Introduction

In my first post in this series Limitations of a Radical’s Views on Class Exploitation: The Blog of the Toronto Radical John Clarke, Part One , I started with an hypothesis: many activists in practice assume that it is unnecessary to engage in theory in any rigorous manner (even if they claim the contrary) since they engage in practice—they are activists. John Clarke, a former major organizer of the defunct organization Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, illustrates this hypothesis in many ways and, in particular, in relation to his very inadequate characterization of the exploitation of workers by employers.

In the first post, I referred to Clarke’s most extensive post on the exploitation of workers on his blog (see his post titled “Truth Is on the Side of the Oppressed https://johnclarkeblog.com/node/97); I again include it as an appendix at the end of this post. I showed the inadequacy of Clarke’s  belief that being a radical and engaging in practice or being an activist were sufficient to gain an understanding of  the specific nature of the employer’s exploitation of workers. Being a radical, an activist or even a revolutionary is hardly sufficient for understanding the nature of the exploitation of workers by employers.

In the second post in this series (Limitations of a Radical’s Views on Class Exploitation: The Toronto Radical John Clarke’s Blog, Part Two), I showed that the exchange relation between workers and employers (the selling and buying of the commodity workers sell to employers) hid the exploitation of workers from workers and that Clarke vastly underestimates the importance of such a situation for organizing workers into a coherent force for eliminating the class power of employers and the associated economic, political and social institutions and structures. 

Despite Clarke’s claim that: “The present period we live in, a time of societal crisis when … the importance of socialist ideas is greatly elevated,” he provides the working class with inadequate tools for understanding and developing socialist ideas–which includes an understanding and critique of their own exploitation and oppression.

Clarke’s Inadequate Characterization of the Obstacles for Workers Becoming Conscious of Their Own Exploitation by Employers

Clarke may point out that he did point out that there are processes that hide the nature of capitalist exploitation in a capitalist society whereas in earlier societies it was more evident. He writes:

This exploitative reality isn’t nearly as apparent as it was for slaves, who could readily see that they worked as directed and only got back what their owners provided in the form of food, clothing and shelter. … b. For modern workers, though they widely view their employer as an exploiter, the unpaid portion of their labour is not immediately identifiable. The agreement they enter into with the capitalist creates the illusion that they are being paid for the work they perform.

This view, though correct, vastly understates the nature of the problem, and it is such an understatement because it is vague. There are systematic mechanisms inherent in the process of capitalist exploitation that prevent workers from realizing that they are exploited in the sense of producing a surplus of value or producing profit (or in performing surplus labour in the case of government workers). 

There are objective relations between workers and employers that result in the workers’ exploitation by employers–but such exploitation is not visible–unlike earlier kinds of society (for the nature of exploitation and how to calculate the degree of exploitation, see for example The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Magna International Inc., One of the Largest Private Employers in Toronto, Part One). 

There are various mechanisms which hide the nature of class exploitation of employers from the working class. I now will outline, briefly, some other mechanisms that hide the nature of the exploitation of workers, in addition to the exchange relation between workers and employers. 

The Second Mechanism that Hides the Exploitation of Workers: Workers’ Income Varies with the Number of Hours Worked

Secondly, another reason why exploitation remains hidden from workers is that there seems to be a direct relation between the level of income of workers and the numbers of hours worked: the greater the number of workers, the greater the total wage, and the fewer the number of hours worked, the smaller the total wage. This fact involves the illusion that what workers sell is their labour and not their labour power (their capacity to engage in work), with the consequence that the difference between the wages and benefits received by workers and the value produced by them vanishes from sight. 

The Third Mechanism that Hides the Exploitation of Workers: Previous Rounds of Exploitation Are Hidden by the Present Exchange Between Workers and Employers 

Both the part of the money used by employers to hire workers and the part used to purchase means of production are derived from the exploitation of workers in previous rounds of production and circulation (with the exception of original accumulation of capital, which involves violence, robbery, murder and so forth)–but given that an exchange of equivalent values occurs in the present exchange relation between workers and employers, past exploitation vanishes from sight.

The Fourth Mechanism that Hides the Exploitation of Workers: Part of the Surplus of Value Produced (Profit) Is Used to Purchase Means for Buying and Selling Commodities, to Hire Workers and to Provide a Provide for Commercial Employers

In the fourth place, there is a broad division in a capitalist economy within the private sector in relation to the actual production or generation of value and a surplus of value and the conversion of the produced value and surplus value of commodities into money, of money into commodities and various financial transactions (such as the selling and buying of securities–assets such as stocks and bonds that are meant to yield a profit for those who purchase them). Part of the surplus value produced is shifted to purchase the conditions for such buying and selling (vaults, safes, physical buildings, warehouses, carts, shelves, ATMs, cash counters, sorters, counterfeit detectors, computers, online banking platforms, etc.), for wages of cashiers, tellers, financial advisors, etc. and profit for the investors in such institutions. This shift or redistribution of surplus value makes it further appear that surplus value does not arise from the exploitation of workers.

The Fifth Mechanism that Hides the Exploitation of Workers: Transfer of Surplus Value from One Individual Employer to Another According to the Class Criterion of Employers: The Equal Rate of Profit 

In addition to exchange relations hiding the real nature of exploitation and the division of the capitalist economy into production and circulation (buying and selling), distribution relations also hide the nature of exploitation. Although I have tried to calculate the rate of exploitation of specific workers working for specific employers (see for example The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Magna International Inc., One of the Largest Private Employers in Toronto, Part One), the amount of surplus value or profit particular employers receive need not and indeed rarely coincides with the surplus value that their workers produce. The amount of surplus value (s) or profit employers receive is mediated through the distribution of the surplus value produced according to the rule of equal rates of profit for equal amount of total capital invested (for an example of this complicating issue, see my response to a comment made by Biswadip Dasgupta on my post  The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Air Canada, One of the Largest Private Employers in Canada). As Desai remarks, page 56:

The role of price mechanism and exchange in Marx’ s theory is to mask surplus value and make it appear legitimate as profit. The profit of anyone particular firm, industry or Department does not equal the surplus value produced by it. … The link between profits and surplus value becomes complex and in fighting against exploitation workers cannot fight against their own industry’s owners in isolation; they have to fight the whole system.

What workers face immediately, however, is a particular employer so that the fight has its point of departure there but has class exploitation as its background and supposition.

There are undoubtedly other aspects of capitalism that hide the source of a surplus of value or profit from the workers. The above should suffice to show that Clarke does not grasp the extent to which workers are prevented from understanding that they are exploited–without anyone intending to prevent them from doing so.  The exploitation of workers is hidden from workers due to the very nature of capitalist exploitation and requires a definite theory to unearth its existence, nature and implications.

Conclusion

Clarke’s vague reference to hidden mechanisms of exploitation constitutes a major understatement of the nature of the problem of organizing workers for the purpose of ending the class power of employers and the associated economic, political and social institutions and structures.

In addition to the immediate relation of workers as sellers facing employers as buyers, at least four other mechanisms hide the nature of workers’ exploitation: the variation in workers’ wages and benefits with the amount of hours worked; the vanishing of former exploitation in the immediate exchange relation between workers and employers; the use of surplus value produced to purchase means for buying and selling commodities, hiring workers and providing a profit for commercial employers; and transfers of the surplus of value from one employer to another according to the class distribution principle of a tendency for employers to obtain the same rate of profit per unit of capital invested.

Without taking into these systemic mechanisms for hiding exploitation, it is highly unlikely that Clarke’s practical efforts will bear fruit in the long run in contributing to the abolition of the class power of employers and its associated economic, political and social institutions and structures. 

Appendix

“TRUTH IS ON THE SIDE OF THE OPPRESSED”

Submitted byJohnnew onFri, 02/24/2023 – 19:27

 

The title of this article is taken from a speech that Malcolm X gave in Harlem, New York City, in 1964. In the course of it, he told the crowd that “Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.”As a fighter on the side of the oppressed, Malcolm offered a vital insight that day on the great power of the truth as a weapon in the struggle to transform society and his proposition contained a lot more than wishful thinking.

 

Ruling classes have always known that the truth can be enormously dangerous and have generally kept a large portion of it off limits to the mass of people.Class liesCorporate news sources and social media provide an ongoing torrent of evidence that those who are dominant in this society wish us to accept a world view that conforms to their interests. A few examples of what I mean might be useful. The occupation of Palestine and an intensifying effort to complete the process of colonial dispossession unfolds before our eyes. Yet, how many media accounts do we read of Israeli attacks Palestinians that are presented as if two quite equally matched opponents were confronting each other?

 

The ‘clash’ has become the term of choice to render invisible an oppressive reality and a massive disparity in terms of armed power.The Zionist project is but one particularly brutal manifestation of the imperialist world order. There is a global division between oppressed and oppressor countries that involves vast inequality and crushing poverty. Yet the most powerful and influential institutions of global capitalism would have us believe that huge gains have been made in ‘poverty reduction.’ The dubious methodology they employ to advance this analysis has been very credibly refuted but their ability to dominate the official discourse protects their myth making from successful challlenge.There is a huge body of evidence concerning the egalitarian nature of the hunter gatherer societies that existed for tens of thousands of years. It is also compellingly argued that the emergence of social classes, private property and inequality were linked to the development of agriculture perhaps 10,000 years ago. Still, the claim that the competitive social values of capitalist society reflect an unchanging ‘human nature’ is promoted relentlessly as common wisdom.The accelerating climate disaster that humanity faces may have taken many of us by surprise but not the fossil fuel companies. We learn that Exxon has known since the 70s that carbon emissions were going to lead us into this dire situation. Yet they deliberately misled the world, with a systematic campaign of climate denial propaganda. These days, the cat is so far out of the bag that crude denial has had to give way to delay and evasion but these are being pursued with vigour. The myth of ‘green capitalism’ is being fostered and the dubious promise of the tech fix is advanced with flourish, even as the destructive behaviour of the oil and gas sector proceeds unabated.The distortion of truth and the promotion of falsehood are elements of this society because they reflect ruling class interests. This class can’t possibly acknowledge the full dimensions of its exploitative role. Even if millions of workers appreciate that it is their labour makes their employers rich, a precise understanding of the nature of the exploitation is discouraged and countered in a thousand ways. A steady flow of counter arguments are advanced, ranging from the billionaire philanthropist, to the ‘Great Reset’, to the ‘trickle down theory’ that would have us believe we will all somehow share in the bounty created by capitalist profit making.Apart from the need to deceive working class people, the capitalist class is incapable of looking reality in the face for a more fundamental reason. It’s ability to survive and function demands that it must consider the system it presides over as the highest form of society while adamantly denying its historically limited shelf life. The capitalists and their intellectual enablers could never even consider the kind of conclusions of Friedrich Engels drew in ‘Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.’‘On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social production forces.’In his ‘History and Class Consciousness,’ Georg Lukacs, offered some important insights into this question of how fully a class is able embrace social reality.‘It must not be thought, however, that all classes ripe for hegemony have a class consciousness with the same inner structure. Everything hinges on the extent to which they can become conscious of the actions they need to perform in order to obtain and organise power.’

He went on to argue that

‘The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological. The class consciousness of the bourgeoisie may well be able to reflect all the problems of organisation entailed by its hegemony and by the capitalist transformation and penetration of total production. But it becomes obscured as soon as it is called upon to face problems that remain within its jurisdiction but which point beyond the limits of capitalism.’

No ruling class can possibly draw the stark conclusion, however overwhelming the evidence may be, that it has become historically anachronistic. Surely, the relentless pursuit of oil and gas profits that are drawn from productive activity that threatens the very existence of life on this planet must be considered a vindication of Lukacs’ conclusions and the strongest possible proof of the durability of the class lie.

Class truth

There is now an obvious need to consider the other side of the question. If the capitalist class can’t look reality in the face, how do things stand for the working class? I’ll argue that the the very same factor of class interests that Lukacs considered drives the exploited class towards a full and clear understanding of the workings of this society and the influences that limit its time on earth. As true as this is, however, there are some very substantial countervailing tendencies that serve to block that understanding.

First of all, oppressed classes reflect their oppression in their consciousness. In ‘The German Ideology,’ Marx and Engels famously asserted that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are, in any age, the ruling ideas.’ This is so much the case that most working class people accept those dominant ideas most of the time to a very considerable degree. It is at times of social crisis, when masses of people are drawn into struggle, that the grip is loosened and a leap in thinking can occur.

Moreover, such leaps in thinking are only possible because they are resisted for greater or longer periods. The development of working class consciousness is therefore uneven and periodically explosive. As Trotsky put it in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution,’

‘The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of “demagogues.”’

It is also true that, while capitalism has produced an exploited class that carries out the labour process in a form that provides opportunities for resistance and social transformation that earlier societies lacked, the function of exploitative is rendered less clear. The slaves worked for the slave owner because they were his property and acted under physical compulsion. The feudal peasants were tied to the land of by law and custom and had very little ability to alter that. Things are somewhat different for modern workers, however.

Since we are considering class lies, the mythical ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ is one of the biggest in this society. As Marx showed, the wealth of the capitalists, however much they may see it as resulting from their business skills and competitive antics, comes from that portion of the workers’ labour for which they receive no compensation. If workers put in eight hours’ labour and get paid for only four, the unpaid portion goes into the capitalist’s pocket. The ‘surplus value’ stays with the exploiter.

The workers aren’t actually paid for the work they perform. The capitalists buys the commodity of ‘labour power’ or the ability to work from workers and pays them at its value. This is determined by the value of the goods and services the workers must purchase in order to renew their labour power. Once the capitalists have paid for it, however, they have in their possession a commodity that creates value and they milk it for all its worth. Indeed, this particular commodity has the capacity to create far greater value than it is itself worth.

This exploitative reality isn’t nearly as apparent as it was for slaves, who could readily see that they worked as directed and only got back what their owners provided in the form of food, clothing and shelter. For modern workers, though they widely view their employer as an exploiter, the unpaid portion of their labour is not immediately identifiable. The agreement they enter into with the capitalist creates the illusion that they are being paid for the work they perform. As Marx put it in ‘Wage Labour and Capital,’

‘(Workers) would all agree upon one point: that wages are the amount of money which the capitalist pays for a certain period of work or for a certain amount of work. Consequently, it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power.’

Class interests

These difficulties in arriving at the truth notwithstanding, it remains clearly in the interests of the working class to embrace it. If the capitalist class needs to conceal the exploitative process and pretend that the society that has developed around it is unchanging and inevitable, the working class is in the opposite situation. It has an interest in understanding the nature of its exploitation, so as to abolish it. If the social and economic system that oppresses it is of limited duration, that is not an inconvenient reality to be denied but an opportunity to be acted upon.

What emerges in this, however, is the need for a very high level of comprehension. When the capitalist class took power from its feudal predecessors, it had neither the ability to fully understand the social change it was initiating or an interest in doing so. It could wrest power from a rival exploiting class with very imprecise ideas that were significantly couched in religious terms.

Since the capitalist class was only a replacement set of exploiters, it needed a mass of people to send against against its feudal rivals. It is now very clear the promises of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ should have been taken with a much larger pinch of salt than they were. Even as Cromwell set in motion a revolutionary army against the kingly power, his leading generals were informing the lower orders, at the Putney Debates, that their share of the new liberty would be strictly rationed.

If an understanding of social reality, is in the interests of an exploited class, then that understanding won’t be arrived at through a process of contemplation. The class lie of the capitalist class must be exposed and refuted in the course of the class struggle. Having said that, there is also a decisive role for analysis and political organization.

However, these two factors are entirely interconnected. A clear understanding of the exploitative nature of this society can’t be discerned simply from direct experience of the labour process as a worker. On the other hand, Karl Marx could only grasp the real exploitative mechanisms at work under capitalistm because he was a revolutionary and, as such, was free of the restrictive class interests that Lukacs described.

The present period we live in, a time of societal crisis when the class struggle is escalating and the importance of socialist ideas is greatly elevated, makes the truth particularly precious. The working class, in all its great diversity comprising the many pitted against thefew, has an interest in understanding the fundamental limitations of this society and in fighting for a new one. It does so, moreover, not as a new exploiting class but as a social force that can bring exploitation and oppression to an end. In this regard, it has nothing whatever to hide or to hide from.

On that day in Harlem

in 1964, Malcolm X delivered a message that he lived by and that we need to act upon. “Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”