From
1948 to 1973, hourly compensation grew in step with the productivity of the
typical American worker. This means that, for about a generation’s time,
economic prosperity amongst workers in the United States virtually reflected
productivity. In the ensuing forty years, however, inequality exploded. The
Washington Post has reported that income for the bottom 90 percent of American
households has only nominally grown since 1973, when this group commanded
nearly 70 percent of national income. In her article entitled “The Capitalist
Machine: Computerization, Workers’ Power, And The Decline In Labor’s Share
Within U.S. Industries”, sociologist Tali Kristal evinces the dismal disconnect
between productivity and pay spanning 1973 to 2011. Despite the fact that
general productivity grew some 80 percent in those four decades alone, Kristal
argues that reparations to workers did not follow suit. Rather, the
upper decile accumulated grossly disproportionate shares. For that matter,
workers generally saw compensation limp along, increasing about 10 percent in
forty years. By 2013, the bottom 90 percent of American households
received little more than half of all national income.
Things
are changing, and the drastic transformation in wealth distribution may not inveigle
Americans quite like it has. The World Socialist Web Site recently published
an article that addressed the US’s war on basic democratic-economic rights. One byproduct
of America’s grossly inegalitarian distribution of wealth happens to be the
spark in social unrest and dissidence among students and workers. The
plutocracy continues to deploy militarized police and other state-sponsored
means of political repression in order to quell public demonstrations of
disapproval. Why? Well, mass unemployment and wage stagnation have plagued
workers during the last six years since the 2008 financial banksterism crisis, even
after taxpayer and state intervention rescued the US economy from annihilation
by disaster capitalism. In other news, wealth has more than doubled for the
super-rich since 2009 alone. The latest edition of the Credit Suisse Global
Wealth Databook holds that 10
percent of Americans own more than 75 percent of the wealth. Thus, the
US happens to be the most unequal of all “advanced economies” in the world.
Technology
and globalization have also caused a “wage surge,” which grew shares of upper income
for a modicum of workers—the so-called “working rich.” Nevertheless, the
concentration of wealth in the US still provides for only a few capitalists to
invest in fixed capital. In the US, some might invest in “fixed assets,” such
as technology and skilled workers, or factories. While this investment does not
lessen the risk relative to potential rewards any more so than, say, employing
a large workforce at lower wages to do the same amount of work (or, more so
than increasing absolute surplus value rather than relative surplus value), it
does mean employing fewer workers at possibly higher rates of efficiency. This
can also work to the advantage of the capitalist class in a
super-industrialized nation like the US.
According
to former US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, 400 Americans have more wealth
than the bottom 150 million combined. This means that very few Americans truly
have the individual agency and capital to make the above-mentioned investments
in fixed capital. And so, if technology has equipped a smaller number of workers
to be able produce more, then those investments surely profit the already rich
elites. That the supply of workers seeking skilled jobs well exceeds the demand
thereof (and which contributes to general unemployment) is yet another quandary.
This predicament can drive middle-income workers to seek out lower-income
employment so as to afford the amenities that allow workers to subsist. Even
the Wall Street Journal described the growing use of technology as a lynchpin
for inducing greater capitalist gains than compensation for the “educated”
worker.
The
layperson might rightfully ask why education matters so much here. The fact is
that education has been a key investment in American human capital since at
least the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Plans stipulated a public university be
established in the Ohio Territory so that “morality and knowledge being
necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the
means of education [should] forever be encouraged.” Today, students assume
loans to pay for education in the centuries-old hope that investing in their
own human capital will eventually land them a job that pays. Yet, in his
article entitled “The Legacy of Debt”, sociologist David Fasenfest reports that
bank profits from “private student loans exceed that of Apple Computing and
Exxon-Mobil combined.” He also notes that student loan “indebtedness” amounts
to more than one trillion dollars, making it “one of the largest categories of
personal debt” for Americans. Before would-be students even enter the
workforce, their loans already serve to enrich the increasingly plutocratic capitalist
class, which will invariably seek to make them into lifelong wage-slaves after graduation—now
an induction into servitude.
If technology has played a role in polarizing
the American workforce (beginning with loans for schooling), then it should be
recognized that technology and fixed capital have always been leveraging
implements central to the capitalist class’s social overlording. Technological
advancements have undermined solidarity among workers, which has in turn caused
the dissolution of unified worker action throughout much of the US. This has
also enabled a globalized economy to extract wealth without necessarily
increasing compensation for work, and without increasing the number of jobs
available. But technology in and of itself is not necessarily bad. Simply put,
it is just as any other element of the current global economic system: not
fully escaped from the gravity of capitalism or capitalism’s master class.
In 1867, Karl Marx published in Das
Kapital exactly why an element like technology might be used against
the workers themselves:
All
methods of the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of
accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means
for the development of these methods. It follows therefore that in proportion
as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or
low, must grow worse.
Accruals
of capital through profit, interest, rent, dividends, investment, etc., have
been main sources of income growth for the capitalist class in America in recent
decades. For workers, though, there has always been a far-reaching and
continual reduction of their share in national income despite generating wealth
through their labor. While capitalists gained extreme financial power over the
last forty years, and partly at the expense of stagnating worker’s
compensation, the increasing costs of healthcare, housing, and education have
continued to oppress workers well into the millennium. It is not safe to assume,
however, that students and workers, or the public in its entirety, have
finished reacting to this.
Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border.
Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist, Mateo Pimentel.
© Copyright 2014 by AxisofLogic.com
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