In "How Capitalism Exploits Us," Richard Wolff offers a critical examination of capitalism, challenging common misconceptions about markets and the nature of economic systems. Wolff elucidates that markets have existed across various economic systems, including slavery and feudalism, and are not exclusive to capitalism. The essence of capitalism, as Wolff argues, lies in the unique employer-employee relationship, which inherently involves a conflict due to the extraction of surplus value from workers by employers.
Wolff delves into the inherent tension within capitalism, where workers produce more value than they receive in wages, leading to systemic inequality and exploitation. This exploitation is not a result of individual malice but is embedded in the structure of the capitalist system itself. Wolff advocates for a transformative solution: the establishment of worker cooperatives where the traditional divide between employers and employees is dissolved. In such a system, workers collectively make decisions about production, distribution, and the utilization of surplus, leading to more equitable and democratic workplaces.
The video also addresses the implications of technological advancements within a capitalist framework, highlighting how innovations often lead to job losses and increased profits for a select few, rather than improved working conditions or reduced labor for all. Wolff presents an alternative vision where technology serves the collective good, suggesting a reduction in work hours and an increase in leisure time for personal and community development.
"How Capitalism Exploits Us" is a compelling call to rethink the foundational structures of our economic system and to consider the potential of cooperative, worker-led models for creating a more just and sustainable society. Through a blend of historical insight and forward-thinking proposals, Wolff challenges viewers to question the status quo and imagine a future where wealth and power are shared rather than concentrated.
Some seem to think that capitalism is about buying and selling things, using the market
as a way of distributing goods from the folks who produce it to the folks who consume it.
Markets are indeed an important phenomenon, but they don't have any unique relationship
with capitalism. For example, in the American slave south, a different system, a slave system,
the goods produced by slaves, for example, cotton, were sold. So you had a market in cotton. You
actually had a market in slaves too. So things were bought and sold all over. Markets existed,
but you didn't have capitalism. You didn't have an employer and an employee. That's the core
of capitalism. Slavery is a different system. It's a master and a slave. The master doesn't
hire the slave. There's no need. The master owns the slave. In capitalism, the employer doesn't
own you. It may feel like that occasionally, but he doesn't legally own you. In feudalism,
it's yet again different. It's a lord and a serf. A serf who kind of belongs on the land,
has obligations to the lord, but the lord doesn't hire the serf, doesn't pay him a wage,
but there were markets in serfdom. The unique thing about capitalism
is not therefore a market. The unique thing about capitalism is the relationship
in production, in how goods and services are produced. It's a relationship that is not
master-slave, that is not lord-serf. It is a very particular arrangement, employer-employee.
And in that relationship lies a fundamental conflict, tension, anger, resentment. Why?
Because some people are doing all the work and producing more than they get.
A more that we nowadays call the surplus, the extra. And if you're a capitalist, an employer,
what of course is your interest? To give the worker the least possible while getting the most
out of them, because that's the biggest surplus they can get. And the more surplus they have,
the more secure they'll be. In capitalism, it turns out we've got exactly the same
kind of system as we had in slavery and feudalism. Why? Because the worker has to produce
more, a surplus, than he gets. Just as the master got the surplus the slave produced,
or the feudal lord got the surplus that the serf produced. It's nobody's fault.
It's the way the system is set up. What's the alternative? When the people who produce the
are themselves the people who get the surplus. If all the workers together make a cooperative,
then they aren't split between the employers and the employees, because both positions are
occupied by every person in the operation. There's no split. How would that work?
Take any factory, take any office, take any store, change it as follows. No more board of directors.
Don't need it. Here's how we're going to do it. You come to work and you sit around
making the decisions. All the decisions that used to be made by the capitalists.
Workers become their own board of directors. Or to say the same thing another way,
the worker capitalist division dissolves. If you made all the workers democratically
get together and decide how to distribute the wealth they've all together created,
they would never give a handful of people more money than they know what to do with,
while everybody else is worrying about sending their kid to college because they can't afford it.
When you're discussing a new technology that might pollute the air or the water,
the decision is made by the major shareholders and the board of directors. A tiny group of people
who typically live in gated communities in a lovely leafy residence far away from the factory
or the office or the store that pollutes, so they can make the investment in the new technology
and reap the profits. If the workers who live and work and depend on the enterprise made the
decisions, they wouldn't do it that often because they're the ones that breathe the air
and drink the water, so they'd be much more sensitive to the real cost. Every technological
invention justified itself on the grounds that by this new machine we could get more done with
less effort. But when those innovations are put into a capitalist economic system, the people who
put the technology in want to make profit out of it. For example, if a machine allows the workers
to do twice as much as before, they fire half of the workforce. The remaining half works with the
new machine, produces as much as before. The company realizes a fantastic profit because it
doesn't have to pay half the workers wages, which they can keep for themselves. Here's an alternative.
Let every worker do half as much work as he or she did before. Let's run the working day
four hours instead of eight. The workers will have engaged an enormous amount of leisure to pay
attention to their own development, to their families, to their communities. If we use technology
that way, we would use it to help the mass of people enjoy a better life, rather than a small
percentage of the people enjoy a greater profit. The problem was never with technology.
The problem was with the system that decides how to use that technology.
You're going to have to get rid of the capitalist system where it lives,
in the stores, the factories, and the offices.
