Wobbly times number 147

May Day 2012 in Fremantle,
Western Australia
Filmed by Mike Ballard, this is the main May Day union 
workers' march through Fremantle, Western Australia 
on May 6, 2012. The film begins at the beginning of the 
march near the Fremantle Esplanade and ends after the 
march with the workers sharing home made beer brewed
 in honour of an old Australian seaman and unionist by 
the name of Paddy.


Employers know enough to belong to a 'union'. It's called 
The Chamber of Commerce. Doctors know enough to belong 
to the AMA. There are plenty of corrupt, shonky operators 
out there amongst the employing class, in the political State 
and amongst professionals. Corruption goes along with wealth 
and power accumulating at the top of a hire-arky. Even Lord Acton 
knew that. The real reason workers should actively join in union is 
to present a more powerful face to their employers when it comes 
time to negotiate the price of their skills. Without unions, there is 
NO negotiation. Without unions, there will be no resistance to the 
constant downward pressure on real wages by the employing class. 
It's market economics 101 folks. Employers want lower prices for the
 skills they purchase and workers should be wise enough to bargain 
for a higher price, including working conditions. Social justice 
remains an empty abstraction without its being filled in with 
workers receiving back more of what they produce.

Wobbly Times number 56

A brief moment from the May Day march in Fremantle, Western Australia this May 2nd, 2010.

Wobbly Times number 47

THE VALUE OF NOTHING by Raj Patel
Published: 27 November 2009
Format: Paperback , 256 pages
RRP: $24.95
ISBN-13: 9781863954563
Imprint: Black Inc
Publisher: Black Inc
Origin: Australia
Categories: Popular Culture Economics, Finance, Business & Management

Raj Patel has written a fine book in which he describes the value of human tenacity, the value of people standing up to their rulers, the value of persistence and the value of solidarity, in other words, the value of nothing. Nothing which has a price that is. Nothing which is a commodity sold for the profit of its owners, unless they’re small owners.

Starting off his critique of the prevailing ideology, which can be summarised in Gary Becker’s concept of ‘homo-economicus’, Patel writes, “The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago, ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of the market.” Patel is keen to link Becker’s prescriptions for realism to commodification, making literally every human activity and nature into commodities for sale. He succeeds quite well and this is important in a day and age when becoming a ‘maximising animal’ in the global market is lauded by capitalist apologists world-wide.

THE VALUE OF NOTHING is chock full of useful insights and history. Patel’s summation of Polanyi’s take on the “enclosure of the commons”, that is, the gradual privatising of what had been land held in common by the peasantry during Britain’s Middle Ages is articulated with verve and clarity . His history includes a fine overview of the British peasant revolt of 1381 and is itself, worth the price of the book. But like Wat Tyler, methinks the flaw in Patel’s analysis and suggested practice is to be located in a reverence for the ruling system of contemporary class political power, the wage system. In other words, the capitalist system which springs from the wage system, the system based on the buying and selling of commodities, in other words, ‘the market’.

Patel accepts markets and prices to value useful things. He sees them as being natural, but he also points to the flaws of equating price with its exchange-value. Bubbles occur in the global, corporate dominated economy and when they do price can become out of balance with value. As Patel points out, the 2008 deflation of the financial bubble in real estate was a prime example of a whole lot of pricey nothingness frothing around value.

In THE VALUE OF NOTHING, the reader will also find easy to read explanations of many concepts used in offhanded ways in today’s capitalist media, ‘shorting’ for example:
“Volkswagen was heading for tough times. Imagine you’re a trader who feels in your bones that the stock price can only fall. One way to cash your hunch in is to sell Volkswagen stock today, and buy it back when the price falls. Since you don’t walk around with Volkswagen stock falling out of your pockets, you’ll turn to someone who does, like an institutional investor. You borrow their stock, for a price, and promise to return all of it very soon. The institutional investor is happy because they make money from lending out the stock, which they will get back in one piece. You’re happy because you can sell this stock, wait for the price to fall, buy it back and with the profit, not only pay back the institutional investor, but make the next instalment on your yacht in Monaco. This practice is called ‘shorting’.”

But, here’s the deal. Raj Patel wants the market for commodities to function in less fickle ways, to wit, in grassroots democratic ways. He wants us to examine our concept of value, price and profit, but not through, “the false prism of markets” prone to corporate driven price bubbles which blow out way beyond asset values. Instead, Patel wants his readers to tame the fickleness of market society by making it operate through their own ideals. There will be a lot of subjective commitment required to keep value in line with price; but Patel believes we can do it. Patel wants us to compare our ideals with actually, existing capitalist outcomes. When we contrast the two, he believes that we can then achieve that primary Ideal of left-liberal discourse, social justice. We will attain this Ideal by gradually reforming our way to a more democratic market system, one where the market is more and more controlled by grassroots organisations and less controlled by corporate capital than they are today.

But, of course, we must change our existing ideals first for, as Patel observes, most of us suffer from “Anton’s blindness” in other words, the ideological domination (hegemony, if you will) which most of us absorb as we mature within capitalist class dominated cultures. In other words, Patel wants people to take charge of markets as opposed to letting the markets rip, a la Reagan or Thatcherite inspired neo-liberalist agendas. He believes this can be done, indeed, that it is already being accomplished in various ways by varying NGOs and peoples’ organisations at the municipal level.

Mr. Patel is a democrat and as a democrat, he wants the people to rule. He rightly sees that corporate capitalism is undemocratic and he believes that small, decentralised, democratically run capitalism is the answer to most of our political, economic and social problems. We, the people can do this, if we can develop and maintain our ideals, as he says the Zapatistas have and the workers’ collectives in Argentina have and, as members of Via Campesina have. If we can be like them, we’ve got a shot at saving the planet from almost everything evil, including climate change. Well, that’s what Raj thinks. In short, Patel’s organising vision doesn’t aim at abolishing wage-labour, but of achieving a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and fair price for commodities which issue out of small businesses. He wants workers, farmers, peasants, women, along with assorted nationalities and ethnic groups to self-manage their own wage-labour and capital through small, democratically run businesses mostly at the municipal level. It seems to this reader that he does so because of his sincere belief that there is no ‘realistic’ alternative to making and marketing useful goods and services as commodities and that a kind of populist, municipal socialism is realistic to work for.

As a result of his faith in the value of grassroots, democratically influenced free markets, free-time is not the focus of his programmatic thrusts. Working small farms to gain Patel’s version of ‘food sovereignty’ plays a major role in thinking behind THE VALUE OF NOTHING. It’s a reformist time sink, in this Wobbly’s opinion. Instead of advancing to a new way of organising time, work and industrial production to maximise free-time, Patel seems to prefer spending free-time away from production in achieving consensus at meetings a la Zapatista or Via Campesina. What is not said by Patel is that no matter how democratic small commodity production is and can be made, it usually means less free-time because the production of goods and services, even just for use and need, takes more human labour time, thus reducing the potential of free-time for ourselves.

Of course, we could always shoot for living with a LOT LESS in the way of good and services and this is a solution which Patel strongly suggests. But what is forgotten is that small scale production is where humanity came from historically and there are reasons why most humans don’t want a return to back breaking, time consuming production and consensus politics as a way of life, when it really isn’t necessary. However, if carried out with enough Idealism, Patel argues that the political trajectory he proposes would take us to a free market society, one always kept small by our idealist convictions. Mindless, conspicuous consumption is being critiqued in THE VALUE OF NOTHING and Patel’s Buddhist angle is presented as a kind of ascetic cure, a kind of generalised monasticism as a way out of mindless, conspicuous consumption.

At the same time another denial is operative in Mr. Patel’s thesis. It is a denial of what has actually occured in history and the inner motivation of humanity to gravitate toward freedom as a whole within class dominated societies. Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have wanted and indeed, worked to move away from chaotic domination by nature by creating more efficient modes of wealth production to release more free-time, especially as humanity has been eliminating the vestiges of feudalism and hurtling into full blown, industrial capitalism since at least the times of the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The drudgery involved in spending one’s life doing laundry with a washboard down by the river; going from human to horse drawn plough and then to tractors; those and other assorted tasks associated with the reduction of the expenditure of human drudge time, have been historical motivators, based on the human desire for more freedom. Over the course of history, these innovations and economies of scale have led to large scale industrialised production. Granted, in class society up to and including the capitalist system of the here and now, the free-time implicit in large scale production has been available mostly to the wealthy and the unemployed, in great amounts with, of course, different outcomes. But in a hypothetical classless society (such as this Wobbly imagines) where there is equal political power amongst humans and common control over socially produced wealth within collective goals (goals which include most importantly the expansion of free-time and living in harmony with the Earth) a free association of producers cannot make a fetish out of smallness and decentralisation without serious consequences for say, the four hour day. Where de-centralisation and smallness function to promote more freedom, fine; where they end up becoming a time sink, they should be discarded. Certainly, we need to have the self-discipline to curb mindless consumption based on competitive status building i.e. the inanity of keeping up with the Jones. We should do this for our own sanity, if not just to promote environmental health and shorter work time. But, we don’t need to do this by adopting Buddhist ethics of ascetic denial. Rather, a free association of producers can kill overproduction by using already existing productive capacity to reduce the labour time necessary to produce the good things of life. Of course, that would mean taking, holding and operating the existing means of production for ourselves, a goal which Patel doesn’t mention nor, it would seem, endorse. Like the Zapatistas, Patel is NOT aiming for a social revolution where the workers take over the means of production and abolish the State, but for fundamental reform of the capitalist system without taking political power away from the ruling class. In THE VALUE OF NOTHING, he is advocating a ‘smaller is beautiful’, grassroots, democratic, class society, based on a left-social democratic market, within an a-historical, mythical, small capitalism which never grows.

Wobbly Times number 39

CLASS DIALOGUE

Old leftist professor:

In this context, of organizing as a class, how

does one define "working class"? I always have

the feeling when I come across references to

"the workers," etc. that probably the writer

has an image in his/her head, that harks back

a half century or so and has no particular grip on
current actuality.
***************************

Wobbly:

The working class is made up of those men and women who make their living from wages. Most of the people in industrialsed countries are in the working class and not in the employing class or the landlord class. There are also people who sell their skills directly to a customer, kind of one on one, as opposed to an employer.

******************************
Old leftist professor:

Most workers today are _not_ blue collar.

So what are the "signs" of
class that one can organize around?

*********************************
Wobbly:


The basic dependency structure inherent in Capital is a good guide. Workers are dependent on employers buying their skills in the labour market. If workers don't make a sale of their skills to an employer, they will have a hard time making ends meet. They often become homeless after extended periods of unemployment. Sometimes they become eligible for government handouts of parts of the wealth they've already created and given over to the employing class in exchange for wages e.g. food stamps or in Australia, Centrelink payments.

***************
Old leftist professor:


At a highly abstract level of _capitalism_ as such

it is easy to define _working class_ and essential

to do so. But at a practical level of
organizing struggle it is probably not relevant.

*************

Wobbly:

I disagree. As Marx and Engels wrote back in 1848: "The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." I think that's a practical principle to operate with.

Listen up now. These figures concern the distribution of wealth (and therefore power) in the USA. Similar figures exist in every State where the wage system prevails.

Top 1 Percent Control 42 Percent of Financial Wealth in the U.S.

Of investment assets 90 percent of Americans (the working class) own 12.2 percent. The rest goes to the top 10 percent. The top 10 percent are those people in the employing class, the landlord class and independent service providers e.g. lawyers and doctors who sell their skills directly to a customer without having that sale mediated by employment for a wage or salary at a corporation. The median household income in the U.S. is $50,000. Only 34% of U.S. households make more than $65,000 per year. The bottom 90 percent (the working class) have been saddled with 73 percent of all debt. In other words much of what constitutes workers' so-called wealth is connected to debt. Debt is slavery for many especially with egregious credit card companies taking people out with absurd levels of interest. Yet the corporate propaganda machine is strong and mighty. Have you ever received an inheritance? A large one? Probably not because only 1.6% of all Americans receive an inheritance larger than $100,000.

Wobbly Times number 36

One aspect of the issue of stagnant real wages (see: Wobbly Times number 22) is the continuing commodification of wage-labour itself. The commodity sells best which sells most cheaply in the marketplace. As the skills necessary to reproduce Capital have become simpler, less time consuming to produce and reproduce, the value and fluctuating price of labour power has gone down for a majority of the class, while for a minority of it, the price remains the same or goes higher with the addition of greater skills to the worker. (However, it should be mentioned here that even if all the working class had Ph.d.s, the unemployment rate would remain about the same, even as the banter at the workplace might change to concerns over whether Foucault or Stephen Jay Gould had more to say about culture.)

Thus, on average, real wages have stagnated. Capital is not only exported to class ruled States which enforce lowered wage demands through coercion and terror,the movement of industry to pools of more cheaply priced labour power also makes the use of skilled labour amongst the majority of the working class in already industrialised nations superfluous. Thus, overall, real wages for workers as a class can stagnate in advanced, industrial, bourgeois democracies as the employed members of the working class are increasingly obliged to flip burgers or open crates at Wall Mart, shipped from dictatorships like China in order to make a living, as opposed to making steel, tires and cars.

Capital is wealth expressed as exchange-value; it is itself a commodity. Labour power is bought and sold as a commodity on the market, just as pork and beans are. The big diff is that labour power has the ability to expand wealth through creation of more commodities. The capitalist hires labour for wages (the price of labour power on the market) and keeps the commodities (goods and services) which the workers have created (aka wealth). These commodities can include constant capital e.g. machinery of production, circulating capital e.g. raw materials from nature like coal which go into the production process and money, which is used as a means to exchange commodities, to 'circulate' them. Money is circulating capital. Thus, money is also a commodity, a mutually agreed upon abstraction playing the universal equivalent.

After the working class creates the wealth, the capitalist has that wealth sold by wage-slaves in order to realise profit. Capitalists hire sales-wage-slaves to market the wealth they've appropriated from already employed wage-labour. Profit can't be realised unless the wealth workers create can be sold. This uncertainty about sale is what pro-capitalist spokespeople call, 'risk'.

Like all commodities, labour power has exchange-value embedded within it. Exchange-value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time bound up within it e.g. education.

BTW, if someone says that this labour theory of value has been proven false, you can always ask them how much wealth would be produced, if the workers of the world went on a week long general strike. The answer is zero. Wealth has to be produced to come into existence and it doesn't come into existence without employing wage-labour, unless you're using your money to buy/commodify nature for nature is the other source of all wealth.

The socially necessary labour time embodied in a worker's abilities, which is expressed as the exchange-value of labour, forms the concrete substance of skill. However, the exchange-value of any commodity, including labour power, is expressed in money aka price. Prices of commodities fluctuate with supply and demand on the market and the market is human beings with money perceiving what they can use, for whatever they deem is necessary i.e. what they can buy with the wealth, expressed as money in their pockets.

Most bourgeois thinkers only look at the demand side of the commodities to explain their conception of 'value' i.e. from the point of view of the consumer, not the producer. The 'effective' demand side is very important, as Marx explained a long time before Jevons, demand is an expression of the use-value of a commodity. If a commodity has no use-value, all the socially necessary labour time in the world will not make it into a saleable commodity and therefore, no profit could be realised from it.

In a classless society, production could be carried on for use and need and there would be no necessity for the expression of wealth to be measured by money. Wealth would be wealth, not an accumulation of commodities for sale with a view to profit.
In a classless society, work would be carried on by and for the association of free producers. There would be no need for wages, which are but the price of labour power, the price of yet another commodity. In a classless society, there would be no need for wealth to be fettered by exchange-value.

Wobbly Times number 25

via Doug Henwood's LBO-talk.....Ed Hyman, Wall Street's favorite economist, features a poll asking who's been helped most by the Obama administration's economic policies:

large banks 62%
Wall Street 54
manufacturing firms 21
people who've lost jobs 15
average working person 13
small biz 11
my family/me 10

For once, Americans are dead on! Can Australians be thinking the same about Rudd's Labor Government?

**********************************


William Black, the government regulator who
fingered House speaker Jim Wright, John McCain,
John Glenn and other members of the "Keating Five"
for bribe-taking during the S & L crisis and is now a
prof at the University of Missouri, has been sounding
a similar note for some time. In April, he told
Bill Moyers that "the entire strategy is to keep
people from getting the facts..."

"[Moyers] Are you saying that Timothy Geithner,
the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the
administration, with the banks, are engaged in a
cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

"[Black] Absolutely....

"They're deliberately leaving in place the people
that caused the problem, because they don't want
the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan
Administration's central priority, at all times,
during the Savings and Loan
crisis, was covering up the losses.

"[Moyers] So, you're saying that people in power,
political power, and financial power, act in concert
when their own behinds are in the ringer,
right?

"That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that
brings this out, because then the class of the
banker says, "You've got to keep the information
away from the public or everything will collapse."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html


see also the Citibank report on Plutonomy.