rests on several basic necessities.

The basic premise to remember, is that we do have to feed everybody. But we also have to retain the fixed exchange of labour put in to materials got out.

The point is, to find ways of wasting human energy. One hour's work is not going to give you back a share of what that one hours work has meant to the human infrastructure, it will give you back a set of tokens ultimately linked to how much material goods you need to subsist.

So for a start, we write off a certain fraction of human energy. I suppose we might as well be honest and say that it is, most often the least skilled. We decide that the least useful section of the human race shall labour not. The rest of us shall take on their workload, but they shall still be fed, on subsistence levels- or what, in our modern world, we see as subsistence levels.

The rest of us shall get more than subsistence levels- we shall get tumble dryers, more TV channells, bigger cars- but to do so, we shall still accept the sale of our labour. And it will take us forty hours of labour a week at least to achieve this.

And the labour isn't needed. So the system favours labour wastage. The economy actually needs ways to use up what is, effectively, cheap labour.

Here's one for you- the workerless factory. It is pretty much possible now to have factories with next to no employees. But the technology involved costs more than using people.
Good thing, you say. At least it provides jobs.

Ah!
Now we have it.

Provides JOBS.

Can't you see????

You've fallen for the trick.

You have to work to get fed.
You have to work eight hours a day to get fed.

DO YOU NOT BELIEVE THAT ONE DAY HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS FOR THE POSSIBILITY THAT, NO, WE DON'T?

We deliberately create waste. We create as much packaging as we can. We move things around as much as we can. We centralise production and at the same time fracture it in such a way as to actually use as much energy as we can- and the main reason given is that it keeps labour costs down.

Using up as much ENERGY as we can for the LEAST amount of tokens.
That's the trick.
To waste energy.

We keep most of the world in as poor a state of development as we can. You can talk all you like of the developing world. As it stands, it ain't going to get any better. Why? Because we can't find enough to do with our energy in the west, we produce far too much junk to find a home for, we don't need the other 80% of the world doing the same. So keeping it as it is, is the best solution.

Let the villagers of Darfur be raped and pillaged. Let Mugabe murder his own people. Let the whole continent tear itself apart.

Let them consume, but not produce.



Never forget, Iraq uses up energy. Bottom line is, that's partly why we're there. It's good for the economy.

And they waste our energy too.

Because so much of what we produce is produced to keep the system going, not the infrastructure. The trade system. To furnish commercial premises so they can carry on selling. To maintain us living in individual homes when living in communal hotel blocks would actually make more sense in today's world.

I work in a building where twenty companies are based. All with photocopiers, phone systems, printers, fax machines.
All produced to use up energy. All USED to use up energy.

Marketing companies, recruitment agencies, mortgage brokers, consultancies.

Wastage.

I live in a street of about forty homes.

Each with their own cookers, micro waves, washing machines, tumble dryers etc. Do we all use these things continuously?

Wastage.

Capitalism cannot take us forward.

Capitalism will not terraform Mars.

Only when we the people ourselves control the human infrastructure and resources are allocated properly, in proportion to contribution put in, on terms democratically agreed by the people themselves, will we truly live in an efficient society that can truly handle the problems of the twenty first and twenty second centuries.

The problem is, the only people who benefit from keeping things as they are pay for the adverts that punctuate the news bulletins that tell you what to think.