#wage labor
I’m still very unemployed, but I did get a one week dog sitting job and honestly getting paid $200 to watch a very cute and sweet german Shepard for the week is what my mental health needs rights now.
You may think that in describing anarchy as organisation, I am being deliberately paradoxical. Anarchy you may consider to be, by definition, the opposite of organisation. But the word really means something quite different; it means the absence of government, the absence of authority. It is, after all, governments which make and enforce the laws that enable the “haves” to retain control of social assets to the exclusion of the “have-nots.” It is, after all, the principle of authority which ensures that people will work for someone else for the greater part of their lives, not because they enjoy or have any control over their work, but because to do so is their only means of livelihood.
-Colin Ward, Anarchy as Organisation
Man, like all living beings, adapts and accustoms himself to the conditions under which he lives and passes on acquired habits. Thus, having been born and bred in bondage, when the descendants of a long line of slaves started to think, they believed that slavery was an essential condition of life and freedom seemed impossible to them. Similarly, workers who for centuries were obliged, and therefore accustomed, to depend for work, that is bread, on the goodwill of the master, and to see their lives always at the mercy of the owners of the land and of capital, ended by believing that it is the master who feeds them, and ingenuously ask one how would it be possible to live if there were no masters.
-Errico Malatesta, The Word Anarchy
An addition to the debate on simple and capitalist commodity production — and a couple points to consider Marx’s theories on “value” and “surplus value”:
The argument forged by Marx suggests that relations of simple production of commodities (ie values/ exchange values) and the law of commodity exchange (ie the law of value) do not in themselves produce surplus value. Capitalism, as opposed to simple (ie, pre capitalist) commodity production, can only begin with production of surplus value. Conditions of production — and expansion — of surplus value defines capitalism. This constitutes its identifying feature.
As understood by Marx, accumulation of surplus value is a necessary function of capital; “necessary” in as much as representing its source of profit; and requires that workers produce more than the value equivalent of the daily average of commodities required for their subsistence — thus exploitation. Nevertheless, the initial laws of simple commodity exchange and relations associated with value obtain within capitalism — albeit, in a modified form — which Marx called the “average rate of profit” — such that production of commodities and exchange of equivalent values results in a greater sum of values — surplus value — profit — bestowed upon capital. Thus, as Marx indicates, equality of value form/ commodity owners coincides with exploiting workers and wage labor under capitalism.
As explained above, profits on capital in accordance with the law of value is one of the most glaring contradictions of capitalism. And the solution to the paradox lies in the unique capacity of labor power to produce more exchange value than its own. But still leaves us with, as we witness, the blind mechanisms of commodity production — which continue to interfere with satisfying human need.
