Abolishing wage labor means producing to live instead of living to produce

Marxist criticism of bourgeois society is essentially a critique of wage labor. Its condemnation of capitalism is essentially a condemnation of production for the sake of production. And this is what, in the current mentality poisoned by the prejudices of this society and the lies of opportunism, we fail to understand. This is what Marxist revolutionaries must not cease to repeat and explain.

Historically and logically, generalized wage labor and production for production's sake are inexorably linked. Wage labor becomes generalized only if the majority of the population lacks means of production and, more generally, property; the vast majority of people are then forced to sell their lives to an external power for money, in order to survive. This "external power" is the class that owns the means of production. Like all dominant classes in history, it seeks to appropriate the means of enjoyment without participating itself in social activity, without subjecting itself to the obligation of work.

One might believe, therefore, that the goal of production is the satisfaction of the needs of the ruling class, and that the lives of the majority of people are subordinated to this objective. In reality, things are not that simple, as already demonstrated by the fact that in the USSR there is a capitalism without capitalists! Even if it were only about maintaining a handful of capitalists, it would not be necessary - even if they have very long teeth - for millions of workers, employees, and technicians to exhaust themselves day after day in increasingly feverish work rhythms. There is no relationship between the billions of hours of work provided every year by the wage-earning population of all major industrial countries and the consumption needs of the large shareholders of banks, corporations, companies, and even the high state bureaucracy. Everyone knows that if a company "paid its workers too well," it would face a more serious risk than not paying sufficient dividends to shareholders in their view of "sufficiency": it would go bankrupt on the market. If the state were to act in the same way, it would even end up in ruins. Even without resorting to high economic notions, simply sticking to empirical reality, therefore, it seems clear that if it does not obey the needs of employees, this does not mean that the capitalist economy obeys the personal needs of the bourgeoisie members: what it obeys are the impersonal laws of the market, which impose themselves on the same dominant class.

To which laws does capitalist production obey?

These laws require—as we never get tired of repeating to the point of nausea—the reduction of production costs. From productive companies and workers in the strict sense, this imperative extends to all businesses, to all public and private administrations, and, consequently, to the entire salaried population. Thus, it is the dictatorship of the market that explains the strange paradox whereby the more humanity produces (or is capable of producing) in wealth, the more feverishly it has to work, the more it has to curb its needs, and therefore, the worse it lives, if "living well" does not mean, as for the bourgeois, "buying more"! But then everything happens as if the purpose of production were not social consumption at all, but production itself. And, in today’s overripe capitalism, such an absurdity is so striking that there are no more naïve people—true or fake—who publicly ask: why the expansion? It is ultimately the most everyday reality that imposes on millions of men, who certainly have never read Marx's Capital, the recognition of the truth found there formulated more than a century ago: the point of view of capitalism is production for production's sake, not for the satisfaction of social needs, since capitalism produces commodities, not use-values.

That the currently salaried class, lacking any means of existence, should come into possession of everything that is necessary and sufficient to ensure its collective existence: here is a social revolution that changes everything. The perspective of the salaried class cannot be to "reduce production costs," since, ultimately, what capitalism calls by this name is human life itself, which it indeed "reduces" to a very miserable thing (those "costs," if anything, should be increased!), nor to work much more intensely the greater the productivity of labor: rather, it is to take advantage of increased productivity to free ourselves from the age-old slavery of work!

As long as, alongside capitalism, there was a vast area of small production, with a miserable social yield that condemned producers to an existence even more barbaric than that of proletarians, being purely private and self-enclosed, this perspective of the salaried class could not yet appear as the interest of the whole society. But, since capitalism imposed itself on the most backward modes of production, the interest of the whole society identifies with the interest of the salaried class, to which all particular interests must be implacably subordinated; this presupposes the political dictatorship of the proletariat. Then the capitalist norm of free enterprise completely falls away. (In Russia, it is only limited in its mode of operation—although the tendency, under market pressure, is also to expand it again—as also happens in a single company of a trust, or in a particular branch of state administration, towards, respectively, the management of the trust or the central state).

"Free enterprise" is, in fact, nothing but a particular group of interests acting as if it were the center of the world, a group that mobilizes all means of production and raw materials and hires all the workers that its capital and its commercial prospects allow, without asking whether these resources and workers would not be more useful in another line of business; a group of interests that produces, of its particular commodity, everything it can place on the market, without asking whether other goods would not be more socially useful, without waging a "psychological war" against the entire population to convince them of the need they would have for that particular commodity.

But if, inevitably, it "comes out," it is because the company has narrow limits, and within the broader limits of social production considered on the scale of a nation, a continent, and, even more so, the world, a myriad of independent businesses move like a crowd of crazy molecules. If the narrow limits of the current company were to expand to coincide with those of the social production of a country, a continent, and finally the world—in other words, if the current company became for the world economy what its departments are for it today (this and nothing else is the socialization of the means of production)—giving products a monetary price would not only be unnecessary but impossible. Value and price would then only appear at the limits of the system; so that, once it becomes global, they will disappear entirely. Capitalist commodity production will gradually regress as the social revolution gains ground, which does not mean, as many false "Marxists" claim, that it will remain until the revolution encompasses the entire planet, but that it will disappear only where the proletariat dominates.

Damnation of free enterprise

But the center-of-the-world company (whether it is "private" or, as in Russia, state-owned, the result is socially the same) generates such absurdities that it becomes increasingly intolerable. The new norm resulting from the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat with that of the bourgeoisie can only be the direct social regulation of production. This implies the integration of what were once independent enterprises into a coherent whole, but it can only happen if the distribution of workers in the different branches of production and various activities - which today is left to chance - is centrally regulated according to real needs. This ensures, for example, that there is not too much steel and too little food, too many means of transport and too few houses, too many songs, films, books, etc., and too few healthcare or educational services, etc. (not to mention the deluge of bourgeois and opportunist propaganda and the shortage of communist writings!)

It may seem strange, but while everyone increasingly understands this necessity as the yoke of capital becomes heavier, very few realize that replacing a coherent social economy with the regime of free enterprise means ceasing to produce goods as commodities, as values attested by a price in money, as exchangeable products. Yet, even in today's enterprise, the different departments do not "exchange" their products. The assembly department, for example, receives its parts from the manufacturing department without having to purchase them. Within the company, the quantities of labor expended at each stage are undoubtedly calculated to avoid small-scale waste (while large-scale waste triumphs at the societal level!), but these quantities of labor do not take the form of values; in other words, the product does not receive a monetary price until it is finished and "leaves" the company.

To abolish the production of commodities means to abolish wage labor.

Now, abolishing the production of goods inevitably means abolishing WAGE LABOR ITSELF, since wages are nothing but the price of a particular commodity, without which nothing would ever be produced, that is, labor power. This presupposes, together with the market in general, the labor market, i.e., the anarchy in the distribution of labor power.

If products are no longer exchange values, if the distribution of the workforce is no longer abandoned to the whims of the market, it becomes impossible to consider the workforce itself as a value and attribute to it a market price. The members of society, now all subject to the obligation of enormously lightened social work, will no longer be "rewarded" based on individual "merit" (!), real or presumed; they will receive a share of the social product proportional to the importance of its consumable fraction. If this share is necessarily much greater than today, it will be because the time spent manufacturing means of production will be much reduced compared to what it is under capitalism, where the concern is only to "reduce costs."

But how? Produce less and consume more, hypocritically exclaims the opportunist. Yet, here's the secret!

This is what the demand for the ABOLITION OF WAGE LABOR means, which, for Marx and three or four generations of revolutionaries, has always been synonymous with COMMUNISM. You don't have to be great theorists to understand it and there is nothing "utopian" or "unrealizable" in this claim, because it ultimately means the same thing that all wage earners, who are not completely brutalized by opportunism, think inside themselves: that men must produce to live, instead of living to produce!