"Efficiently" on the other hand, is the adverb of "efficient," meaning: 1 . Acting directly to produce an effect: an efficient cause; 2. a. Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort; b. Exhibiting a high ratio of output to input. Most manufacturers and other businesses believe that definition 2b is the only definition.
So, sufficiency is about production quality and quantity, while efficiency is about quantity alone.
I had just finished Charles Denby's book The Indignant Heart, describing Mr. Denby's years of struggle against racism as a member of the United Auto Workers and in his personal life. It is a stinging indictment of the American Labor movement after World War II. His book helped confirm my conclusion that after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, the leadership of the American Labor movement was increasingly in the pocket of the corporations, getting only wage and benefit increases, rather than becoming the instrument for social democracy that men like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers had struggled for in the 1920's and 30's.
I was trying to find a Karl Marx quote in Indignant Heart describing machinery as dead labor that weighed down the workers and their living labor. I started with my PDF (from Marxists.org) copy of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and entered the word "machine."
Searching the 41 places in that particular book where the word "machine" is found, I came upon the three quotes by Marx I am using for this article. These quotes seem to me to be so prescient--given the current state of affairs in the United States--I would not have been surprised to hear the theme to The Twilight Zone playing in the background.
I sent my discoveries to a friend of mine who, like myself, had grown up during the Cold War, and had been taught that Karl Marx was the bà ªte noire of all that was decent and right in the World. She e-mailed me back saying that next time I came across quotes like this, to give her a heads-up first, because I'd just about scared the crap out of her.
I also sent her a copy of Paul Craig Roberts' article "Marx and Lenin Revisited," which, if you have not read it, is very much worth the time and effort. Roberts--a former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan--is no more a Marxist than I am. That does not mean that we ignore the truth simply because we don't like the source. I would suggest reading that article together with this one to get the full effect that my friend did.
Karl Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (First Manuscript, "Wages of Labor;" p.p.15-6), wrote the following (I have italicized Marx's quotes, and left my commentary in normal lettering; I have bracketed where I have amplified Marx's test):
<blockquote>" (c) In a society which is becoming increasingly prosperous, only the very richest can continue to live from the interest on money. All the rest must run a business with their capital, or put it on the market. As a result, the competition among the capitalists increases, there is a growing concentration of capital, the big capitalists ruin the small ones, and a section of the former capitalists sinks into the class of the workers--which, because of this increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes even more dependent on the handful of big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists has fallen, competition for workers has increased, the competition among them has become all the more considerable, unnatural and violent. Hence, a section of the working class is reduced to beggary or starvation with the same necessity as a section of the middle capitalists ends up in the working class."</blockquote>
We have seen the concentration of wealth in this country for the top 1% go from 20% of the total to roughly 40% of the total in the last 30 years. We have seen the income of the top 1% increase from 8.9% of the national total in 1976 to 23.4% in 2007. (See Robert Reich's book Aftershock for more on this.) The Bureau of Labor Statistics says we have seen a virtual stagnation of wages (after inflation) in this country since 1973. Marx continues:
<blockquote>"So, even in the state of society most favorable to him, the inevitable consequence for the worker and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital which piles up in threatening opposition to him, fresh competition and starvation or beggary for a section of the workers. An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and body."</blockquote>
When we note that our current unemployment rate is approximately 9%, and that there is another 8 or 9% of underemployment, all of this with an ever increasing level of "productivity" in the United States (Bureau of Labor Statistics); Marx looks like he has been reading today's headlines, not making a prediction. The American worker is increasingly being required to work ever greater amounts of overtime just to keep his job, leaving deficits in the time they can spend with their basic family and civic duties. My suspicion is that the amount of overtime currently being forced on the American worker could go far to wiping out much of our current unemployment and underemployment in this country.
<blockquote>"An increase in wages presupposes, and brings about, the accumulation of capital, and thus opposes the product of labor to the worker as something increasingly alien to him. Similarly, the division of labor makes him more and more one-sided and dependent, introducing competition from machines as well as from men. Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor. Finally, just as the accumulation of capital increases the quantity of industry and, therefore, the number of workers, so it enables the same quantity of industry to produce a greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of work or by reducing their wages to a pittance."</blockquote>
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote (in Time Enough for Love) that "Specialization is for insects." Yet places like ITT Tech and the University of Phoenix are turning out graduates with little or no background in other disciplines to build upon their core training with. You learn about a specific area of knowledge, but nothing else that you can use for a different career if that one you trained for disappears. I know several people who learned all about working with big mainframes in the 1970's and early 80's, who discovered their knowledge did not translate well in the era servers and parallel processing.
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