Chapter 3: SKETCH OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY -- LABOR
In a communist society, wage labor is abolished. Will people no longer work as a result? Or will there be a completely new way of working?
1. People are freed from wage labor.
1.1. Abolition of wage labor
In the previous chapter, we argued that in a communist society, commodity production would be abolished, and thus the monetary economy would be abolished. Inevitably, it is easy to foresee that the wage labor system, in which the reward for labor is given in the form of money (wage), will be abolished. Transitioning to a communist society means the abolition of the wage labor system from the point of view of labor.
In order not to give grounds for the popular anti-communist propaganda which claims that communist society is an archipelago of forced unpaid labor, I would like to contrast the communist labor system with the capitalist labor system.
1.2. The structure of capitalist exploitation
What is the capitalist wage labor which is currently spreading around the world? As many people have experienced, this is a process in which job seekers are recruited through a hypothetical labor market in response to job offers from employers (capitalist companies as well as public institutions). Under this system, if an employee is hired, he/she concludes an employment contract, provides the specified work within the working hours set by the employer, and receives wages as compensation for that work.
Here, wages, which are the most important resource for workers' livelihoods - so to speak, "capital" for workers - are the trickiest things. Wages are legally interpreted as remuneration for labor, and the workers themselves may be aware of this, but few workers are paid the full amount for the hours they actually work. This is because if the employer were to make such a big deal, the business would ceases to operate.
The essence of capitalist management is the exploitation of low wages and long working hours by saving workers' wages by even one dollar and extending working hours by one minute. However, as a result of the labor movement, countries today have labor legal regulations that are onerous for capital (for example, legal minimum wages and legal working hours), so it is not always possible to achieve exploitation in the literal sense.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that, in general, capitalist companies make workers work for free in excess of the working hours for which they are actually paid wages.
For example, even if you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and is doing high-intensity work equivalent to $60 hourly wages, it is possible that you are actually only paid for 4 hours of work. In this case, you should have received a monthly salary of {($60x 8 hours) x 5 days} x 4 weeks = $9,600, but in reality it was cut off to half that amount, $4,800.
The employer saved the remaining $4,800 that had not been paid, and you were made to work for free for 4 hours out of your 8-hour work day. In other words, you were "exploited." Workers' dissatisfaction with pay levels within the legal range stems from this structure of exploitation.
In this way, the thrifty exploitation of capitalist enterprises is reflected in the earnings from their product sales, which are accumulated and reproduced as profits, While repeating this cycle with total capital, capitalism is rotating.
From the capitalist's point of view, they must sell their own products so that the gains obtained through parsimonious exploitation are secured as profits. If sales are sluggish due to the economic crisis, they will have to cut wages further or lay off workers to survive. It is a tough world indeed.
I have no intention to defend the capitalists here, but the capitalists who work hard to exploit - though greedy - are by no means spiteful or ruthless. As long as they are subject to the laws of capitalist economics, they cannot go against those laws. Marx saw through that the capitalist was "mere one driving wheel" in the social system, and this statement is completely correct.
