CAPITALIST CLASS STRUCTURE

CONTINUING THE MARX STORY: CAPITALIST CLASS STRUCTURE

Once the bourgeois revolution takes place, a new class structure emerges with exactly the same issues as the last one. Note first that the bourgeois revolution did not help the lowest class at all. The peasants were still peasants after 1789, although their precise role in society was to change drastically during the course of the nineteenth century.  This lowest class had to be accommodated in Marx' vision, or he would have had to accept two non-revolutionary perspectives that he had to reject. On one hand he had to reject the Hobbesian/conservative approach which argues that class conflict is an inevitable, eternal feature of all social orders. 

Social and political life is an endless struggle  for power between haves and have nots, and there are no final accommodations. The powerful will generally prevail and in a sense should prevail because the only law of order in human groups is that superior power prevails. 

Power may be given to the people but the conservative has a suspicion that the people in general will misuse power, because they lack the ambition and talent of the natural born leaders, whose hard work and genius pushes society forward, creating opportunities for all. Societies run by the people tend to privilege averageness, focusing on giving everyone roughly the same irrespective of how hard individuals work and how much they contribute. This, in the eyes of the conservative, leads to a sluggish, less productive economy and an artificially egalitarian society that will inevitably falter, even for those who think they benefit from it. Society, for the conservative, should be run by the naturally powerful, not by the people, and class divisions are a necessary corollary 

The other view Marx has to  reject is bourgeois, what we would call liberal, progressivism. This view believes that class conflicts will ultimately be resolved, or at least softened, by a continual mutual progress by all classes. Classes are not ultimately enemies; their interests can converge and, in a democratic give and take in which all groups have equal access to the political process and thus to power, all segments of society will be able to voice their positions and be properly rewarded. Progress for all comes from mutual political cooperation and a willingness to compromise.

These are rough approximations of the positions that most of you occupy.  Marx rejects both because each one, in different ways, accepts that there are class distinctions but rejects the idea that this structure has an internal dynamic that requires a resolution through revolution. Both conservatives and liberals believe that class structure can be worked with. The conservatives believe that divisions are natural and inevitable and that as long as the 'better' people can stay in control, things will go well for everybody. Liberals believe that divisions are acceptable and that a shared political process allows people with different interests to meet their needs without denying or neglecting those of others.

Marx thinks that what both groups of theorists get wrong is that they assume that one can have a just idea of what different classes need when one is a member of a certain class. Especially those who belong to a dominant class deceive themselves into thinking that they understand their position vis a vis the other classes. But Marx believes that such accurate understanding is impossible, that one of the salient features of class membership is that one gets caught up entirely into the ideology of one's class.

Let's shift focus a little, to an analysis of the new class structure. Once the nobility are gone, there are two classes, the bourgeois and the workers, or proletariat. Here is how the set-up works. We have entered the industrial age. The fall of the nobility coincides roughly  with the rise of what Marx calls capitalism. Capitalism means a social/class structure in which class divisions are driven by the bourgeois' dedication to the accumulation of capital. Capital is in essence frozen labor, the time of a worker's life trapped in commodities, or objects produced.  

Let's  analyze this a bit: when a farmer grows a crop, say corn, the ears of corn represent the effort the farmer had to invest to grow those ears. When he sells the corn, or gives it to his lord or landlord, he receives a value for it. This sometimes in permission to keep occupying his farm. It is sometimes represented by cash. Cash, capital in its 'purest' form, stands in for what the farmer has put into growing the corn. The cash he gets represents what we think, or what the market thinks, the corn, and by extension, the farmer's labor, and time, are worth. 

Thus if a worker gets paid $10 an hour, this means that one hour of his life is worth that, has that value. If Manny Ramirez makes $15 a season, for 200 games, including preseason and  playoff games, this means he gets paid $75,000 per game. If an average game lasts 3 hours and Manny has to arrive 2 hours early, and leaves an hour after the game, for a total of six hours, Manny is pulling down $12, 500 per hour. He makes, in one game, more than most Americans make in a year. This is what he is worth in a capitalist system – over $200 per minute. 

How does this all work? Well, the nub of capitalism is that unlike the warrior/priest system, the capitalist wants to maximize profit, or create as much capital as possible. Rather than simply taking part of what the farmer grows, as the nobleman does, the middle class capitalist wants to get the farmer's crop so he can resell it. The dynamic here is different. The capitalist’s intention is not to consume and spend what the farmer gives him but to maximize the value of that product by reselling it for a higher price than he gave the farmer, thereby adding value to the corn. The capitalist’s job is simple: he has to buy the corn from the farmer for less than he can sell it for. When he does this by acting as a middleman he essentially ‘steals’ some of the farmer’s labor by selling for more than he paid. He pockets this excess, which he calls a commission but which Marx sees as, secretly, the frozen time of the farmer. So, the capitalist relationship is based on a secret form of theft. He always takes a little less than the thing is worth and accumulates the results of this into concentrated value which he can exchange for goods and services.

This whole system and relationship grow more complex and more profitable when the farmer moves into the factory. 

The capitalist owns the factory as well as the equipment in it. Marx calls these the means of production and the characteristic note of capitalism is that the capitalist controls the means of production. In the factory, the worker mixes his labor/time with the machinery and raw materials and makes products that belong to the factory owner. For doing this he is paid a wage. But for the factory to survive the wage the workers are paid, plus the cost of materials and plant, must all add up to less than the total amount for which that factory’s products are sold. This is what we call ‘profit’, and it represents, again, that part of the worker’s time/labor that the owner takes in exchange for allowing the worker to work and earn a wage.

Built into the structure of the capitalist society is the drive to maximize profit; this is what capitalists do, what they see themselves as called to do. Just as the nobles and priests create an ideology that ‘explains’ and justifies their privileged position, so, too, do the capitalists, who saw how the nobles deceived themselves, remain blind to their own self-deception. They tell a story in which they prevail because of hard work and talent, rising above the herd not because they happen to make things the nobles and priests want but because of inherent advantages over their fellows. So they create the ideological myth of their own superiority and invincibility, imagining, as did the nobles, that they represent a natural upper class and that the society they have founded will never change, only get more productive and more capital-rich. 

But just as in the case of the nobles and priests the capitalists are laying the foundations for their own destruction. Their very success, and their ideology, cooperate to doom them, in Marx’ eyes.  How does this work? Well, the capitalist has one thing in view: to maximize profit. So there is an inherent driving dynamic in capitalism, which all of us have seen in our lifetimes. Capitalists are driven to make the most possible product at the least possible cost. This requires that they pay their workers as little as they can get away with, and that they relentlessly pursue every technology that promises to cut labor costs by replacing workers with less expensive and more efficient machinery.

We have all experienced these aspects of capitalism as more and more American corporations offshore services and outsource production, replacing American workers with less expensive people in India, China, Mexico and other countries. As the labor-intensive, well-paid jobs leave they are replaced by lower paid service jobs in which people sell the imported products that they no longer make. 

And when factories remain in this country they are mechanized to the maximum, cutting labor forces to the bone and replacing workers with robots. 

Marx sees a disastrous and destabilizing outcome to these trends. He believed that in capitalist society the owners would, and must, eventually produce goods so efficiently that they would price their workers out of the market for buying those very goods. Marx saw it as an inevitable outcome of capitalism that it reduce its own workers to poverty so that the goods they produced would remain unpurchased - because all the workers who could have purchased them have been so impoverished that they can barely buy enough to survive. So, the capitalists create a system in which production is perfected, technology and social organization are highly developed, and the system cannot survive because its life blood - the selling of products to acquire capital - can no longer happen. 

UNDERLYING FORCES

SUBTERRANEAN FORCES THREE: NIETZSCHE AND THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

There are three grand theories in the 19th century that have scientific pretensions. Only Darwin's ideas about natural selection still have such a status. Marx's dialectical materialism has fallen on hard times because of the failures associated with the regimes that claimed to embrace and enact its visions. But scholars and political analysts still argue that, as a method of analysis, Marx's views can yield powerful results. See Marx as a tool for analysis, not, as Marx intended, as a tool for changing the world.

In similar vein, Freud's psychoanalysis has not been adopted as a scientific model for the human psyche. It has in fact been rejected by almost all American professional psychologists, although it survives in two important ways: psychoanalysis persists as a kind of ghostly background, a medium in which ordinary people think their lives. The ideas of neurosis, oedipal complex, penis envy, the role of desire in human life, the importance of dreams, the whole idea of the unconscious, and more, all operate to some untestable degree as a general background in many peoples' thinking despite the fact that therapists rarely use Freudian terms or his methods of analysis.  Second, Freud's view of human being has persisted as a model for a very influential post-Freudian version of psychoanalysis practiced by the late French therapist, Jacques Lacan. Lacan's influence extends far beyond his practice; his public lectures/seminars drew virtually every major French intellectual of his era (Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, inter alia), and through them influenced American literary theorists, gender theorists and philosophers. The influential Slavoj Zizek, whose influence extends into political theory and the study of film and popular culture, keeps Lacan important for certain sectors of American intellectual life. 

But there is a fourth theorist whose ideas have never been seen as scientific theory, although recently the American philosopher Brian Leiter has argued for a naturalistic interpretation of his work, aligning it with Darwin's theories without arguing that it is a form of science.

This fourth theorist is Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the same time as earlier Freud and whom influenced Freud who regarded Nietzsche as a psychological talent of the first order.

Why include Nietzsche? Nietzsche matters because he too saw personal identity as an historical-biological deposit, not as something given immediately in experience, as was Descartes' thinking thing. For our purposes, Nietzsche built up identity as a deposit of moral concepts; who we are is a result of a certain moral history, rather than of the operation of unseen forces of desire or class conflict or natural selection. (Nietzsche is probably closest to Darwin, as we shall see.)

Nietzsche's hunch was that the moral concepts that we consider to be as timeless as Descartes' thinking thing or the Christian soul - isn't 'good' pretty steady in its meaning, across time and culture? -- have their own hidden history, such that the original meanings of these crucial terms was sometimes exactly the opposite of how those terms mean in the present day. 

Nietzsche's idea - or, one of them -- was that in the beginnings of human, or European, society, the 'good' people were the warriors, those who ruled and led by force and courage. These people had neither forethought nor memory: they acted as 'blond beasts', that is, as perfectly natural beings who gave gifts, killed, loved or pillaged as they willed, when they willed, and whatever they did was considered right because they did it and could back their actions with force. 

Thus, 'good' and 'bad' were originally descriptions of what the rulers did, and of course under this description 'bad' meant what people did who did not win, or, what people did who were conquered or enslaved or intimidated. In short, the original 'bad' meant the sort of self-effacing, accommodating behavior that we today often call 'good', while the warriors' acts of self-assertion which often involved violence we would call 'bad'. Nietzsche's question is: if what the winners and warriors once called 'good' is not often called 'bad', how did the definition change over time? 

Nietzsche then tells a complex story that he reconstructs as the most likely one to have been true about the shift in meaning of 'good' to 'bad', and vice versa. The analysis hinges on the role of the people he calls 'ascetics', those who often made up the priestly class. These were not the ordinary people, who one imagines accepted the warriors' definitions of good and bad without murmuring, because they were resigned to being the people who bore the burdens of supporting the warriors and form time to time benefitted from the warriors' magnificence and greatness of heart. But the ordinary people had little control over either their fate or the meaning of words. They endured because they had to and they were sufficiently intimidated by the superior courage and recklessness of the warriors to forego resistance. 

But the  ascetics, those who made up the class of priests, were a different sort of people. Nietzsche is here assuming that these different kinds of people occur naturally, that they are types thrown up by evolution. The ascetics were people of superior abilities -- intelligent, power-hungry, much like the warriors in many ways, but different in one essential way: they had no ability to act decisively because they were afflicted by internal organic weakness. They were essentially cowards, physically weak and afraid, incapable, either psychologically or physically, of challenging the rulers.

But they also wanted to rule and, because they were cowards, and afraid to act, they developed a rich inner life based on what Nietzsche calls "resentment' (ressentiment in French, which means 're-feeling' of all feelings). The idea was that when these people were challenged by those who were stronger and more decisive they would inevitably back down. When they backed down, their whole bodies would be ready for confrontation, in what we would call the fight or flight syndrome. But rather than do either they would take their humiliation, often with a smile, and use the energy generated by their state of arousal to re-feel their hatred of their warrior betters over and over. From re-feeling, and rethinking, the circumstances under which they had been humiliated, these people developed a sharp intelligence, which was much more developed than that of the warriors because the warriors, being winners, did not have to think very much. Thus, over time, the weaker priests became more and more intelligent, and what they thought about was how to gain power over the warriors without besting them in combat.

What they figured out was a complex system for making the warriors doubt their power and naturalness. They did this by creating the idea of a God who demanded submission to his will, and who valued this submission as a virtue. Submission to God meant a denial of the warriors' instincts; they came to see their exuberance as something defective, and as something that was subject to God's laws. 

God's laws, as thew ascetic/priests read them (made them up) required that self-assertion be considered a sin. This diod not so much change how the warriors acted - they were still after all warriors and naturally acted as they always had. But it made them rethink and second-guess their actions and when they did this they began to develop an inward lack of confidence, a self-questioning, and thuis a need tro ask the priests for advice and guidance. This gave the priests the power they had always desired and effectively changed the meaning of 'good' and 'bad'. 

Nietzsche sees this shift happen especially in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jewish God was one who Nietzsche saw as devised by the priests to hobble and control the Israelite kings, and to develop their inner self-torment via setting up rules that the priests could help them to internalize as if these rules were parts of their nature.

The fullest possible development of this God and of priestly control was the Christian proposal in which God sent his only son to suffer and die for the wrongdoing of the warriors. Thus the noblest of men had to die because the misdeeds of the warriors, and his saving them by this act incurred an eternal and unpayable debt. The warriors were thereby forever beholden to the dead and risen God, and the priests, who controlled access to this God, had finally won.

NIETZSCHE

SUBTERRANEAN FORCES THREE: NIETZSCHE AND THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

There are three grand theories in the 19th century that have scientific pretentions. Only Darwin's ideas about natural selection still have such a status. Marx's dialectical materialism has fallend on hard times because of the failures associated with the regimes that claimed to embrace and enact its visions. But scholars and political analysts still argue that, as a method of analysis, Marx's views can yield powerful results. See Marx as a tool for analysis, not, as Marx intended, as a tool for changing the world.

In similar vein, Freud's psychoanalysis has not been adopted as a scientific model for the human psyche. It has in fact been rejected by almost all American professional psychologists, although it survives in two important ways: psychoanalysis persists as a kind of ghostly background, a medium in which ordinary people think their lives. The ideas of neurosis, oedipal complex, penis envy, the role of desire in human life, the importance of dreams, the whole idea of the unconscious, and more, all operate to some untestable degree as a general background in many peoples' thinking despite the fact that therapists rarely use Freudian terms or his methods of analysis.  Second, Freud's view of human being has persisted as a model for a very influential post-Freudian version of psychoanalysis practiced by the late French therapist, Jacques Lacan. Lacan's influence extends far beyond his practice; his public lectures/seminars drew virtually every major French intellectual of his era (Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, inter alia), and through them influenced American literary theorists, gender theorists and philosophers. The influential Slavoj Zizek, whose influence extends into political theory and the study of film and popular culture, keeps Lacan important for certain sectors of American intellectual life. 

But there is a fourth theorist whose ideas have never been seen as scientific theory, although recently the American philosopher Brian Leiter has argued for a naturalistic interpretation of his work, aligning it with Darwin's theories without arguing that it is a form of science.

This fourth theorist is Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the same time as earlier Freud and whom influenced Freud who regarded Nietzsche as a psychological talent of the first order.

Why include Nietzsche? Nietzsche matters because he too saw personal identity as an historical-biological deposit, not as something given immediately in experience, as was Descartes' thinking thing. For our purposes, Nietzsche built up identity as a deposit of moral concepts; who we are is a result of a certain moral history, rather than of the operation of unseen forces of desire or class conflict or natural selection. (Nietzsche is probably closest to Darwin, as we shall see.)

Nietzsche's hunch was that the moral concepts that we consider to be as timeless as Descartes' thinking thing or the Christian soul - isn't 'good' pretty steady in its meaning, across time and culture? -- have their own hidden history, such that the original meanings of these crucial terms was sometimes exactly the opposite of how those terms mean in the present day. 

Nietzsche's idea - or, one of them -- was that in the beginnings of human, or European, society, the 'good' people were the warriors, those who ruled and led by force and courage. These people had neither forethought nor memory: they acted as 'blond beasts', that is, as perfectly natural beings who gave gifts, killed, loved or pillaged as they willed, when they willed, and whatever they did was considered right because they did it and could back their actions with force. 

Thus, 'good' and 'bad' were originally descriptions of what the rulers did, and of course under this description 'bad' meant what people did who did not win, or, what people did who were conquered or enslaved or intimidated. In short, the original 'bad' meant the sort of self-effacing, accommodating behavior that we today often call 'good', while the warriors' acts of self-assertion which often involved violence we would call 'bad'. Nietzsche's question is: if what the winners and warriors once called 'good' is not often called 'bad', how did the definition change over time? 

Nietzsche then tells a complex story that he reconstructs as the most likely one to have been true about the shift in meaning of 'good' to 'bad', and vice versa. The analysis hinges on the role of the people he calls 'ascetics', those who often made up the priestly class. These were not the ordinary people, who one imagines accepted the warriors' definitions of good and bad without murmuring, because they were resigned to being the people who bore the burdens of supporting the warriors and form time to time benefitted from the warriors' magnificence and greatness of heart. But the ordinary people had little control over either their fate or the meaning of words. They endured because they had to and they were sufficiently intimidated by the superior courage and recklessness of the warriors to forego resistance. 

But the  ascetics, those who made up the class of priests, were a different sort of people. Nietzsche is here assuming that these different kinds of people occur naturally, that they are types thrown up by evolution. The ascetics were people of superior abilities -- intelligent, power-hungry, much like the warriors in many ways, but different in one essential way: they had no ability to act decisively because they were afflicted by internal organic weakness. They were essentially cowards, physically weak and afraid, incapable, either psychologically or physically, of challenging the rulers.

But they also wanted to rule and, because they were cowards, and afraid to act, they developed a rich inner life based on what Nietzsche calls "resentment' (ressentiment in French, which means 're-feeling' of all feelings). The idea was that when these people were challenged by those who were stronger and more decisive they would inevitably back down. When they backed down, their whole bodies would be ready for confrontation, in what we would call the fight or flight syndrome. But rather than do either they would take their humiliation, often with a smile, and use the energy generated by their state of arousal to re-feel their hatred of their warrior betters over and over. From re-feeling, and rethinking, the circumstances under which they had been humiliated, these people developed a sharp intelligence, which was much more developed than that of the warriors because the warriors, being winners, did not have to think very much. Thus, over time, the weaker priests became more and more intelligent, and what they thought about was how to gain power over the warriors without besting them in combat.

What they figured out was a complex system for making the warriors doubt their power and naturalness. They did this by creating the idea of a God who demanded submission to his will, and who valued this submission as a virtue. Submission to God meant a denial of the warriors' instincts; they came to see their exuberance as something defective, and as something that was subject to God's laws. 

God's laws, as thew ascetic/priests read them (made them up) required that self-assertion be considered a sin. This diod not so much change how the warriors acted - they were still after all warriors and naturally acted as they always had. But it made them rethink and second-guess their actions and when they did this they began to develop an inward lack of confidence, a self-questioning, and thuis a need tro ask the priests for advice and guidance. This gave the priests the power they had always desired and effectively changed the meaning of 'good' and 'bad'. 

Nietzsche sees this shift happen especially in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jewish God was one who Nietzsche saw as devised by the priests to hobble and control the Israelite kings, and to develop their inner self-torment via setting up rules that the priests could help them to internalize as if these rules were parts of their nature.

The fullest possible development of this God and of priestly control was the Christian proposal in which God sent his only son to suffer and die for the wrongdoing of the warriors. Thus the noblest of men had to die because the misdeeds of the warriors, and his saving them by this act incurred an eternal and unpayable debt. The warriors were thereby forever beholden to the dead and risen God, and the priests, who controlled access to this God, had finally won.

SUBTERRANEAN FORCES TWO

subterranean forces two:marx

There is something similar in the work of Freud and Marx. Both are secular Jews, well-educated, living in a German-speaking world in which social and career advancement depends on not being a Jew.  Marx’ father had his family convert to Lutheranism so that he could be more successful, as many other Jews had done in Germany in the past. 

The big difference between them was where they found their inspiration. Freud found a theory of human existence from studying the non-specific illnesses of upper middle class Jewish women; Marx formed his Big Vision from close analysis of people whom no one ever noticed -- the so-called lumpeNproletariat , unskilled and semi-skilled urban factory and sweatshop workers.  But both of these thinkers spent their time thinking about how ignored, marginalized people whom no one else took seriously got to be in the position they were in. 

Marx’ vision of how these people got to be who and where they were had little, but not nothing,  to do with Descartes’ thinking thing. We will project ourselves back to an imagined social beginning. Just as Freud recreated what he imagined childhood must be like, as a way to ground his vision, so Marx imagined an initial social situation to ground his account of the poor people he saw around him. 

MARX AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

CONTINUING THE MARX STORY: CAPITALIST CLASS STRUCTURE

Once the bourgeois revolution takes place, a new class structure emerges with exactly the same issues as the last one. Note first that the bourgeois revolution did not help the lowest class at all. The peasants were still peasants after 1789, although their precise role in society was to change drastically during the course of the nineteenth century.  This lowest class had to be accommodated in Marx' vision, or he would have had to accept two non-revolutionary perspectives that he had to reject. On one hand he had to reject the Hobbesian/conservative approach which argues that class conflict is an inevitable, eternal feature of all social orders. 

Social and political life is an endless struggle  for power between haves and have nots, and there are no final accommodations. The powerful will generally prevail and in a sense should prevail because the only law of order in human groups is that superior power prevails. 

Power may be given to the people but the conservative has a suspicion that the people in general will misuse power, because they lack the ambition and talent of the natural born leaders, whose hard work and genius pushes society forward, creating opportunities for all. Societies run by the people tend to privilege averageness, focusing on giving everyone roughly the same irrespective of how hard individuals work and how much they contribute. This, in the eyes of the conservative, leads to a sluggish, less productive economy and an artificially egalitarian society that will inevitably falter, even for those who think they benefit from it. Society, for the conservative, should be run by the naturally powerful, not by the people, and class divisions are a necessary corollary 

The other view Marx has to  reject is bourgeois, what we would call liberal, progressivism. This view believes that class conflicts will ultimately be resolved, or at least softened, by a continual mutual progress by all classes. Classes are not ultimately enemies; their interests can converge and, in a democratic give and take in which all groups have equal access to the political process and thus to power, all segments of society will be able to voice their positions and be properly rewarded. Progress for all comes from mutual political cooperation and a willingness to compromise.

These are rough approximations of the positions that most of you occupy.  Marx rejects both because each one, in different ways, accepts that there are class distinctions but rejects the idea that this structure has an internal dynamic that requires a resolution through revolution. Both conservatives and liberals believe that class structure can be worked with. The conservatives believe that divisions are natural and inevitable and that as long as the 'better' people can stay in control, things will go well for everybody. Liberals believe that divisions are acceptable and that a shared political process allows people with different interests to meet their needs without denying or neglecting those of others.

Marx thinks that what both groups of theorists get wrong is that they assume that one can have a just idea of what different classes need when one is a member of a certain class. Especially those who belong to a dominant class deceive themselves into thinking that they understand their position vis a vis the other classes. But Marx believes that such accurate understanding is impossible, that one of the salient features of class membership is that one gets caught up entirely into the ideology of one's class.

Let's shift focus a little, to an analysis of the new class structure. Once the nobility are gone, there are two classes, the bourgeois and the workers, or proletariat. Here is how the set-up works. We have entered the industrial age. The fall of the nobility coincides roughly  with the rise of what Marx calls capitalism. Capitalism means a social/class structure in which class divisions are driven by the bourgeois' dedication to the accumulation of capital. Capital is in essence frozen labor, the time of a worker's life trapped in commodities, or objects produced.  

Let's  analyze this a bit: when a farmer grows a crop, say corn, the ears of corn represent the effort the farmer had to invest to grow those ears. When he sells the corn, or gives it to his lord or landlord, he receives a value for it. This sometimes in permission to keep occupying his farm. It is sometimes represented by cash. Cash, capital in its 'purest' form, stands in for what the farmer has put into growing the corn. The cash he gets represents what we think, or what the market thinks, the corn, and by extension, the farmer's labor, and time, are worth. 

Thus if a worker gets paid $10 an hour, this means that one hour of his life is worth that, has that value. If Manny Ramirez makes $15 a season, for 200 games, including preseason and  playoff games, this means he gets paid $75,000 per game. If an average game lasts 3 hours and Manny has to arrive 2 hours early, and leaves an hour after the game, for a total of six hours, Manny is pulling down $12, 500 per hour. He makes, in one game, more than most Americans make in a year. This is what he is worth in a capitalist system – over $200 per minute. 

How does this all work? Well, the nub of capitalism is that unlike the warrior/priest system, the capitalist wants to maximize profit, or create as much capital as possible. Rather than simply taking part of what the farmer grows, as the nobleman does, the middle class capitalist wants to get the farmer's crop so he can resell it. The dynamic here is different. The capitalist’s intention is not to consume and spend what the farmer gives him but to maximize the value of that product by reselling it for a higher price than he gave the farmer, thereby adding value to the corn. The capitalist’s job is simple: he has to buy the corn from the farmer for less than he can sell it for. When he does this by acting as a middleman he essentially ‘steals’ some of the farmer’s labor by selling for more than he paid. He pockets this excess, which he calls a commission but which Marx sees as, secretly, the frozen time of the farmer. So, the capitalist relationship is based on a secret form of theft. He always takes a little less than the thing is worth and accumulates the results of this into concentrated value which he can exchange for goods and services.

This whole system and relationship grow more complex and more profitable when the farmer moves into the factory. 

The capitalist owns the factory as well as the equipment in it. Marx calls these the means of production and the characteristic note of capitalism is that the capitalist controls the means of production. In the factory, the worker mixes his labor/time with the machinery and raw materials and makes products that belong to the factory owner. For doing this he is paid a wage. But for the factory to survive the wage the workers are paid, plus the cost of materials and plant, must all add up to less than the total amount for which that factory’s products are sold. This is what we call ‘profit’, and it represents, again, that part of the worker’s time/labor that the owner takes in exchange for allowing the worker to work and earn a wage.

Built into the structure of the capitalist society is the drive to maximize profit; this is what capitalists do, what they see themselves as called to do. Just as the nobles and priests create an ideology that ‘explains’ and justifies their privileged position, so, too, do the capitalists, who saw how the nobles deceived themselves, remain blind to their own self-deception. They tell a story in which they prevail because of hard work and talent, rising above the herd not because they happen to make things the nobles and priests want but because of inherent advantages over their fellows. So they create the ideological myth of their own superiority and invincibility, imagining, as did the nobles, that they represent a natural upper class and that the society they have founded will never change, only get more productive and more capital-rich. 

But just as in the case of the nobles and priests the capitalists are laying the foundations for their own destruction. Their very success, and their ideology, cooperate to doom them, in Marx’ eyes.  How does this work? Well, the capitalist has one thing in view: to maximize profit. So there is an inherent driving dynamic in capitalism, which all of us have seen in our lifetimes. Capitalists are driven to make the most possible product at the least possible cost. This requires that they pay their workers as little as they can get away with, and that they relentlessly pursue every technology that promises to cut labor costs by replacing workers with less expensive and more efficient machinery.

We have all experienced these aspects of capitalism as more and more American corporations offshore services and outsource production, replacing American workers with less expensive people in India, China, Mexico and other countries. As the labor-intensive, well-paid jobs leave they are replaced by lower paid service jobs in which people sell the imported products that they no longer make. 

And when factories remain in this country they are mechanized to the maximum, cutting labor forces to the bone and replacing workers with robots. 

Marx sees a disastrous and destabilizing outcome to these trends. He believed that in capitalist society the owners would, and must, eventually produce goods so efficiently that they would price their workers out of the market for buying those very goods. Marx saw it as an inevitable outcome of capitalism that it reduce its own workers to poverty so that the goods they produced would remain unpurchased - because all the workers who could have purchased them have been so impoverished that they can barely buy enough to survive. So, the capitalists create a system in which production is perfected, technology and social organization are highly developed, and the system cannot survive because its life blood - the selling of products to acquire capital - can no longer happen.