A Life-and-Death Game
by
Charles Lamson
 |
The other basic rule of capitalism is this: To make the most profit, get as much work out of workers as possible for the lowest possible wage. Paying workers less means that products can be sold for less, while still making a profit. A firm that pays its workers more will make less profit, unless it can sell its products at a higher price. But raising prices usually means losing customers, who can pay less elsewhere. So a capitalist who does not drive workers hard and keep wages low is likely to go out of business. This is not a matter of people being nice or not. It is just what capitalists do to survive.
That happens when an economy operates by these rules. For one thing, there will always be inequality in wealth, since capitalists control the means to create vast wealth for themselves, while workers have only their time and energy to sell for a wage. Inequality will also tend to grow. Although workers, if they organize, can resist this. It is also likely that a great many people will be allowed to go without work, or with too little work to make a decent living, so that capitalists can control workers by threatening to replace them with more desperate people.
One time when a teacher was talking about how capitalism works, a student (business major) folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in the chair, and asked with a mix of anger and skepticism in his voice, "Are you saying that capitalism causes poverty?" Before the teacher could answer, his student sat straight up and added, "It seems to me that capitalism creates jobs." This was a useful challenge to the teacher.
The teacher said, "Yes capitalists create jobs, but only if doing so would yield profits. If they did so for any other reason they would not survive as capitalists." The teacher said that capitalists will destroy any number of decent-paying jobs if they can replace them with low-wage jobs, because capitalists make more money when they can reduce the total amount they pay for labor. The teacher said, "In fact, capitalism creates jobs only when necessary, try to pay as little as possible when they do, and try to get rid of jobs if they can, often by means of automation.
Much of what the teacher said seemed to be familiar to this student from his business courses. But he was sill unhappy with the teacher's way of putting things. The student said, "Of course businessmen try to make a profit. But that doesn't necessarily cause poverty." He was right. His teacher said that, "Even though capitalists had incentives to push wages down to the poverty level, that did not mean they could always do it. Workers sometimes resist successfully, and sometimes workers with special skills can command high wages.
To get back to his point about poverty, the teacher asked him, "So why is it that people will take such lousy jobs?" The student said, "For one thing, people need to work. And then there will always be people who don't have enough education to get anything better, or enough self-esteem to try." The teacher said that his first point about people needing to work was very important. If people have no other way to survive, then we should not be surprised if they take whatever jobs they can get.
His point about education led the teacher to propose a thought experiment. Suppose, the teacher said, that everyone had a P.H.D. and high self-esteem. Would everyone get a good job? While the student puzzled this out, another student said, "I don't think anybody could have a good job, because someone would still have to clean up floors, and pick up garbage, and dig ditches. And even if people with P.H.D.'s were willing to do that, there probably still would not be enough jobs for everybody. Look at how much unemployment there is now. There just are not enough jobs to go around." The business major admitted that this was true.
So then the teacher asked, "Why don't we use the government to create jobs for everyone, so that everyone who wants to work can have a decent job?" This time, the business major answered, "Businessmen wouldn't like that." The teacher said he was right, and that businesswomen would not like it it either. But why? Don't employees often criticize welfare and say that everyone should work? If so, why would they object to using the government to create jobs? The student answered well, the teacher thought, "Its like you said, if everybody knew they could get a decent job, they'd be a lot fussier and less willing to work at a crappy job for low pay. That would probably mean that employers would have to pay people more to keep them, and that would hurt profits." The teacher was pleased his student was seeing these connections.
They still had not answered the question about poverty. The teacher asked, "So does this mean that poverty is an inevitable result of how capitalism works?" No one spoke, so the teacher rephrased the question, "If a capitalist economy can produce as much wealth as ours does, why does anyone have to be poor?" After a few moments, a student said, "I don't think anyone would have to be poor. Its just a matter of how the wealth is distributed, and those who have it aren't going to give it up, at least not without a fight." Now we were getting somewhere.
"Where would the fight take place?" the teacher asked. Another student said, "If you're talking about using the governent to create jobs, then I suppose it would be a political fight." The teacher asked who would win. They agreed that capitalists - those who benefited from conditions that forced people into lousy jobs - would probably win, because they had more resources and more control over government. "Would they necessarily win?" the teacher asked. The business major said, "Not necessarily. If workers in all industries got together, they could win. But it would take a huge fight."
They were running out of time, so the teacher tried to sum things up. Capitalism tends to push working people toward poverty, he said, because profits depend on keeping wages low, and even putting people out of work, if machines can do the work more cheaply. Poverty also benefits capitalists, because it means that many people will be desperate for jobs at any wage. Capitalists are thus, in no hurry to end poverty. So while capitalism does not inevitably cause poverty, it does create incentives for capitalists to act in ways that make poverty a likely result, especially if workers are too disorganized to fight back.
In Sum
The point of telling this is not to show that capitalism is all bad, but that certain bad results - inequality, lousy jobs, unemployment, poverty - stem from the way that capitalism works. If we think of capitalism as a kind of game, one that is played for high stakes, and for keeps, we see that its rules make some bad results inevitable, and others extremely likely. Once people are locked into the game, these results are bound to come about, unless people change or break the rules.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAERL SCHWALBE, PGS. 123-126*
END
|
No comments:
Post a Comment