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 worse?
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 worse?
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. 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
Originally Published in Internationalist Perspective #36, spring
2000
No War But the Class War
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