Link to originalcommodity fetishism, reserve army of labour, malthusianism (overpopulation)
We encounter commodities in finished form. We don’t see the labour that has gone into it, so we don’t understand why a thing costs what it does. “The price is guided by the law of the value”, and you can’t understand values as things themselves, but you must look at the labour time that goes into production.
→ Because this is hidden, relations between things cover relations between people. Marx calls this commodity fetishism.
It mystifies the underlying relations.
Example: technology has the capacity to shorten labour time. But work has to be done by a worker in order to put it to use (and create new value), just like it took work to produce the tech.
They are not eliminating human labour, they are degrading it (?) and making it cheaper (e.g. sweatshop workers filtering images for AI training; programming jobs becoming way cheaper). That’s what capitalism does best, called progressive accumulation of capital.
Capitalists are not satisfied to feed themselves on their profits, they must turn those profits into new capital, increase the scale of production, increase the productivity of machines.
→ The worker becomes an appendage to the machine!
→ Capitalists can reduce the number of workers and pay them less.
Capital is increasingly dedicated to the machines / means of production (see TRPF), and a section of the working class is increasingly pushed to the side, condemned to idleness - temporarily or permanently (the reserve army of labour), while those in the factories are condemned to overwork.
→ Downwards pressure on the actively working people’s wages.
Today, ome of these extra workers are utilized through things like “gig work” / freelance work, lying around for the capitalists to use for whatever purpose, only useful so long, as they can produce surplus.
This is also where the idea of overpopulation looks at it backwards. It’s not that there are too many people / that the working class has grown too much, but capital has grown too much, and increasingly cannot absorb the working class! It reproduces and even depends on the division between the active and idle army!
“There’s too many People / too many old people (we’re all living too long, according to the capitalists) / too few young people (there aren’t enought to sustain their demands on the healthcare system).”
Well, why can’t we produce more with less labor? That has been the whole history justification of capitalism, that it was abloe to develop the productive forces, such that less labour could produce more wealth.
The real crisis isn’t that there’s too many old people, but that we live in a senile system.
We already have enough resources to feed and care for everyone.
If capitlism would develop the productive forces we could have fully automated luxury lifes, live far beyond the current life-expectancy, reduce the retirement age to less and less.
Even utopian capitalist economists keep talking about all the “problem of leasure time” a future society will face due to automation.
Link to originalIn a few generations the main problem will be what we’ll do with all our free time.
This seems like a joke to most workers, and it is, his prophecy never came true because this will never be realized under capitalism.
Under socialism, work will be reduced too a couple years, like a service. The rest of the time you can dedicate to your lifelong education, arts, sciences, leisure, and the running of society.
Link to originalDegrowth: A modern form of malthusianism
Proclaims to be anti-capitalist. Has no scientific approach. “Growth-ideology”, whereas Marx wrote 3 Volumes of capital…
Growth isn’t just a mindset, but a do or die question (accumulation) in a race with eachother. It’s not a tap we can just turn on and off.
It’s like the the argument of keynsianism turned upside down / the other side of reformism. One side says:
“We can stimulate growth, that’s a good thing”, while the degrowthers argue for clamping down on it.
… there is a word for when you don’t have growth under capitalism… it’s called a recession. And it usually doesn’t work out so well for people.
Carbon emissions dropped very fast during the covid pandemic. Degrowthers celebrated, but for the majority of people, that meant suffering, the piling up of debts, inflation, job insecurity.
If you abandon a scientific approach and treat the economy as an ideological question, you fall back into the same utopian socialism that Marx was criticising.