Transcript SOC 102-Week 6b Guest lecture Slidesx

Sociology102 Guest
lecture
The effects of capitalism on work:
the impossibility of an ethical
capitalism
Nathalie Jaques
Lecture outline
• Laws of capital accumulation
• Historical forms of capitalism
• Labour struggles against capital
• Case study: The Living Wage
• The imperative to resist
Laws of capital accumulation:
Primitive accumulation
• Establishes the necessary social relations of capitalism:
workers and capitalists (the capital relation)
• The existence of the wage labourer is contingent upon a
prior historical shift that divorces the worker from the
means of subsistence and production and thus ‘divorces
the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his
own labour’ (Marx, 1867: 874).
Laws of capital accumulation:
Productive and unproductive labour
• The value of labour is defined in terms of capitalist
production
• Productive labour is only that which creates profit for capital
• Explains the devaluing of domestic labour and reproductive
labour, predominantly carried out by women.
• We have the labour power (unemployed and
underemployed) and resources to carry out innumerable
social projects that are not considered profitable enough for
capital, e.g. free tertiary education, universal health care,
alternative energy, climate change, food distribution.
Laws of capital accumulation:
Surplus Value
• The productive power of labour for capital is ‘the excess of
labour which the labourer returns to the capitalist over and
above the quantity of labour he receives in wages’ (Marx,
1861-1863a: 354).
• This relation emerges when the worker ‘objectifies more
labour time in his product than is objectified in the product
that keeps him in existence as a worker. It is this kind of
productive labour that is the basis for the existence of
capital’ (1861-1863b: 9).
• The fundamental struggle between labour and capital is the
rate of exploitation, how much of the workers product they
receive in wages and the capitalist receives in profit.
Laws of capital accumulation:
Wages
• Means of subsistence – what the worker needs to
survive
• ‘A man must always live by his work, and his wages
must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must
even upon most occasions be somewhat more;
otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a
family, and the race of such workmen could not last
beyond the first generation’ (Smith, 1776/1999: 170).
Laws of capital accumulation:
Socially Necessary
• The means of subsistence varies in time and place, it is shaped by the social
and historical context of the worker.
• ‘It varies at different times in the same country, and very materially differs in
different countries. It essentially depends on the habits and customs of the
people’ (Ricardo, 1817/1971: 118).
• ‘the number and extent of his so-called socially necessary requirements, as
also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of
history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization
attained by a country; in particular they depend upon the conditions in which,
and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free
workers has been formed. In contrast, therefore, with the case of other
commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a
historical and moral element’ (Marx, 1867/1990: 275).
Socially necessary
• Socially necessary is a CONTESTED category, the
workers want to increase it, the owners want to
decrease it.
• The key point here is that capitalism does not look the
same everywhere, it adapts to the social context – for
example very low wages, exploitative conditions for
Bangladeshi garment workers compared to the New
Zealand minimum wage. The difference here is the
political organisation of capitalism (if the government
intervenes and enforces domestic regulations etc.)
Historical Forms of capitalism
• Defined by the relative strength of labour and capital in
any given context
• Social democratic (Keynesian) – labour strong
• Neoliberalism (Monetarism) – labour weak, capital
strong
• Within the global economy, labour is weaker and
stronger in different contexts, this is a key motivation
for outsourcing and offshoring production to weaker
sites of labour.
Labour struggles against capital
• Many of the now normalised social
rights and protections were only
made possible through ongoing
struggle and resistance.
• Capital has never willingly conceded
opportunities for greater exploitation
and profit.
• ‘Capitalism will never fall on its own.
It will have to be pushed. The
accumulation of capital will never
cease. It will have to be stopped.
The capitalist class will never
willingly surrender its power. It will
have to be dispossessed’ (Harvey,
2010 :260).
Case study: The Living Wage
• Historical living wage campaigns became now commonplace
minimum wage laws.
• In a contemporary context, living wages respond to:
• Failure of business and government to provide wages in keeping
with the cost of living
• Low wages have been reconceptualised as poverty pay, where
workers live a sub-poverty level existence despite being in full-time,
year round employment.
• large scale reduction in government based systems for the working
poor to offset the consequences of declining real wages
• USA: In the 30 years between 1968 and 2000, productivity
grew 74.2%, profits rose 64% in the same period while
average wages fell 3% and the minimum wage fell 35%
when adjusted for inflation rates (Muilenburg and Singh,
2007: 27)
Case study: The Living Wage
• Financialised economies resulted in
increased unemployment and
declining wages as previously full
time positions were replaced with
low wage, part-time, positions with
significantly reduced or entirely
removed employee benefits.
• Subcontracting labour: reduces
costs of labour and removes ability
for staff to negotiate wages and
working conditions
Case study: The Living Wage
• The contemporary living wage
movement is motivated by the belief
that full time workers should not have
to be trapped in or raise a family in
poverty. However, they generally
extend beyond purely economic
considerations and incorporate
conditions of dignity, self-respect, and
participate in civic life.
• Current living wage is $19.80 ($792
p/w) – For Auckland would be $24.11
at 2014 calculation ($964.4 p/w).
• Current minimum wage is $15.25
($610 p/w)
Goals of Living Wages
•
•
•
•
•
limitations on public money subsidising business interests,
challenging the normalisation of insecure working conditions,
increasing levels of unionisation among low wage workers,
responding to extreme levels of poverty and inequality,
and reframing the current narrative of economic policy to
reorient government agendas towards putting people before
profit, thereby empowering the political voice of communities.
• The living wage contests the socially necessary means of
subsistence, a new moral limit on capital.
The impossibility of ethical
capitalism
• Capitalism must always operate by its governing laws of
motion, it must always seek greater levels of profit to
escape its crisis tendencies.
• Capital must always place downward pressure on
wages, working conditions and social rights.
• The fundamental laws of capital accumulation are
premised on dispossession, exploitation, deprivation
and inequality.
• Capital will always seek to transcend and circumvent
social and moral limits imposed on it.
The imperative to resist
• It is because capital
always seeks new
and expanding
spaces to exploit
that we must resist,
to defend the
victories of the past
and to pave new
roads for a future
emancipated from
the violence and
exploitation of
capital.
References:
Harvey, David. (2010). The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of
Capitalism. London: Profile books.
Marx, Karl. (1990/1867). Capital Volume one: A Critique of Political
Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. (1861-1863a/1988). ‘Theories of Surplus Value.’ In Karl
Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Economic Manuscripts of
1861 - 1863, Volume 30.. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, Karl. (1861-1863b/1989). ‘Theories of Surplus Value
(continuation).’ In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works,
Economic Manuscripts of 1861 - 1863, Volume 31. London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Muilenburg, Kamal, and Gandaram Singh. (2007). ‘The Modern Living
Wage Movement.’ Compensation & Benefits Review, 39(1): 21-28.
Ricardo, David. (1817/1971). On the Principle of Political Economy and
Taxation. Middlesex: Penguin.
Smith, Adam. (1776/1999). The Wealth of Nations. London: Penguin.