Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on Mar 11, 2008 1:03:49 GMT
The Injuries of Class
by Michael D. Yates
We live in a complex, divided society. We are divided by wealth, income, education, housing, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. These divisions are much discussed; in the last two years, there have been entire series in our major newspapers devoted to the growing income divide. The wealth-flaunting of today’s rich was even the subject of a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine article (“City Life in the New Gilded Age,” October 14, 2007).
What is seldom talked or written about is to me our most fundamental division, one at the center of our economic system, namely the division of our society into a very large class of working men, women, and children, the working class; and a much smaller class of owners that employs the former, the capitalist class. These two great classes make the world go round, so to speak.
Workers and owners are fundamentally connected and antagonistic along a number of dimensions:
>It is through the labor of the working class that the goods and services necessary for our survival are produced.
>It is through the ownership of society’s productive wealth (land, machines, factories, etc.) that the owning class is able to compel that this labor be done. Workers must sell their capacity to work in order to gain access to this productive wealth, since no one can live without such access.
>In terms of society’s “reproduction” the relationship between labor and capital is essential. So much of what we do presupposes the successful sale of labor power. Without the money from such a sale, nothing appears to exist.
>The essence of production in capitalism is the ceaseless accumulation of capital, the making of profits and the use of such profits to increase the capital at the owners’ disposal. Competition among capitals both drives accumulation and is driven by it, in a relentless dance.
>But to accumulate capital, employers must make sure that workers cannot claim possession of all they produce. This means that employers must strive for maximum control of the entire apparatus of production and any and all social forces and institutions that might interfere with this control (for example, the state, schools, and media). At all costs, workers must be prevented from getting the idea that they have rights to the output they produce.
This organization of capital and labor in our society has negative effects on working people. I want to talk about some of these negative effects. However, before I do, I would like to point out that the whole process of accumulation, beginning with the extraction of a surplus from the labor of the workers, is, especially in the United States, hidden from view, so that workers do not know or are confused about what is happening to them. This is the result in part of the public school system and the tireless promotion of individualism and nationalism at its core.
FURTHER:
www.monthlyreview.org/080101yates.php
by Michael D. Yates
We live in a complex, divided society. We are divided by wealth, income, education, housing, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. These divisions are much discussed; in the last two years, there have been entire series in our major newspapers devoted to the growing income divide. The wealth-flaunting of today’s rich was even the subject of a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine article (“City Life in the New Gilded Age,” October 14, 2007).
What is seldom talked or written about is to me our most fundamental division, one at the center of our economic system, namely the division of our society into a very large class of working men, women, and children, the working class; and a much smaller class of owners that employs the former, the capitalist class. These two great classes make the world go round, so to speak.
Workers and owners are fundamentally connected and antagonistic along a number of dimensions:
>It is through the labor of the working class that the goods and services necessary for our survival are produced.
>It is through the ownership of society’s productive wealth (land, machines, factories, etc.) that the owning class is able to compel that this labor be done. Workers must sell their capacity to work in order to gain access to this productive wealth, since no one can live without such access.
>In terms of society’s “reproduction” the relationship between labor and capital is essential. So much of what we do presupposes the successful sale of labor power. Without the money from such a sale, nothing appears to exist.
>The essence of production in capitalism is the ceaseless accumulation of capital, the making of profits and the use of such profits to increase the capital at the owners’ disposal. Competition among capitals both drives accumulation and is driven by it, in a relentless dance.
>But to accumulate capital, employers must make sure that workers cannot claim possession of all they produce. This means that employers must strive for maximum control of the entire apparatus of production and any and all social forces and institutions that might interfere with this control (for example, the state, schools, and media). At all costs, workers must be prevented from getting the idea that they have rights to the output they produce.
This organization of capital and labor in our society has negative effects on working people. I want to talk about some of these negative effects. However, before I do, I would like to point out that the whole process of accumulation, beginning with the extraction of a surplus from the labor of the workers, is, especially in the United States, hidden from view, so that workers do not know or are confused about what is happening to them. This is the result in part of the public school system and the tireless promotion of individualism and nationalism at its core.
FURTHER:
www.monthlyreview.org/080101yates.php