PROFIT KILLS

The engineer was interviewed amidst the ruble of the earthquake in Turkey. "How many of these buildings would still be standing if the proper materials would have been used in their construction?" the TV-reporter asked. "All of them", the engineer answered with a tired voice, "all of them". Thousands were killed in Turkey and hundreds of thousands made homeless, not by an earthquake but by profit. The purpose of building houses in this society is not to shelter people. It is to make profit. If this can be done by providing people with a sturdy home, fine. If not, the cheapest materials are used to knock together houses that are doomed to crumble when the earth moves in Turkey or Taiwan, when a hurricane hits Florida or when rivers overflow in Mexico or China. The builders plead innocence. If they followed proper procedures, they say, their rates of profit would be so low that investors would shun them, and they could build no more houses and millions more would have to live in shanty-towns. Would that be any better?

The purpose of producing medicine is not to fight disease either. When earlier this year, South-Africa started to make cheap medicine to slow the epidemic of AIDS which had infected millions of South-Africans and killed millions there and in neighboring countries, the entire pharmaceutical industry of the US rose in protest and the Clinton-administration threatened economic sanctions. No matter that people are dying like flies because they can't afford the prices which the pharmaceutical multinationals are charging, intellectual property-rights were infringed! If this became a common practice, so these companies say, they would be greatly discouraged from investing in the development of new medicines, and diseases would spread. Would that be any better?

Similar examples of the crazy dilemmas which capitalism is imposing on society can be found in any sector of economic activity. The purpose of agriculture is certainly not to feed the hungry. Otherwise, how can it be explained that the most productive countries are sitting on mountains of agricultural surpluses, and are paying farmers not to farm, while each year 30 million people die of hunger and hundreds of millions suffer malnutrition?

And so on, and so on. Producing for profit, the basic rule of our society, has become truly absurd, completely irrational. To hide this absurdity has become the prime function of all mass media and assorted ideologies. In the US, where this article happens to be written, it has become customary, even on the left, to characterize the present state of the economy as  "good times", while in fact statistics of the Congressional Budget Office show that, for the majority of Americans, net-income has shrunk considerably since 1977 and homelessness and hunger have risen. Only through the window of the ruling class are we allowed to look at the world.

Profit kills. That is nothing new. It always has, throughout capitalism's history. Not because capitalism is blood-thirsty per se, but because, when faced with a choice between profit and other considerations, it doesn't hesitate. Nothing is more fundamental to this society than the drive for profit. That doesn't make us nostalgic for pre-capitalist days. For centuries, the drive for profit was also a creative force, unleashing a tremendous growth in productivity and human development, freeing mankind from the inevitability of scarcity and all its implications. Even in human thought, capitalism brought  "enlightenment", the establishment of the rational progress of humanity as a conscious goal for society. The slogans "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" or "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" were never to be taken too literally and always were subordinate to the preservation of profit, but still they represented a giant step forward.

Then came the bloody turning point of 1914. Just as capitalism had enlisted all social forces in production, it now enlisted them all in destruction.  The purpose remained the same: profit. More then three quarters of the war fatalities of the last 500 years have occurred since 1914. And the number grows every day, in the Balkans, in Timor, in Ethiopia, in Chechnya to name but the most recent slaughterhouses.

Something had changed drastically in the early part of this century. Through the development of science and technology and their generalized application in production, capitalism had created a system of mass-production, capable of eradicating scarcity. Yet capitalism was born out of scarcity and cannot function without it. Its absence, in a capitalist context, does not mean abundance but overproduction. Because the market-mechanism is based on measuring the exchange-value of commodities by the social labor-time that is required for their production, global demand, purchasing power, can grow only to the degree that more labor-time is expended in production. Yet the growth of supply was now no longer based so much on adding more labor-power  as on subtracting it, replacing it with technology. This fundamental, insoluble contradiction between supply and demand, between the creation of real wealth and the creation of capitalist exchange-value, became a deadly threat to what capitalism is all about: profit.

The preservation of profit now required a steep loss in the exchange-value of all that is traded, a drastic cheapening of capital and labor-power. That's why the decadent phase of capitalism is so destructive: the greater the contradiction, the more value must disappear to make newly created value more profitable, so as to rekindle the flame of production.

Contrary to what some expected, this new phase did not spell the end of capitalism's development. Devalorization made room for new growth, reorganization and technological progress extended capitalism's scale and reach, which alleviated its contradictions. But these contradictions continued to build subterraneanly, forcing again massive devalorization, violent destruction.

Today, capitalism's extension-potential is nearly exhausted. The global assembly-line is humming but precisely because it is so productive, there's ever less room on it. Only the strongest competitors can maintain a relative prosperity, but even for them there are ominous signs as more and more capital shuns productive investment to seek refuge in financial assets, building up a bubble that is doomed to burst. The fact that a third of the global workforce, more than a billion people, cannot find work testifies to the degree to which global production is blocked by dwindling profits. More and more, the preservation of profits requires cutting corners, lowering production costs through any means possible, even when this means devastating the environment, subjecting workers to unbearable living and working conditions, or sacrificing quality, regardless of the consequences for the safety of consumers, as crumbled buildings in Turkey and dioxin-laden chickens in Belgium illustrate. In more and more places, the shrinkage of profits invite violence, corruption, and mafia-practices. In the weakest, least cohesive countries, states are fracturing as different segments of the dominant class fight each other over the shrinking pie. Or else the state tries to defend its cohesion by creating, with genocidal rhetoric, a hated common enemy, a scapegoat-minority. Capitalism's own crisis provides the instruments for these battles in the form of millions of uprooted people, many of them young men who were never integrated into a working life and are vulnerable to the erotic seduction of an all-is-permitted culture of violence. Meanwhile, the stronger countries try to contain the rot where it threatens their own profits by intervening militarily, advancing their own particular interests against their rivals at the same time.

Left unchecked, this destructive dynamic will gather steam and engulf the world in a new holocaust. Not a replay of World War II, not one giant nuclear holocaust (although that danger can't be discounted forever) but one in which bloody conflicts multiply and combine into an unprecedented orgy of self-destruction.  Some of this is explored in this issue of IP. The alternative to this grim perspective is at the same time very simple and enormously complex: to produce for human needs instead of for profit. Technically, this is more possible than ever. The fast development of information and communication technology has made it a lot easier. There is no doubt that it is feasible to create abundance in regard to the basic needs of all humans, and not just the basic needs, and to organize production so that all able-bodied people can work and there is a lot of free time for everyone -- and to find in the exploration of that leisure-time itself an endless source of creative activity. Of work, you might say, although it's not imaginable that 'work' would still resemble what it is today, when the elimination of drudgery becomes the conscious goal of society.

But what this requires above all is the conscious will of humanity to make it real, to organize and control this revolution. We believe that this will can only be forged in struggle, in revolt against the class whose existence depends on the perpetuation of the absurdity of production for profit. Only the autonomous struggle of the working class, the great majority of society whose work makes the wheels of the world economy turn and whose will can stop them and change their direction, provides this hope. But the working class cannot realize its potential until it puts itself in the picture. To see what it can do, it must see itself.

We revolutionaries are here and must come together to tear away the curtains of ideology that hide the absurdity and truly horrendous perspective of continued capitalist rule, and to hold  a mirror to the proletariat: see clearly, see the danger, see yourself, see your power. Recognize the necessity and the possibility. They're here. Now.

INTERNATIONALIST

PERSPECTIVE

[from Internationalist Perspective #36, spring 2000]