Capitalism and everything else: existence and extermination 3/4

Arbeit macht frei

Everything changes through space and time. Everything is its own space and its own time. Likewise, capitalism is its center and its periphery, its past and its present, its immense bottom and its tiny top. Most people’s lives on the planet for the last 200 years have been determined to a good extent by their location from birth in these dimensions of capitalism.

For instance, well-off people have fancy jobs in the cores of capitalism whereas menial work is for immigrants, blacks, Latinos, Algerians, Philippines, Turks, Indians and other low castes and peripheries of capitalism. The same way, although necessary for the reproduction of capital, house and care work occupy peripheral positions to the extent that women from bellow have traditionally worked hard and for free.

To transform all reality into wealth, this is, to create more capital, capitalism needs workers. For wealth to grow, accumulate, and reproduce exorbitantly, the system tirelessly seeks this from the worker: to do much more for far less. Two centuries of technological innovation, class struggle, wars and revolutions, few things have shaped the human world as this twofold endeavor of capitalism.

Nobody who has conditions of freedom, the guarantee of a decent life, who is content and satisfied with himself is ready to relinquish his will and give up his freedom eight hours a day, six days a week during most of his life so that the boss can have two wives and three Lamborghinis. Freedom and human happiness are bad for business.

But the hunger for power finds ways to smash freedom and extinguish happiness wherever they exist to produce masses of reduced hopeless subjects. Like those four centuries of touring Africa hunting, putting in chains, buying and carrying for months in infernal conditions 12 million souls to America to be exploited to death in mines, cane, cacao and cotton fields. Without those four centuries of slavery, capitalism would still be burning coal in steam machines today. Or like when all hell broke loose in the jungle thanks to the Amazon rubber cycle at the end of the 19th century. Dozens of thousands of indigenous peoples were enslaved, tortured and exterminated for decades for rubber. There is this idea that capitalism means wage labour. Inner capitalism maybe. In its periphery as well as in its historically accumulated wealth, slavery is a more appropriate term.

Where the drive for infinite profit could not enslave, it proletarianized. The first to experience the delights of wage labour en masse were the poor and vagabonds the enclosures crafted for centuries. This is, millions of impoverished and malnourished men, women and children burnt away producing industrial capital in European mines and factories through the 19th century and well into the 20th. Always at lowest wages for capitalism might be lavish and plentiful in everything, except in paying fairly. If the system paid fairly, it would cease to exist.

Today, many alienated working people get upset about antigovernment demonstrations. If they put but a finger in a history book, they would realize labour laws, prohibition of child labour, minimum wage, the eight-hour work day, workplace safety, vacations, parental leave and all labour rights they are entitled to, exist because people got mad, threatened to burn it all and invented communism. Everything is struggle between capital and labour and the object of that struggle is every worker’s life.

The search for a labour power that does much more for far less shapes every aspect of labour under capitalism. The worker, who is a tool, needs to be pestered and harassed to his limits. Leashes, high speed machines, killer deadlines and bullying do the job. The mechanizing drive, the fascination with robots, supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence reveal the goal of capitalism: to reduce as much as possible the value of human labour as to break free from the worker and no longer having to pay him. Real bosses also know that under certain circumstances, a satisfied employee is a productive one. That is why they invented the company as family and manager as benevolent father ideologies and all sorts of comforts and caresses for employees.

However, it matters little whether your colleagues smile or your boss pets you or your job includes the pleasure of bossing others around. Capital is always seeking to take away your job and give it to someone or something else, a new technology or some other guy, cheaper and docile.

Someone out of work, for example. When unemployment is high, people get nervous in job interviews, they thank god for being hired and consent to the most demeaning labour conditions. They are easily replaceable and they know it. This is not a social problem of capitalism. This is how the job markets must work so the employee stays in line and keeps his head down. Every unemployed person fulfills a passive function in the capitalist labour regime. The system needs unemployment as the universe needs space for matter to move freely around.

Capitalism is full of solutions. If conditions allow, it’ll go to the end of the world in search for cheap workers. This is an element of offshoring and the reason Made in USA disappeared and made way for Made in China which, in turn, got replaced with Made in Thailand. And that is the reason why, suddenly, customer support in the first world started speaking peculiar Indian and Latino accents. No one is as subject to the force of competition in the capitalist system as people who have to work for others to survive.

That is what the system has in store for most people in the capitalist world and capitalist history: working to exhaustion for those on top, century after century, country after country, living to work, working to death, this is the great horizon, the big existential goal for almost everyone under capitalism.

Forty years ago Stephen Jay Gould ended an essay, which has little to do with any of this business, with an observation that has fairly gained fame. “I am, somehow, less interested – he wrote – in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”[1] How many Picassos, Joyces, and Kubriks who were not. How many Van Goghs, Gauguins, Kafkas and Modiglianis who did were but for posterity, not for themselves: highly creative individuals who died penniless and forgotten.

That is the wicked nitty-gritty of capitalism. It crushes freedom, creativity and individual talent amidst the obscenest opulence we have ever seen. The system can rummage the planet for resources, wrap it up in plastic, melt all ice capes, but it’s absolutely incapable of creating a society of freedoms.

Ah, but we live in democratic societies with separation of powers, freedom of the press, of religion, right to personal identity, and free speech! There is no freedom of the press in the office, no right to personal identity in the soybean field, no free speech in a discussion with the boss, much less separation of powers between 8 am and 5 pm.

If the best that can happen to you during your labour hours is the coffee break, you do not belong to yourself. If you feel anxious when talking to your boss, you are oppressed. If you are the happier when the day is over and you can go see your children, if only one day of the week belongs to you, if you don’t have the fundamental right to siesta, if you break your back the whole life so that you don’t have to work in your last years, you are not free. Neither are you during off-hours because democracy is not for the people from bellow.

For the lower classes there is jail, police brutality and dictatorships. It is the worker who pays the taxes the disgustingly rich refuse to pay. It is the one bellow who blows to pieces in the wars fought for the interests of those same fat cats who enjoy the freedoms sternly sung in national anthems. Because in capitalism everything is commodity, including the State and its institutions, because freedom is very scarce and democracy as real as free market.

[1] Stephen Jay Gould, “Wide hats and narrow minds”, New Scientist, March 8 1979, pp. 776-777.