Production for profit or for human need?
From a talk by Sarah Sloan at the Dec.
2-3 Workers World Party conference.
What is capitalism?
First of all, capitalism is a system based on two classes.
The capitalist class owns the property, meaning the
factories, transport, mines, mills, land, etc. There's a
working class that has no property and goes to work for the
owners of the property. All the value and wealth created by
the working class accrues to the capitalists for profit,
which goes to investment or personal luxury.
Workers have nothing to sell except their labor power, in
exchange for which wages are paid. The extra value that
workers produce from their labor goes to the bosses, not to
them.
A second aspect is that capitalism is based on production
only for profit, not to meet human needs. If it is more
profitable to produce MX missiles than to provide health
care, then the investment will go to the missiles, despite
the fact that we can probably all agree that health care is a
more vital human need.
There is a story that was used for many years by the union
movement to explain the profit motive and another aspect of
capitalism: the crisis of overproduction. There's a young
girl who lives in a shack with her parents in West Virginia.
They have no heat. One day she asks her father why. He says
that it's because they have no coal. She asks why? He says
that they could not afford to buy any. Why, she asks? Because
he was laid off. And why? Because the mine where he worked
was producing too much coal, meaning too much for the
capitalists to sell at a profit.
This is the absurdity of capitalism: a family of coal
miners freezing because they produced too much coal.
Every year, the U.S. spends tens of billions of dollars
subsidizing farmers and especially big agribusiness to not
grow food. The government wants to either stop the production
or warehouse the food produced. This is because, if too much
is produced by the farmers, the increase in supply will cause
the price of food to drop, and with it the profit of
agribusiness.
The closing down of production has a ripple effect that
leads to a recession or depression. So the capitalist
government wants to avoid "overproduction" of food. For the
first time in human history, there is not a scarcity of food
– but from the capitalist point of view, there is
"too much."
It is an absurdity of capitalism that this goes on while
there are 30 million people hungry in the U.S. and 800
million worldwide who suffer from malnutrition. From a human
standard it is not possible to overproduce food. Again, if
the productive capacity of food or the question of whether or
not to produce were unleashed from the profit-driven
capitalist system, there would be no such thing as
overproduction or hunger.
Socialism is the elimination of profit as the productive
motive, and its replacement by human need. The property of
the capitalists, which is really our collective labor, no
longer belongs to them. Society is organized to meet human
needs--not to make profits for a few.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS
:: SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page