In my 1/28/08 diary entry for the OEN political discussion group named “Capitalism: a threat to life on earth” http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/groupshow.php?gid=38 , I proposed to defend the premise that the underlying laws and imperatives driving the capitalist mode of production and distribution are the same forces responsible for engendering worldwide social and economic crisis. I began by defining the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘the problem’.
In short capitalism, like most previous socio-economic systems, is based on class divisions – people are distributed into a hierarchy of social classes. However it differs from the others in how the division is facilitated, enforced and reproduced. Its distinctive features can be understood by conceptualizing 1) how capitalism organizes human productive activity, 2) how capitalism exploits human labour power, 3) how capitalism distributes political power. I concluded that entry by mentioning a few of the social mechanisms underlying the development of capitalism as a unique socio-economic formation and suggested investigating them as an entryway into understanding the linkage between what defines and drives the capitalist system and the social crises emerging from it.
It is here I want to pick up and continue the diary by elaborating and examining some of these capitalist defining mechanisms, starting with a general overview of how capitalism organizes productive human activity. Capitalism developed out of a compulsion to produce commodities for sale. A commodity is a thing made to be sold at a price that is regulated by the prevailing average conditions of production. The mechanism controlling this compulsion is competition among individual capitalist producers who privately own the tools of production. Competition among them pressures each to utilize a labour process that is at least as cost-efficient as the social average. Those who do so more effectively tend to drive those who do so less effectively out of business. This form of indirect coercion provides a strong incentive for individual capitalists to increase exploitation in the labour process relative to the social average rate of exploitation. The result is a rise in the productivity of labour while at the same time human labour power is devalued and plundered. Labourers are subjected to a loss of dignity, loss of any trace of control over the work process, and the forced necessity to conform to the dictates of capitalist commodity production. It doesn’t take too much to begin to see the probable linkages between capitalism’s underlying laws of motion and its immersion in social crises. Under the laws of capitalist commodity production the material that should serve life comes to rule over us instead. The social relations that serve the dictates of this form of social production undeniably seep into every aspect of our lives, our consciousness, our deeper nature is formed through them. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as having said about modern industrialized society, “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind”. This is accurate political economics.
The dictates of capitalist commodity production produce a division of social interests between private producers who own the means of production and hired labourers who own only their labour power. Clearly, this social relation created by the engine driving capitalism is a defining antagonistic relation contained within it. The capitalist division of classes based on the exploitation of labour serves as the underlying source of many social conflicts which bubble to the surface. Labour exploitation fertilizes the alienation and degradation of work, which begets disillusionment and frustration in the minds and stomachs of workers, which begets active or passive resistance, which begets social dissonance and upheaval, which begets harsher mechanisms of control by capital, which begets further cycles of conflict. This particular dynamic does not explain everything about the current world social crisis facing us but then there are many other defining mechanisms employed by capitalism which produce other antagonistic social relations that require investigation. More about that in my next entry.
