I'm going to be writing a series on what I have come to call "Money-Free Economics." By this I don't mean economics of a barter system or of an economy without money; rather, I mean economics that ignores money and goes to the underlying real-wealth economy that money facilitates. I acknowledge up front that this creates a certain amount of distortion. There are features and processes of a modern economy that can't be understood without addressing money, among them interest rates, the effects of government fiscal policies, and speculative investment -- to name but three of many. But money also creates distortions. In particular, schools of economics that address money without touching on the underlying economy of goods and services often create severe distortions by treating money as if it existed and operated independently of the goods and services for which it is a token of exchange -- as if only money, not stuff, mattered. Moreover, those features of an economy that require addressing money to understand are already covered well by professional economists in their various schools. On these matters they don't require any help from me (often it's the other way around). But when economists present something as stupid as, for example, the laissez-faire interpretations of the Laffer Curve, or explanations for recession that rely entirely on monetary factors and ignore the distribution of wealth, I know that they have focused on money to the point where they have forgotten that it is just a token of exchange and not real wealth, because when you put those in money-free terms their nonsensical nature becomes obvious. So, to address the follies of economists and the politicians who quote them, I shall engage in an exercise, presenting economic concepts in ways that don't use money at all.
I'll begin today with an examination of what an economy is and what it's for in money-free terms.
An economy is, to begin with, a social arrangement. It involves assigning of ownership, division of labor, and rules of exchange and trade. In a modern society it is always a function of law. That wasn't always so, because human beings have not always lived under the rule of law, but even in pre-civilized times when there was no law as such and no formal government, there were still rules about who owned what, who was supposed to do what, and who got what in the end.
What this social arrangement is meant to do is to regulate and facilitate the production and distribution of wealth. Wealth, as I pointed out in the last entry, consists of goods and services. Going into a bit more detail, wealth consists of eight things: food, clothing, shelter, tools, toys, entertainment, advice, and assistance. Everything you or anyone else ever buys or sells falls into one or more of those categories. The economy is a social arrangement whereby these eight things are produced and gotten to the people who want and can use them. Those are the two criteria of economic success. As long as those eight things can be produced in enough quality and quantity and distributed to everyone who needs and wants them, the economy is a success. When either of these functions fails, the economy fails. If not enough food can be grown, or if the food that is grown can't be gotten to the people who need to eat it, there is famine. If not enough housing can be built, or if housing is built but sits vacant while people are homeless, there is a housing crisis. And so on.
Every failure of the economy, every depression, every recession, every instance of runaway inflation, every bubble collapse, even the economic failure that occurs after a military defeat, manifests ultimately in a failure either of production or of distribution or both. Even when the cause (or at least the trigger) of the economic problems is fiscal or monetary, such as a stock-market crash or the collapse of a housing or real estate or some other bubble, it always comes down in the end to a failure to produce or a failure to distribute. If it does not, then it is a nonexistent problem as far as the overall economy is concerned.
Problems can occur on either the production or the distribution side. An example of a production-side problem is a severe drought that results in crop failure. This creates a shortage of food and starvation. Another example is the devastation created by war, as for example in Germany during and after World War II, when Allied bombing and Allied and Soviet invasion destroyed German factories and industrial capacity, as well as German roads and railroads. A third example, more subtle, is the impact on the U.S. economy of the OPEC oil embargo from 1973 until 1983, which caused shortages of a crucial raw material. An economy that is in a pre-industrial state and is trying to industrialize also faces production challenges, not in the sense of losing production but in the sense of wanting to increase it. In general, production of wealth requires raw materials, labor, knowledge, and organization, and a shortage of any of these (for whatever reason) results in a deficit of production.
Problems of production are severe, but problems of distribution can be equally severe. The Irish potato famine was, at root, a distribution problem. It had a proximate cause on the production side, a potato disease that caused crop failures, but this would not have resulted in famine except that the Irish wheat lands were all in the control of aristocratic landholders who were entitled to the wheat crops for export purposes. That's the reason why ordinary Irish people were dependent on a potato diet in the first place. A more nearly equal distribution of Ireland's food crops would have meant that when the potato harvest failed, the people could eat other foods. Severe maldistribution of the nation's agricultural wealth meant that the potato blight became the potato famine.
The Great Depression and similar breakdowns in the years before it (for example the Long Depression that began in 1873 and lasted longer than the Great Depression itself, although it was not quite as severe) were also breakdowns of distribution. The economies of the advanced nations, such as the United States, suffered no shortages of raw materials, labor, knowledge, or organization, and there were initially no problems of production. But the goods produced were not distributed to the people who would use them. Because of the system of private capital property ownership, the goods produced in a factory (say) belonged to the factory's owner, and anyone who wanted those goods had to exchange items of value for them (by way of money, of course). Since not enough of the people who wanted the goods had the value to exchange for them, they could not be sold and so sat in warehouses being of no use to anyone.
The distorting effect of money can be easily seen in this entire sequence of events, which were caused by a desire on the part of capital property owners to keep to themselves as much of the wealth produced as they could. As long as we think in terms of money, this is perfectly understandable: the rich wanted to become richer. But if we think in money-free terms, the silliness of it becomes clearer. How much in the way of food, clothing, shelter, tools, toys, entertainment, advice, and assistance does even the richest person need? How much of these things does he even want? How much can he use? After a certain point, all that stuff is wanted not for use but for sale, and if a relatively few rich people own almost everything of value, for what can it be sold?
Here is the fundamental flaw of capitalism. It is predicated and focused on the accumulation of individual fortunes, which means that ultimately it undercuts its own basis resulting in economic breakdowns due to maldistribution of wealth and consequent depressed demand. Economists have gone to great lengths to refuse to acknowledge this. There is, or used to be, a concept in economics called "overproduction" or "surplus production" which meant that the economy was producing more stuff than people could use, so that in order to maintain full employment and productivity it needed to be sold abroad. But the economy has not historically ever actually produced more stuff than people could use (although that's theoretically possible). It has just produced more stuff than the people who wanted to use it could buy. That's a very different thing. The demand for goods and services depends not only on people's desire for things, but also on what they have to trade for them, and for most people the latter is exhausted long before the former. (Those for whom it is not, exhaust their desire to buy instead. Either way, stuff remains unsold.)
One of the things about economics today, even more than its disconnect from the economy of stuff and its focus on the arcane economy of money, is the refusal of many of its practitioners to think about the elephant in the room: the distribution of wealth. Even when an economist (by this stage of the game usually one long dead) takes a money-free approach, it often suffers from this flaw. A good example is Say's Law.
Say's Law is an economic principle attributed (somewhat incorrectly, but that's by-the-way) to the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who lived and worked in the late 18th and early 19th century. Say argued that there could never be a general glut of goods -- too much on the market to be sold -- because all goods produced created value with which to buy other goods, and goods are exchanged only for goods even when they are exchanged by way of money. As far as it goes, that's true -- but it also very much matters whether the goods produced are owned, and so exchangeable, by those who desire the other goods produced. Or in other words, it matters how widely wealth is shared. The fact that wealth exists to exchange for all products produced in the form of other products does no good on a practical basis unless those goods are in possession of those who wish to make the purchase.
One finds many critiques of Say's Law among economists, but rarely will one find this fundamental flaw recognized. John Maynard Keynes, for example, identified three assumptions underlying Say's Law: a barter model of money (goods are exchanged for goods), flexible prices (that can rapidly adjust upwards or downwards with little or no "stickyness"), and no government intervention. Keynes himself disputed the second assumption, arguing that prices are not necessarily flexible. Others have disputed the first or the third. (And here one does run into the distorting effect that arises from money-free economics, because there are aspects of a money economy which do not perfectly mirror a barter economy. However, that is not the real problem with Say's Law.) It's true that the idea does rest on at least the first two of those assumptions, but it also rests on another which is self-evidently false: the equal or near-equal distribution of wealth.
It's a curious thing, this refusal even of a supposedly "progressive" economist such as Keynes to address the central problem of inequality even though his own work naturally lends itself to doing so. Those who do address it usually seem to confine themselves to the moral aspects of it without considering the economic aspects. But the economic aspects are also real and also important.
Returning to the two functions of an economy, production and distribution of wealth, we may consider the template to be the economy of a pre-civilized community, in which a small band of human beings own all capital property in common and share tasks and wealth more or less equally. Production-side problems arose often enough in the form of shortages, but distribution-side problems did not. Even when production problems happened, it was never due to failures of organization, but only of natural resources, knowledge, or labor. The economy functioned in the manner Marx described as "communism," the end-state of his theoretical economic progression: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Now, my personal opinion is that Marx had to have been smoking something to believe that an advanced economy, whose essence is impersonality, could ever operate communistically in this fashion. But we may nonetheless take that ancient pattern as, in terms of distribution and of the organization of labor and natural resources, the ideal, and evaluate our modern substitutes in terms of how closely they approximate this ideal. The truth is, of course, that they fall far short -- but in fairness, they have a much more complicated problem to solve.
In future posts, I'll consider historical economies that worked better than the one we have now, along with some spectacular historical failures. Finally, I'll speculate about alternatives to capitalism as it currently exists. In all cases, I'll approach the questions through money-free economics, in order to keep it as simple and non-arcane as possible.
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Personal Power and Political Power
“Money is power” is a cliché. That wealth leads to power, and vice-versa, is so well-known that an important underlying question is often missed. One finds arguments about which of the two is the more important for the commercial elite in our society – again missing that underlying question.
The important underlying question that’s often missed is this: what KIND of power? Are we discussing political power or personal power?
Political power is the ability to influence governing institutions. It’s held (obviously) by elected officials. Barack Obama, at present, has a great deal of political power. He can issue orders and have them carried out by the agencies of the U.S. government, by the United States military forces, and by the Democratic Party which he heads. He can use the persuasive power of his office to influence votes in Congress. To a lesser degree, all elected members of Congress also hold political power, as do Cabinet members and other important unelected government officials and those holding office in state and local governments, or in foreign governments throughout the world. Political power is also wielded by those who don’t hold government offices but who, through campaign contributions and lobbying, or through the ability to persuade a following among the citizens, can influence the actions of the government. Most of the time, when people speak of “power” being held or valued by the commercial elite, this is what they mean: the ability to influence government actions by means of persuasion and bribery.
If that sort of power, political power, is what we’re talking about, then I’d have to say on the whole – with a few exception – that money is more important to the commercial elite and power is only a means to the end of amassing more money. But there’s another sort of power that lies, I believe, at the heart of all desires to become mega-rich in the first place. Sometimes, for some people, it lies at the heart of a desire for political power as well. Both money and political power can be means to the end of amassing personal power: the ability to make other people, as individuals, into servants of one’s own will. Political power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified by the dictator. Personal power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified not by the dictator but by the slave owner.
Personal power is embodied in the powerful by a sense of superiority, and in the powerless by a sense of inferiority. Personal power lets a powerful person look at someone over whom he has power and say to himself – and, through various gestures and subtle means of communication, to his inferior as well – “I am better than you,” and makes the inferior say in the same ways, “You are better than I.” Unlike political power, it’s a very primal sort of power, with roots going back to the origins of our species. It pumps the body full of adrenaline and testosterone, or churns the guts with loathing, fear, and self-hatred.
Personal power is a man’s ability to seduce another man’s wife right in front of him, and have her be afraid to say no and him be afraid to do anything about it. Personal power allows a person to demand that others bow and scrape and show their submission. Personal power allows cruelty to others without penalty, and enables retaliation for even the most minimal slights. Personal power is what the power-hungry desire on a visceral level, and freedom from anyone having personal power over us is what we mean in our hearts by the word “liberty.”
Personal power is a face-to-face thing. Unlike political power, it isn’t impersonal power over the masses, but one-on-one power over an individual. It’s the ability of one individual to make another grovel, serve, and obey.
Government officials seldom hold personal power over ordinary citizens – we seldom interact with government officials in any direct way. They have personal power only over their employees, interns, and so on, and those who come within the purview of their immediate jurisdiction under the law.
Employers, on the other hand, always have personal power over their employees. We have laws protecting the rights of workers for that very reason, to limit the consequences of personal power. Landlords have personal power over renters, and we have laws protecting tenants’ rights for that reason. All such laws were fought tooth and nail by employers and landlords when they were proposed, partly because obeying them is often an expense, but in large part because it removes some of the payoff of personal power.
Every time an employee successfully starts a small business, or becomes self-employed, he gains freedom. The commercial elite may still have a lot more money than he does, but he is no longer dependent on any of them. No employer holds personal power over him. Every time a person buys his own home, he gains freedom. No landlord holds personal power over him.
That’s the underlying, unspoken reason why the pressure is on to keep wages suppressed in America. It’s not the only reason, of course; it’s reflexive for business owners for whom wages are a cost to be kept down, and who seldom consider the larger picture. But as long as wages are kept low, the number of people who will be able to escape from wage work and become free is limited, and so is the number of people who will be able to afford their own homes. With more and more money funneled to the very rich at the top of the ladder, they have more money to play with and gamble with, but at least as important is that the majority of the people are kept on the treadmill, where they can be controlled. Where they can be told what to do, and made to serve.
Personal power needs to be recognized and understood. We need to stop thinking “government” reflexively when we use the word “power.” Sure, government power is important and potentially dangerous. We need to make sure it is restrained by the three safety controls we put on it: separation of powers, public accountability, and explicit limits of government action such as the Bill of Rights. When these become frayed, as they have in recent years, we need to restore them.
But on a visceral level, the government is not what most people think of when they imagine freedom. They think of their boss, or their landlord, and being able to tell them to shove it. They think of being in a situation where no one can tell them what to do. The real enemy of freedom in a democracy is not the government, but rich and powerful individuals able to exercise personal power. To judge whether a government is a tyranny, a good rule of thumb is to ask to what extent it serves the interest of rich and powerful individuals – helping them to exercise personal power over others. To say that government secures and protects people’s rights is another way of saying that it protects the weak from the strong. A tyranny instead aids and abets the strong in dominating the weak.
Of course, the rich and powerful often try to confuse the issue by saying that a government interfering with their freedom to tyrannize others is a tyranny, and to them, it is – as it has to be; if it weren’t, it would be a tyranny to the rest of us. In just that way the slave owners of the antebellum South complained of the tyranny of Washington. We need have no more sympathy for our capitalist masters today than we do in hindsight for the plantation masters of yesterday.
The important underlying question that’s often missed is this: what KIND of power? Are we discussing political power or personal power?
Political power is the ability to influence governing institutions. It’s held (obviously) by elected officials. Barack Obama, at present, has a great deal of political power. He can issue orders and have them carried out by the agencies of the U.S. government, by the United States military forces, and by the Democratic Party which he heads. He can use the persuasive power of his office to influence votes in Congress. To a lesser degree, all elected members of Congress also hold political power, as do Cabinet members and other important unelected government officials and those holding office in state and local governments, or in foreign governments throughout the world. Political power is also wielded by those who don’t hold government offices but who, through campaign contributions and lobbying, or through the ability to persuade a following among the citizens, can influence the actions of the government. Most of the time, when people speak of “power” being held or valued by the commercial elite, this is what they mean: the ability to influence government actions by means of persuasion and bribery.
If that sort of power, political power, is what we’re talking about, then I’d have to say on the whole – with a few exception – that money is more important to the commercial elite and power is only a means to the end of amassing more money. But there’s another sort of power that lies, I believe, at the heart of all desires to become mega-rich in the first place. Sometimes, for some people, it lies at the heart of a desire for political power as well. Both money and political power can be means to the end of amassing personal power: the ability to make other people, as individuals, into servants of one’s own will. Political power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified by the dictator. Personal power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified not by the dictator but by the slave owner.
Personal power is embodied in the powerful by a sense of superiority, and in the powerless by a sense of inferiority. Personal power lets a powerful person look at someone over whom he has power and say to himself – and, through various gestures and subtle means of communication, to his inferior as well – “I am better than you,” and makes the inferior say in the same ways, “You are better than I.” Unlike political power, it’s a very primal sort of power, with roots going back to the origins of our species. It pumps the body full of adrenaline and testosterone, or churns the guts with loathing, fear, and self-hatred.
Personal power is a man’s ability to seduce another man’s wife right in front of him, and have her be afraid to say no and him be afraid to do anything about it. Personal power allows a person to demand that others bow and scrape and show their submission. Personal power allows cruelty to others without penalty, and enables retaliation for even the most minimal slights. Personal power is what the power-hungry desire on a visceral level, and freedom from anyone having personal power over us is what we mean in our hearts by the word “liberty.”
Personal power is a face-to-face thing. Unlike political power, it isn’t impersonal power over the masses, but one-on-one power over an individual. It’s the ability of one individual to make another grovel, serve, and obey.
Government officials seldom hold personal power over ordinary citizens – we seldom interact with government officials in any direct way. They have personal power only over their employees, interns, and so on, and those who come within the purview of their immediate jurisdiction under the law.
Employers, on the other hand, always have personal power over their employees. We have laws protecting the rights of workers for that very reason, to limit the consequences of personal power. Landlords have personal power over renters, and we have laws protecting tenants’ rights for that reason. All such laws were fought tooth and nail by employers and landlords when they were proposed, partly because obeying them is often an expense, but in large part because it removes some of the payoff of personal power.
Every time an employee successfully starts a small business, or becomes self-employed, he gains freedom. The commercial elite may still have a lot more money than he does, but he is no longer dependent on any of them. No employer holds personal power over him. Every time a person buys his own home, he gains freedom. No landlord holds personal power over him.
That’s the underlying, unspoken reason why the pressure is on to keep wages suppressed in America. It’s not the only reason, of course; it’s reflexive for business owners for whom wages are a cost to be kept down, and who seldom consider the larger picture. But as long as wages are kept low, the number of people who will be able to escape from wage work and become free is limited, and so is the number of people who will be able to afford their own homes. With more and more money funneled to the very rich at the top of the ladder, they have more money to play with and gamble with, but at least as important is that the majority of the people are kept on the treadmill, where they can be controlled. Where they can be told what to do, and made to serve.
Personal power needs to be recognized and understood. We need to stop thinking “government” reflexively when we use the word “power.” Sure, government power is important and potentially dangerous. We need to make sure it is restrained by the three safety controls we put on it: separation of powers, public accountability, and explicit limits of government action such as the Bill of Rights. When these become frayed, as they have in recent years, we need to restore them.
But on a visceral level, the government is not what most people think of when they imagine freedom. They think of their boss, or their landlord, and being able to tell them to shove it. They think of being in a situation where no one can tell them what to do. The real enemy of freedom in a democracy is not the government, but rich and powerful individuals able to exercise personal power. To judge whether a government is a tyranny, a good rule of thumb is to ask to what extent it serves the interest of rich and powerful individuals – helping them to exercise personal power over others. To say that government secures and protects people’s rights is another way of saying that it protects the weak from the strong. A tyranny instead aids and abets the strong in dominating the weak.
Of course, the rich and powerful often try to confuse the issue by saying that a government interfering with their freedom to tyrannize others is a tyranny, and to them, it is – as it has to be; if it weren’t, it would be a tyranny to the rest of us. In just that way the slave owners of the antebellum South complained of the tyranny of Washington. We need have no more sympathy for our capitalist masters today than we do in hindsight for the plantation masters of yesterday.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Slavery, Serfdom and Wage Work: The Forms of Coercion
I continue this week to encourage radical thinking, and to build on the post from last week. Last week, I explored the origins of capital property ownership, how it separates the right to own wealth from the work to create it, and the consequent nature of profit as a form of theft.
This week, I want to explore the lynchpin of all class privilege throughout the history of civilization: the ability to coerce the labor of others for the elite’s profit and the elite’s ends. Historically, there have been three broad methods by which the labor of the many has been channeled to the ends of the few, declining in brutality and increasing in subtlety from one to another, but all of them coercive in one way or another. These three methods are slavery, serfdom (and variants), and wage-work.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is perfect moral equivalence among the three. To be a wage worker is immeasurably better than to be a slave. The abandonment of slavery, and the near-abandonment of serfdom, really does represent progress in human rights and the human condition. But while working for wages is certainly not slavery, it is no more accurate to call it freedom. The only people who are free are those without masters, without bosses – those who work for themselves.
There was a time, early in the history of civilization, when that was pretty much the case for most people. The normal condition for a person in ancient times was not that of a hireling but that of a small farmer or craftsman, an owner of one’s own business. Working for someone else for pay was thought of as a transitional phase, something one did in order to learn a craft or to acquire the necessary capital to buy one’s own land. And of course, working for someone else was completely unknown in precivilized times. The transition to the current situation, in which the overwhelming majority of people work at jobs serving the profits of others, with no entitlement to the fruits of their own labor, did not develop overnight. The circumstances of servitude have grown less severe with the passage of time, but at the same time the condition of actual freedom has grown rarer and rarer.
One of the earliest forms of working for another, and the first to be employed on a large scale, was slavery. We may consider this the template. Initially, slavery probably arose as a consequence of war. When the victors in a war conquered an enemy, they gained more than the land that the enemy had occupied. They also gained the surviving enemy citizens as captives. Even when the conquest was less complete than that, captives were often taken in the course of the fighting and could be brought to the homeland and forced under threat of punishment to work for the victors. Of course, just as with the enemy’s land, the enemy people became disproportionately the property of the elite, who found themselves the owners of large tracts of land worked by slaves and generating a lot of money without the owner having to work on it at all. (Profit being theft, as noted last week.)
Over time, slaves became property to buy and sell just like land itself, and the pattern emerged of a class of warrior-aristocrats living off the labor of people who had no rights under the law (or few, depending on the society) and whose only purpose in life was to serve the interests of their masters. This became the template for all elite classes from that time forth. Like most prototypes, it was crude and unsubtle compared with the more sophisticated ways of compelling labor that followed. It suffered from numerous disadvantages, including slave revolts and a lack of motivation on the part of the workers. Nevertheless, it sufficed to keep the aristocratic class in wealth and power for thousands of years and in many different civilizations. Even more importantly, the underlying idea that the elite deserved to be served by a class of workers and to become rich from their labor became so entrenched that it survives to this day, many years after slavery itself has been outlawed.
One problem with slavery is that it was universally unappealing to the slave. (Or nearly so. There are instances in ancient times of highly skilled persons selling themselves into slavery, knowing that their skills would earn them favored treatment and a better circumstance than they could achieve in freedom. However, that’s the exception; very few slaves ever became slaves by choice.) People resisted becoming slaves and had to be forced into it when captured in battle or condemned for debt or for some other legal offense for which slavery was the penalty. There was really no way to reduce most of the people to a state of slavery, because the numbers of slaves would have proven impossible to control by the number of free people. In order to increase the number of people who could be reduced to servitude, it was necessary to make the conditions of servitude less drastic than was usually the case with slavery.
Some examples may be found prior to the industrial revolution of a form of coercion gentler than slavery, but still more direct and brutal than wage work. This consisted of a defined set of obligations on the part of a worker, who was forbidden under most conditions to leave his employment, but who also had more rights under the law than a slave. I’m going to call this sort of arrangement “serfdom,” but I should explain that I’m talking about a broader category of social arrangement than serfdom proper. The peasantry of medieval China or Japan, or the sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements in the post-emancipation American South, fit into this general category, as well as the condition of the medieval European serf. Because serfdom was less onerous than slavery, because it entailed some rights on the part of the serf and some obligations to the serf on the part of the master, it was possible to have a larger population of serfs than could be maintained as slaves. Even so, it turned out not to be as perfect a solution as wage work: the industrial-era answer that has turned nearly everyone into a tool of the elite.
Anyone can see how slavery and serfdom are coercive arrangements, because the victim is punished for refusing to work. But in the case of wage work, the coercive nature of the institution is less evident, because a wage worker is not directly punished for refusing to work. The only punishment is to withhold a reward: failure to work means the worker will not be paid. But it is still coercive, and the coercion still takes the form of punishment or threat of punishment. It’s just not applied by his immediate employer, nor directly for refusing to work. The coercion applied to a wage worker is applied before he ever accepts a job. It is built into the system of ownership that concentrates possession of capital property into a few privileged hands. It punishes the wage worker, not for refusing to work, but for attempting to work using capital property that belongs to the elite. Since he cannot obtain capital property of his own, he is unable to produce wealth on his own for his own use or for sale to others. As such, he has no independent way of supporting himself. He must work for the profit of another, in return for the means to support himself and his family. Rewards are sufficient motivators only to the extent that the person receiving the reward suffers from deprivation. If the wage worker can support himself through his own labor on his own behalf, rather than in service to another, then his desire for monetary reward is satiated, and he will have no reason to surrender his liberty. The rat will run the maze in return for food pellets, but only if it is kept hungry.
Because the ability of an employer to apply direct coercion is limited, and because the wage worker is allowed by law to voluntarily leave his employment, refusing to work but giving up his wages, it carries a greater semblance of freedom than either slavery or serfdom. It has been possible to argue that a wage worker “voluntarily” enters into an employment agreement, and so is actually free. The argument is specious, of course, because the only way the agreement could genuinely be voluntary is if the worker had the right and opportunity to support himself without a master. When the alternative is starvation, no real choice exists. It has also been possible to argue, with equal speciousness, that the worker rather than his master owns the fruits of his labors, by confusing the real fruits of his labors – the goods or services that his labor creates – with the reward his employer offers for surrendering them. Let there be no confusion on this point. A wage worker is not a slave, nor is he a serf. But he is most certainly not free.
In addition to keeping capital property concentrated in few hands – actually, in service to that necessity of universal coerced labor – it has also been desirable from the standpoint of the elite to keep the rewards paid for wage labor as low as practical. This was desired partly so as to maximize the share of wealth held by the elite, of course, but also to reduce the chance of a wage worker freeing himself by saving sufficient money to go into business or, through investments, to support himself without working. Even if a worker is unable to completely free himself from servitude, if he is well paid and lives within his means, his options become wider and he is much harder to manipulate. If asked to do something unacceptable, an employee who can survive without work for a year or more is much more likely to quit than one that lives paycheck to paycheck.
In the end, it’s all about power, even more than about money.
And that will be the subject of next week’s post.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357
This week, I want to explore the lynchpin of all class privilege throughout the history of civilization: the ability to coerce the labor of others for the elite’s profit and the elite’s ends. Historically, there have been three broad methods by which the labor of the many has been channeled to the ends of the few, declining in brutality and increasing in subtlety from one to another, but all of them coercive in one way or another. These three methods are slavery, serfdom (and variants), and wage-work.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is perfect moral equivalence among the three. To be a wage worker is immeasurably better than to be a slave. The abandonment of slavery, and the near-abandonment of serfdom, really does represent progress in human rights and the human condition. But while working for wages is certainly not slavery, it is no more accurate to call it freedom. The only people who are free are those without masters, without bosses – those who work for themselves.
There was a time, early in the history of civilization, when that was pretty much the case for most people. The normal condition for a person in ancient times was not that of a hireling but that of a small farmer or craftsman, an owner of one’s own business. Working for someone else for pay was thought of as a transitional phase, something one did in order to learn a craft or to acquire the necessary capital to buy one’s own land. And of course, working for someone else was completely unknown in precivilized times. The transition to the current situation, in which the overwhelming majority of people work at jobs serving the profits of others, with no entitlement to the fruits of their own labor, did not develop overnight. The circumstances of servitude have grown less severe with the passage of time, but at the same time the condition of actual freedom has grown rarer and rarer.
One of the earliest forms of working for another, and the first to be employed on a large scale, was slavery. We may consider this the template. Initially, slavery probably arose as a consequence of war. When the victors in a war conquered an enemy, they gained more than the land that the enemy had occupied. They also gained the surviving enemy citizens as captives. Even when the conquest was less complete than that, captives were often taken in the course of the fighting and could be brought to the homeland and forced under threat of punishment to work for the victors. Of course, just as with the enemy’s land, the enemy people became disproportionately the property of the elite, who found themselves the owners of large tracts of land worked by slaves and generating a lot of money without the owner having to work on it at all. (Profit being theft, as noted last week.)
Over time, slaves became property to buy and sell just like land itself, and the pattern emerged of a class of warrior-aristocrats living off the labor of people who had no rights under the law (or few, depending on the society) and whose only purpose in life was to serve the interests of their masters. This became the template for all elite classes from that time forth. Like most prototypes, it was crude and unsubtle compared with the more sophisticated ways of compelling labor that followed. It suffered from numerous disadvantages, including slave revolts and a lack of motivation on the part of the workers. Nevertheless, it sufficed to keep the aristocratic class in wealth and power for thousands of years and in many different civilizations. Even more importantly, the underlying idea that the elite deserved to be served by a class of workers and to become rich from their labor became so entrenched that it survives to this day, many years after slavery itself has been outlawed.
One problem with slavery is that it was universally unappealing to the slave. (Or nearly so. There are instances in ancient times of highly skilled persons selling themselves into slavery, knowing that their skills would earn them favored treatment and a better circumstance than they could achieve in freedom. However, that’s the exception; very few slaves ever became slaves by choice.) People resisted becoming slaves and had to be forced into it when captured in battle or condemned for debt or for some other legal offense for which slavery was the penalty. There was really no way to reduce most of the people to a state of slavery, because the numbers of slaves would have proven impossible to control by the number of free people. In order to increase the number of people who could be reduced to servitude, it was necessary to make the conditions of servitude less drastic than was usually the case with slavery.
Some examples may be found prior to the industrial revolution of a form of coercion gentler than slavery, but still more direct and brutal than wage work. This consisted of a defined set of obligations on the part of a worker, who was forbidden under most conditions to leave his employment, but who also had more rights under the law than a slave. I’m going to call this sort of arrangement “serfdom,” but I should explain that I’m talking about a broader category of social arrangement than serfdom proper. The peasantry of medieval China or Japan, or the sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements in the post-emancipation American South, fit into this general category, as well as the condition of the medieval European serf. Because serfdom was less onerous than slavery, because it entailed some rights on the part of the serf and some obligations to the serf on the part of the master, it was possible to have a larger population of serfs than could be maintained as slaves. Even so, it turned out not to be as perfect a solution as wage work: the industrial-era answer that has turned nearly everyone into a tool of the elite.
Anyone can see how slavery and serfdom are coercive arrangements, because the victim is punished for refusing to work. But in the case of wage work, the coercive nature of the institution is less evident, because a wage worker is not directly punished for refusing to work. The only punishment is to withhold a reward: failure to work means the worker will not be paid. But it is still coercive, and the coercion still takes the form of punishment or threat of punishment. It’s just not applied by his immediate employer, nor directly for refusing to work. The coercion applied to a wage worker is applied before he ever accepts a job. It is built into the system of ownership that concentrates possession of capital property into a few privileged hands. It punishes the wage worker, not for refusing to work, but for attempting to work using capital property that belongs to the elite. Since he cannot obtain capital property of his own, he is unable to produce wealth on his own for his own use or for sale to others. As such, he has no independent way of supporting himself. He must work for the profit of another, in return for the means to support himself and his family. Rewards are sufficient motivators only to the extent that the person receiving the reward suffers from deprivation. If the wage worker can support himself through his own labor on his own behalf, rather than in service to another, then his desire for monetary reward is satiated, and he will have no reason to surrender his liberty. The rat will run the maze in return for food pellets, but only if it is kept hungry.
Because the ability of an employer to apply direct coercion is limited, and because the wage worker is allowed by law to voluntarily leave his employment, refusing to work but giving up his wages, it carries a greater semblance of freedom than either slavery or serfdom. It has been possible to argue that a wage worker “voluntarily” enters into an employment agreement, and so is actually free. The argument is specious, of course, because the only way the agreement could genuinely be voluntary is if the worker had the right and opportunity to support himself without a master. When the alternative is starvation, no real choice exists. It has also been possible to argue, with equal speciousness, that the worker rather than his master owns the fruits of his labors, by confusing the real fruits of his labors – the goods or services that his labor creates – with the reward his employer offers for surrendering them. Let there be no confusion on this point. A wage worker is not a slave, nor is he a serf. But he is most certainly not free.
In addition to keeping capital property concentrated in few hands – actually, in service to that necessity of universal coerced labor – it has also been desirable from the standpoint of the elite to keep the rewards paid for wage labor as low as practical. This was desired partly so as to maximize the share of wealth held by the elite, of course, but also to reduce the chance of a wage worker freeing himself by saving sufficient money to go into business or, through investments, to support himself without working. Even if a worker is unable to completely free himself from servitude, if he is well paid and lives within his means, his options become wider and he is much harder to manipulate. If asked to do something unacceptable, an employee who can survive without work for a year or more is much more likely to quit than one that lives paycheck to paycheck.
In the end, it’s all about power, even more than about money.
And that will be the subject of next week’s post.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8357
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)