A REFLECTION ON THE WAY THINGS ARE

Capital is not a difficult book, at least not in the way that the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, is a difficult book.  The central thesis of the book can be stated in a simple declarative sentence of nine words: Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.  But although it is not a difficult book, it is a mysterious book because in it Marx undertakes a task of the very greatest difficulty that no one before – and I venture to say no one since – has fully comprehended let alone attempted.  Marx tries first to show the reader that capitalism is deeply ideologically mystified and he then attempts to demystify it by revealing both its exploitative foundation and the ways in which that exploitation is concealed by the ideological rationalizations of its professional apologists.  Both Marx’s greatest predecessor, David Ricardo, and his most brilliant successors, the neo-classical economists, conceived capitalism to be complex, but not mysterious, presenting puzzles requiring sophisticated solutions but not mysteries calling for unmasking.

The central ideological mystification of the apologists of capitalism is their representation of industrial workers as legally free producers of a commodity – their own labor – which they bring into the market as though it were cloth or bread or iron, to be exchanged in a free, uncoerced equal exchange for the commodities of other free producers.  The theoretical, dramatic, and literary pivot of the entire book is the concluding paragraph of Chapter VI, “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.”  It is worth quoting:

“This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.”

[This passage is, among other things, a brilliant inversion of the most famous philosophical metaphor of the distinction between Appearance and Reality, namely the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, but that is neither here nor there.]

In much of the remaining three-fourths of Volume One, Marx shows us in extraordinary detail the historical process, stretching over many centuries, by which ordinary men and women have been deprived of control over their means of production, their work processes, their tools, their laboring, their very bodies, until, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, they are trapped in a machine spitting out product and making profits for the capitalists.

Throughout this process, the professional Economists have persisted in propagating the mystified justification that the workers are free agents, small commodity producers no different save in the magnitude of their operations from the owners of mills or factories.  Marx makes it clear that there is no going back to an imaginary Merrie Olde England in which the workers were supposedly owners of small farms or workshops.  The only way forward is for the workers to unite, to form unions, to confront the factory owners as the political manifestation of the generalized Worker that the development of capitalism has created in the workplace.  As Marx says in the great Chapter X, The Working Day, “ in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.”

And so they did, by the tens of millions, in Europe and in America.  In a century of struggle, unions compelled capitalists to shorten the work day, raise wages, make work safer, even provide paid vacations, pensions, and family leave.  As the old bumper sticker said:  “Unions – they brought you the weekend.”  In this country, by the 1960s, a third or more of full time wage earners were members of unions. 

Capital fought unionization every step of the way, sometimes in the courts, sometimes in the streets with clubs and guns.  Embracing fully the ideological mystifications so brilliantly exposed by Marx, they described labor unions as “combinations in restraint of trade.”  If it was to be illegal for producers of sugar or automobiles or hand sanitizers to collaborate in restricting output in order to drive up prices above their natural competitively determined level, then it must be equally illegal for the producers of labor, the workers, to collaborate in withholding their product from the market to restrict supply and drive up the wage. 

Capital responded first with Right to Work laws, and then with outsourcing any stages in the production process that could be carried out in foreign low wage countries, and for a time this worked.  But as more and more manufacturing was transferred overseas, America shifted to a “post-industrial” service economy.  In response, Capital transferred more and more of its labor services to workers having no regular, permanent contractual relationship to the firm.  By switching to “independent contractors,” the firms were relieved of any obligation to provide pensions, health insurance, paid vacations, safe working conditions, or guaranteed employment.

Workers were forced to become independent “small businesses” offering their own labor as their “product.”  Isolated from fellow workers, they were unable to bargain collectively.  Benefits and protections won over a century of dangerous, painful struggle evaporated.    The exploited were unable to secure any limits to the number of days a week or the number of hours a day that they worked. What began as a merely theoretical ideological rationalization for the exploitation of workers in factories became an instantiation of that ideology in the daily lives of larger and larger segments of the working class.

The Gig Economy had arrived.