Or, everything you wanted to know about Marx but were afraid to ask
Communism, as everyone knows, is dead. Except in Cuba and certain parts of Latin America. And if it isn't dead in those parts of the world it certainly ought to be - because, as everyone also knows, Communism is a delusion on a par with the contention that the earth is actually flat.
Communism as practiced in the old Soviet Union was not the Communism theorized by Marx. 'Communism' in the Soviet Union was simply centralized control over the economy, bound up with the cult of the personality of Stalin. It didn't work - not because there was something inherently fallacious in the idea itself, but because the stresses placed on the Soviet economy in its Arms Race with the USA proved too demanding; the people could eat, have refrigerators, TVs and air conditioning or the Government could have missiles, nukes, and fighter aircraft. They chose missiles and nukes and in the end the system meant to produce these things collapsed under the strain. End of Communism, Vindication of Capitalism. Right?
Wrong. Capitalism is, in its own way, as much a system of slavery as was Communism under Stalin. Except that the workers of the USA get to play with as many TVs, air conditioners, and SUVs as they want and can afford, and can bitch about their taxes, their President, and their system of government in the reasonable expectation that they won't be arrested, incarcerated in mental institutions, deported to a forced labor camp, or put up against a wall and shot. But we're all still slaves.
Why?
"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."
That's why. You are not a human being. You are a commodity; something that has use so long as you can produce profit for someone else, to be discarded when you can't. You are a commodity, just like the plasma TV, or the new SUV, or that cure for a disease you didn't know you had until some medical parasite with his eye on his bank balance told you you had it. You're a factor in an economic equation that has no more use for your humanity than gnats have for calculus.
Not since Aristotle wrote that slaves were 'living tools', devoid of any worth except that attributed to them by their Masters, has any system of thought (let alone a system of economic production) so comprehensively and contemptuously dismissed the human factor involved in work. The slaves of ancient Rome had legal rights that recognized them as human beings: you, on the other hand, are a factor in the calculations of profit and loss carried out by 'human resource' specialists. Human beings may be resourceful - they are not 'resources'.
Why do I hate work? Marx can answer for me.
"Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is." (Emphasis added).
By and large, the great Manufactories of the Industrial Revolution have gone the way of the workshops of the Medieval Guilds and have vanished. To be replaced by the 'knowledge' economy, the 'service' economy (you want fries with that?). Instead of the drudgery of the assembly line we have the drudgery of the Computer Operator - a fine euphemism for endless lines of drones, closeted in endless cubicles, each repetitively inputting some fragment of data into a database they don't control. The forms Capitalist Production assumes change constantly - but the relationship between Capital and Labor is always the same: an absolute slavery perfectly disguised as freedom.
You don't think class struggle in America is alive and well? Then tell me why American Corporations (I'm thinking in particular of Wal-Mart) are vehemently opposed to unionisation. Why is it that unions, once established, make their primary goal (when they are not merely corrupt cabals intent on making profit themselves) improvements in wages and conditions? Because there is a fundamental antagonism between those who make a profit and those who make a wage: the better the wages and conditions of workers, the less profit for share-holders; the greater the profit for share-holders (and the greater the 'bonuses' for their managerial representatives), then the poorer are the wages and conditions of those who do the work. Ask any of Wal-Mart's 'associates' (not even employees, but 'associates') whether or not there is an antagonism between Labor and Capital - I don't think you'll find many who will say no.
In America and Britain what has largely pulled the teeth of this conflict, rendering it so deeply buried that it now is almost invisible, is the institution of Social Security; along with, in America, the myth that education and hard work will inevitably pay-off, allowing individuals to rise within society to whatever height they wish to attain.
Fiddlesticks. Competition for wages between workers lowers the real value of any wage. I and you attend an interview for the same job. We are both qualified and experienced; we have both demonstrated in our work histories that we are reliable workers; we both make persuasive cases for our employment - but you want a higher wage than the employer is willing to offer, whereas I'm willing to take what's offered without argument. Who gets the job? I do - and the consequence of my doing so is that the employer can now look to lower wages again, because he knows there's always some poor slob willing enough, or stupid enough, or desperate enough, to take whatever that offer will be. The consequence of competition between individual workers for jobs is to depress wages - because every employer, in every industry, is always looking to cut costs, and the cost that's simplest to cut is the rate paid to the fools who work for him.
Combination, unionisation, collective bargaining, is the only defence of wages and conditions available to the worker: which is why, in America, where profit is King (and you thought you lived in a Republic and a Democracy, didn't you? Didn't you? Idiot. It's the economy, stupid) unionisation is a virtual anathema.
A real world example, drawn from my own experience. A few weeks ago, just as I was about to begin my present Contract, I was contacted by a Technical Recruiter. The position they wanted to discuss involved the use of GE SmallWorld, a suite of GIS software that's universally acknowledged to be the 'gold-standard' of geographic information systems, one with which almost no one in America is familiar. As the agent for the Recruiter said, he could count on one hand those who had my experience and were available for employment. There was however a major difficulty. I would have had to move to California, and while the rate of pay offered was ten thousand a year better than that here, once the difference in rates of cost of living was taken into account I would have been earning the equivalent of five thousand a year less than the rate I currently enjoy.
The manager of the project in which I would have been involved had a fixed budget and was utterly intransigent; nothing would compel him to offer a higher base-rate. Despite the rarity of people with the kind of experience he wanted that manager will, if he can afford to be patient, eventually find someone who will accept it. And when he does, that manager will communicate his success to other managers, who will then be able to lower their expectations of the kind of pay they will have to offer in order to secure the services they need.
Competition between workers lowers pay rates - unless they combine and resist.
It was Marx's contention that this impulse toward combination on the part of workers, as a defence of their interests in the face of the diametrically opposed interest of employers, would ultimately lead to a universal combination of workers - first nationally, and then internationally.
Clearly, that hasn't happened. Why not? In essence, because we've been bought. Bought, and deluded into the belief that the possession of things (SUVs, a cure for vaginal warts, a plasma TV) is the hallmark of success and freedom. Nothing could further from the truth. You possess nothing - except your capacity to labor, which is sold to others in return for cash. Power and freedom are not found in the number of things you have in your house (and being one commodity among others you are only one thing among other things) but in possession of control over the means of production. A man who owns the tools, and has the knowledge, necessary to actually make something, to produce something, is infinitely more free than even the wealthiest manager of Corporate America. Why? Because, to the extent that he is a producer and not a consumer, he has seperated himself from the world of commodities and asserted his essential nature as a creative individual.
That's the delusion. Welfare is the price we accept in return for our freedom. Welfare is the drug that neutralizes our sense of ourselves as one group opposed and exploited by another. Welfare is what allows us to fend off starvation and despair, allows us to live in idleness and depravity, instead of uniting together to overthrow the source of that idleness, the source of that depravity, the source of starvation and despair. What is that source? The periodic convulsions created when too many things are produced while too few people have the money to buy them; or, when there is too much money in circulation and not enough things to buy; or, when there are money and things aplenty - but no one wants to buy them. In other words, the fluctuations of a Capitalist economy, combined with the irrationality of commodities who think they can become people through buying other commodities.
Marx was the most perceptive analyst of the inner life of Capitalism that's ever drawn breath. But he was also long-winded and horribly obscure - which is why I haven't quoted from the Communist Manifesto at greater length. He was also, in many ways, a would-be Prophet of the New Age that would, so he thought, inevitably succeed the Era of Capitalist Production. His analysis fails at the point that he ceases to describe the inner workings of Capitalism and attempts to predict the future. He believed that a universal combination of Labor against Capital would occur; he believed that a new kind of human being would appear as a result, and that a new kind of society ("from each according to his ability; to each according to his need") would appear in consequence.
Plainly, he was wrong. He failed even to guess at our readiness to be bought by the seductions of Welfarism. He failed to imagine a world in which possession of inanimate objects can be, and is, equated with competence as a human being. And he in no way imagined the unbelievable wealth that Capitalism is capable of producing: wealth which allows every Capitalist State to support a caste of unproductive beggars who would rather live from the 'charity' of the State than make the effort necessary to overthrow that State.
'Communism', his panacea for all the ills of humanity, never emerged - except, for the briefest of moments, in the original 'soviets' that sprang up among Russian soldiers and peasants in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic defeat of Tsarist Russia in WW1. Those Soviets were ruthlessly suppressed, first by Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and later by Stalin alone - after Lenin's death and Trotsky's murder.
Marx expected that the Dawn of Communist Man would occur in the heavily industrialised heartlands of the Europe of his day: probably in Germany, possibly in Britain. The very last thing he expected was that Russia would become the home of his 'Revolution of the Proletariat' - a nation of illiterate peasants governed by a feudal aristocracy barely more developed than the serfs who suffered their rule.
I imagine that, if he were alive today, he'd be a very disappointed man - and an ardent unionist.