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Workers Vanguard No. 877 |
29 September 2006 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
Capitalism: Wages Falling, Profits Rising (Quote of the Week)
Today in the U.S., the share of wages and salaries in total economic output is at the lowest level since the government began collecting data in the late 1940s, while the share of corporate profits is at the highest level in four decades. While liberal Democrats and reformist leftists put the onus for the deterioration in workers’ living standards on the economic policies of the Bush White House, Karl Marx explained that both the ever-increasing concentration of production and the immiseration of the laboring masses are inherent in the capitalist system itself. This brutally exploitative and irrationally destructive system must be overthrown through workers revolution and replaced by a planned, socialist world economy.
Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic régime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
—Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (1867)
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