[p2p-research] a distributist rant against the wage system

[Michel Bauwens]

a conservative-catholic assault against the wage system:
http://distributistreview.com/mag/2010/07/servility-or-freedom/

excerpt:


(Originally written by Maurice Reckitt)

The fundamental basis of the revolutionary case against Capitalism is not
that it makes the few rich and the many poor though this is true; not that
it creates social conditions which are a disgrace and an amazement in a
civilised community though this also is true; not that it brutalises the
rich by luxury, stifles beauty, and frustrates the hope of craftsmanship for
the worker though, indeed, it does all these things; but that it denies and
degrades the character of man by the operation of a wage-system which makes
the worker of no more account than a machine to be exploited or a tool to be
bought and sold. The seed of all our glaring social failure and distress
to-day lies not in any imagined “problem” of poverty, nor in any inevitable
“stage” of economic development, but in a vile conception of human
relationship that has entered into and now dominates all our social life and
has invested it with its character of injustice and insecurity. This
spiritual failure to which we have come finds its concrete expression in the
wage-system. Its assumptions and even its ideals (if we can call them so)
have won so great a victory over the minds and wills of every section of our
countrymen that its creed is the creed of England to-day. Few challenge it;
few have the spirit even to desire an alternative, far less to struggle for
one. That men should be forced by the menace of starvation to accept a price
for the labour which is all they have to sell, to subdue all their purposes
and all their gifts to the purpose of others (and that purpose profit), to
lay claim to no right of control over the conditions of their working lives,
nor any power of government over those who direct them in the workshop, to
be divorced from responsibility and all the attributes of free status, to
have upheld before them no standard but that of gain, no incentive but the
bribe (often fallacious) of higher wages this pathetic distortion of human
fellowship, this vile and perilous imprisonment of the human spirit, is
actually accepted as natural, and even providential, by nearly all those who
triumph by means of it, and by the vast majority, indeed, of its victims.
The existence of the wage-system conditions all our “reforms”; it is (as has
been well said) our “permanent hypothesis.” It has even infected our very
language, so that we can speak without compunction of the workers as
“hands,” the process of their hire as the “labour-market,” and the return
for their services as the cost of labour.” Catch-phrases reflect it: as when
we tell the worker (with equal insolence and truth) that he is “not paid to
think,” or inquire (with the standards of gain transcending all others) what
a man is worth.”

Capitalist society, combining economic tyranny and insecurity with political
“democracy” and civil liberty, is something quite new in history. Its
industrial princes and their Parliamentary hirelings, while preserving and
even extending the machinery of human rights and the show of political
power, have reduced this parade of freedom to a hopeless mockery by
affording to the vast majority no resource in the economic sphere by which
that freedom might be translated from theory into fact. For Capitalism
demands as the condition of its successful working that the bulk of mankind
shall own nothing at all of the means of production, nor even assume any
real degree of responsibility for the control of the circumstances upon
which their livelihood depends. The worker is thought of not as a man, not
even as a labourer, but as “labour” a mechanical aid to the purposes of
another, something to be purchased, a tool. And, indeed, the familiar phrase
of the economists, “Land, Capital, and Labour,” exposes the whole error on
which the wage-system rests. Human labour has come to be regarded, both in
theory and practice, not as the employer of the instrument of production,
but as one of the instruments of production. A separate class of persons has
arisen, almost fortuitously in the first instance, but now ever more rapidly
becoming circumscribed and defined, whose function it is to buy labour-power
in the “market ” as a commodity and pay for the cost of its subsistence with
a wage. Labour-power under the wage-system is but machinery under another
name; and as soon as human hands can be replaced more cheaply and
efficiently by mechanical devices, the labourer is thrown on to the
scrap-heap without compunction, while labour-saving inventions are extolled
as the sign of economic progress. And so they would be if the worker being
in command of his own economic life their effect were to save labour and not
dividends. But so long as he is content to barter away his personality and
all his priceless potentialities of creation and control for a mere money
payment, the basis of which he is almost powerless to determine, the worker
must of necessity remain only a factor in production, or, as a recent writer
on industrial affairs complacently puts it, “our most precious raw
material.”


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