Simon Hannah - Why We Need an Anticapitalist Revolution

Resistance Books

Why we need anticapitalist revolution

Simon Hannah

Published April 2021
Resistance Books, London

ISBN: 978-0-902869-45-5 (print)
ISBN: 978-0-902869-46-2 (e-book)

Cover design Adam di Chiara

We live in a capitalist world. And that world is killing us. Capitalism is an economic system where production is privately owned by a small number of people, while the vast majority of us are forced to work for a wage. Our ability to work, our labour power, is a commodity, bought and sold on the market by the boss class. Our labour creates the profit that feeds the capitalist machine. As such, we are exploited wage labourers who are not paid the value of the work we produce. All around us there is capital . Capital is money that makes more money through becoming things, commodities . Capitalism commodifies everything and sells it back to us.

The constant struggle between the bosses and their workers is a feature of daily life. At the extreme end you have Amazon, with Jeff Bezos now the richest man on the planet while the logistics workers in Amazon warehouses are badly paid and overworked. Their every movement is tracked. While they are at work their bodies are not their own, they belong to the company. Toilet breaks are frowned on because they cut into work time. A device is strapped to their body, which makes a warning noise they you move too slowly. Efficiency is everything, and because time is money, profit determines your every move.

In such a place, if you try to organise and join a trade union (even though it is your legal right), then your hours will be cut and you can end up with no shifts. Anyone attempting to speak to workmates about a union is targetted and sacked. Staff are made to watch anti-union training videos about how if you have a problem at work, you should just speak to Human Resources. When you do, Human Resources put the companies interests first . The message is, whatever you do don t join a union . Security guards are even hired to keep union organisers from the premises.

Amazon is only an extreme version of what happens to workers all over the world. In factories making Apple products the work conditions are so bad many workers committed suicide by throwing themselves from the roof. What was the company s response? Not to slow down the work schedule or increase pay, but to install nets to prevent people falling to their deaths. Tesla has fired workers for trying to organise a union and moved its operations to escape paying taxes. During a global pandemic, workers are forced into work to do unnecessary jobs just to keep the profits flowing. And these are the cutting edge companies with huge public profiles and high stock prices. These companies are at the cutting edge of capitalism today

The COVID-19 pandemic shows the brutal reality of the contradictions of the capitalist system, that there is a rupture between people and planet, between our society and the environment, between human health and corporate profit. The drive for profit is killing people while apologists for the system complain about too much regulation and health and safety gone mad.

When you challenge these practices, it is clear that there is no workplace democracy. Every workplace has a strict management hierarchy. Command and control of labour is key to the smooth functioning of capitalism. Capitalism is good at divide and rule. Some managers start as workers and progress up through the management chain, their pay increased because they are being incorporated into the logic of capital. They become the representatives of capital in the workplace. Some workers have more opportunities at work than others; in a country such as Britain, Black workers or women workers have faced historic prejudice over what roles they can do. Today the wage gap between workers of colour or women workers and white male workers remains considerable.

So why is the world this way? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that what was going on was class struggle between the bosses and the workers over profit. Profit came not at the point of selling, but at the point of production. Profit is from not paying workers the full value of their work. Your wages are an agreed reimbursement for your time and energy, what is called your labour power (that is true whether you are a blue-collar manual worker, a white-collar office worker, a university academic, a nurse or in any other waged role). This is why all work is ultimately exploitative; even if you got a pay increase and live a relatively comfortable life as a worker, you are still not being paid the full value of your labour power if you were, your boss would make no profits.

The difference between your wages and the value of what you produce is surplus value. And it is this surplus value that is fought over when workers want a shorter working day or higher wages and the bosses want the opposite! When Google creates a HQ with bean bags and pool tables and hang out spaces, it is because they want to keep you in work longer, coding or whatever else it is you are hired to do.

One of the things Marx and Engels wrote about was the idea of alienation , that we are somehow cut off from ourselves and exist in a world where things are strangely detached. Even our bodies and nature is cut off, so we become frightened of our bodies breaking down, frightened they cannot get the work done. Men are separated from women, and women often do n o t even have control of their own bodies, to choose when to have sex and whether to have children. Our lives are dominated by these strange things called market forces , as if the economy exists beyond us even though we are a key part of it. We are surrounded by commodities, things that we are told we need to fulfil us. The world appears as a strange collection of commodities and power relations which we can barely grasp, yet alone hope to overcome. That is not to say that Marxists want a kind of primitive life without modern things, it is that the things we are, are things that we have made and then they are sold back to us by the capitalists.

Everyone can relate to how alienating work is under capitalism. A lot of it involves jobs we dont enjoy, which are not socially useful. Jobs people might originally enjoy, end up being exhausting. Because the capitalists decide what kind of work gets done you end up a bizarre situation every time there is an economic crisis with the bosses making millions unemployed because they there is no more work. When austerity is announced by the government, it is always working people who pay. But an economic crisis doesnt change the number of people who need food, clothes, local amenities, education, social work support, transport and so on. This is because the concept of work is captured and distorted by the capitalist system, it is not something natural and joyous as a part of human life and society, it is mercenary and economic in the most alienating sense.