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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb.8, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Back in the 19th century the productivity of labor was much lower than it is today. Yet there were many socialist writers in Europe and the United States who could show convincingly that by abolishing private ownership of industry, reorganizing production on a cooperative, socialist basis and sharing the social product equitably, humanity could wipe out poverty.
It was possible then. It is a thousand times more possible now.
The class struggle is not won, however, by reason alone. Just proving logically that a socialist system of production is vastly superior to capitalism doesn't vanquish the capitalist class or the vast social structure it has developed to protect its dominant position.
And of course no one can draw up a blueprint of exactly how the working class, once it took power, would go about solving the global problems that have accumulated under capitalism.
But it is not a crime to indulge in some imaginative thinking about the future--especially when all the capitalist politicians, from right-wing to liberal, are saying that the working class has been pampered by an extravagant "welfare state" and needs a reality check in the form of severe cuts in social programs.
There just isn't enough money, they say in chorus. Everything has been stretched to the limit. Something has to give.
Since workers have been getting poorer for at least two decades, this gloomy diagnosis may sound plausible. But it's a lie. Its basic flaw is that it can only see the future as an extension of the capitalist present. The politicians of both capitalist parties have neither the imagination nor the courage to consider what life would be like if the profit system were abolished.
The Gross Domestic Product of the United States stands at its highest point ever--about $6.38 trillion.
Who can understand a figure this big? But divide this by the U.S. population of 264 million and it comes to $24,700 per capita--including babies and the elderly. Everyone.
Since less than half the population actually works, it means that the average value produced by each worker is considerably more than $50,000. Thus a family with two wage earners contributes more than $100,000 worth of goods and services to society each year.
It is human labor that produces all this value. If workers were to stop working, the GDP would shrink to nothing.
But what do the workers get for all this? Even production workers earn less than $20,000 a year on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Service workers get even less. The rest goes to the boss.
Then the capitalist government may take up to 40 percent of workers' wages, when you add up all the various taxes. Then there's the money that goes to pay the landlord, the utility company and for groceries.
So of all the value that workers produce, only a fraction remains in their pockets.
Of course, there is no average worker. African American and other nationally oppressed workers are paid much less than whites. Women make less than men. Wherever capitalism goes, it finds ways to push down some workers even lower than others, leading to hostility and antagonism. The rise of ethnic strife and sexism in the now-capitalist countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe shows this divisive process at work.
Back in the 1870s, some in the European workers' movement put forward a socialist program that called for each worker to be paid the full value of their labor. It certainly had popular appeal. Everyone knew that the bosses skimmed off a lot of profit, so it was taken to mean the end of profiteering.
But Karl Marx criticized that slogan, pointing out that for many reasons a significant portion of what each worker produces would have to go into a common pool to pay for education, bridges, medical facilities, libraries, etc. So under socialism, the wealth of society would increase much faster than each individual worker's wages.
With a socialist system, the means of production--the factories, mines, offices, railroads and so on--belong to society. Part of what is produced each year must go to maintain and develop them.
So it would be naive and inaccurate to say that under socialism, workers receive a check for the full value of their labor. In fact, in those underdeveloped countries where socialist revolutions have succeeded, a lot of wealth has had to go into modernizing the means of production.
Yet even then, it is remarkable how much of the social product in a country like Cuba has been set aside for education, medical care, recreation and the arts--the very things being cut in the U.S. budget today.
The United States, of course, is not an underdeveloped country. Its problems are very different. Everything people need and more can already be produced in abundance here.
But with capitalist ownership of the means of production, this great advantage becomes a curse. The more productive labor becomes, the more workers get laid off or forced into low-wage jobs, part-time and temporary work.
Capitalism may promise prosperity for all in a rapidly growing economy, but the reality is a billionaire-ridden society where a big section of the working class is falling into poverty and even homelessness while stocks, bonds and profits are still going up.
Life can be so much better.
Capitalism is not a "natural" system of economic relations but one very specific to the industrial age. It has rapidly expanded humanity's productive capacity, but at a growing cost to the working people and to the planet.
It had a beginning and it will have an end. Then the enormous wealth that the working class is now able to produce will truly belong to everyone.
That is not so unusual--human beings lived in sharing, communal groups for millions of years. The difference is that today humanity has reached a technological level where abundance can be shared instead of want.
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