If it was that easy to become a capitalist, we wouldn’t have workers. Some people are just workers because they don’t have a choice. And even petit bourgeois risk becoming workers again.
The worker appears to sell his ‘labour’ in exchange for a wage. The capitalist ‘combines’ that labor with machines, raw material and the labour of other men to produce finished products. As the capitalist owns these machines and raw materials, as well as the money to pay the wages, is it not ‘natural’ that he should also own the finished products which result from the ‘combination of these factors’?
This is what appears to occur under capitalism. However, probing below the surface, Marx comes up with a series of striking observations which can only be denied if one deliberately refuses to examine the unique social conditions which create the very peculiar and exceptional ‘exchange’ between labour and capital. In the first place, there is an institutional inequality of conditions between capitalists and workers. The capitalist is not forced to buy labour-power on a continuous basis. He does it only if it is profitable to him. If not, he prefers to wait, to lay off workers, or even to close his plant down till better times. The worker, on the other hand… is under economic compulsion to sell his labour-power. As he has no access to the means of production, including land, as he has no access to any large-scale free stock of food, and as he has no reserves of money which enable him to survive for any length of time while doing nothing, he must sell his labour-power to the capitalist on a continuous basis and at the current rate. Without such institutionalized compulsion, a fully developed capitalist society would be impossible.
If it was that easy to become a capitalist, we wouldn’t have workers. Some people are just workers because they don’t have a choice. And even petit bourgeois risk becoming workers again.
Spot on. As Ernest Mandel explains:
The worker appears to sell his ‘labour’ in exchange for a wage. The capitalist ‘combines’ that labor with machines, raw material and the labour of other men to produce finished products. As the capitalist owns these machines and raw materials, as well as the money to pay the wages, is it not ‘natural’ that he should also own the finished products which result from the ‘combination of these factors’?
This is what appears to occur under capitalism. However, probing below the surface, Marx comes up with a series of striking observations which can only be denied if one deliberately refuses to examine the unique social conditions which create the very peculiar and exceptional ‘exchange’ between labour and capital. In the first place, there is an institutional inequality of conditions between capitalists and workers. The capitalist is not forced to buy labour-power on a continuous basis. He does it only if it is profitable to him. If not, he prefers to wait, to lay off workers, or even to close his plant down till better times. The worker, on the other hand… is under economic compulsion to sell his labour-power. As he has no access to the means of production, including land, as he has no access to any large-scale free stock of food, and as he has no reserves of money which enable him to survive for any length of time while doing nothing, he must sell his labour-power to the capitalist on a continuous basis and at the current rate. Without such institutionalized compulsion, a fully developed capitalist society would be impossible.
Great in-depth explanation!
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