Chapter 3: SKETCH OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY -- LABOR
1. People are freed from wage labor.
1.3. The emancipation of wage serfs
In a situation where working conditions are deteriorating as a result of capital supremacist policies that are spreading around the world in recent years, there are calls for wage workers to step away from wage labor, start their own businesses, and become capitalists. In other words, it is a shift from the exploited side to the exploiting side.
It is true that there are successful people who make a spectacular transition from mere workers to capitalists. However, if all wage workers become capitalists, capitalism will lose its labor force and collapse. Therefore, the majority of people should be made to have no choice but to continue to be wage laborers. It is inevitable that the majority of new entrepreneurs will not last five years.
In fact, in the capitalist commodity-money exchange system, all goods and services, including daily necessities, are required to be exchanged for money as commodities. Without income, survival itself cannot be maintained. In that sense, it can be said that capitalist wage labor is exactly a kind of "forced labor."
However, unlike pre-modern slaves, wage workers are not directly subject to human trafficking, and in the labor market job seekers are free to choose which employer to contract with. On the other hand, however, the wage-earners must repeatedly appear in the labor market to make ends meet, find an employer willing to buy their labor-power. Even if they succeed in finding an employer, they will inevitably be exploited in some way and must accept that their wages will be reduced or they will be dismissed for their employer's convenience.
If they are not evaluated as a useful labor force by any employer, they will be forced into long-term unemployment and joblessness. Such "exclusion from labor", which has become a problem in recent years, is actually a phenomenon of exclusion as the flip side of exploitation.
In other words, from the perspective of capital, unemployment is the ultimate means of saving labor costs in the direction of not even exploiting the labor force in the first place. Since capitalists are wary of hoarding surplus workers even in boom times, there is no literal "full employment" in a capitalist economy, and a capitalist economy is an "uemployment economy" with a certain amount of unemployment even in boom times.
In this way, from the perspective of capitalists, wage workers are living commodities that provide a unique intangible service of labor that includes a certain level of knowledge and skills. As such, wage workers are beings reused through the labor market, and conversely, kept away from labor by total capital. In this sense, Marx solemnly called the wage laborer a "wage slave."
Nonetheless, considering that legal wage laborers in modern times are not traded like literal slaves and are not bound to not escape, it would be more appropriate to call them "wage serf" as they resemble medieval serfs, who were similarly guaranteed relative personal freedom.
As such, the capitalist economy can be said to be an economic system of "wage serfdom" from the perspective of labor. In contrast, in a communist society, this wage-serfdom economy is abolished, so this means "emancipation of wage serfs." Indeed, this is the most revolutionary aspect of true communism.
1.4. Separation of labor and consumption
Wage workers invest the wages they receive as a result of labor exploitation into their living expenses. Then in the form of consumption, a considerable portion of wage income is spent in exchange for various goods and services, and is exploited further.
Marx focused exclusively on the first stage of labor exploitation, but did not pay much attention to the second stage of exploitation - consumption exploitation. However, for capital, which today is constrained by labor laws and regulations from exploiting labor freely, consumption exploitation is essential as a means of supplementing it. On the other hand the hardships and poverty of wage workers are the result of two-stage exploitation: labor and consumption.
Thus the capitalist economy can be said to be a very rational system for ambitious and efficient money making, but it is an unreasonable system for a frugally satisfying life.
In contrast, in a communist society, labor and consumption are separated by the abolition of the monetized economy and the wage labor system. The problems of hard living and poverty due to wages and unemployment will disappear. This is truly a lifestyle revolution.
However, a question may arise here. If people were able to obtain as much goods and services as they wanted free of charge, completely unrelated to labor, it would lead to monopolization and frequent shortages of goods due to a flood of demand.
In order to answer this question, Marx proposed a mechanism called "work certificate." To give a simple example, a worker W who works 8 hours a day and has been issued a labor certificate for 8 hours can obtain the product P manufactured by also working 8 hours in exchange for the certificate.
This labor certificate resembles a gift certificate, but unlike a simple exchange ticket, it has the properties of a type of securities that incorporates the right to claim exchange based on working hours. In short, it is the idea that workers can acquire goods corresponding to the working hours they have worked. Labor and consumption are thus linked, but instead of being mediated by wages as under capitalism, working time itself is directly linked to consumption and exchanged for equivalents.
This is theoretically possible, but is a highly hypothetical theory. In the first place, is it possible to strictly measure how many hours of labor the product P correspond to?
Even if we set a rough figure for the average labor hours required to produce P, for example, the labor required for W is simple labor that even beginners can handle, whereas the labor required for the production of P is complicated labor that requires skill. Thus, because they are qualitatively different, the 8-hour labor required for W and the 8-hour labor required to manufacture P cannot simply be regarded as equivalent.
It can be said that it is practically impossible to build an elaborate work certificate system that reflects such qualitative differences in labor. However, Marx sees this work certificate system as a transitional system peculiar to "a communist society that has just emerged from capitalism," and states that the higher stages of communist society, where the principle of "each man according to his ability, each man according to his needs," allows for a complete separation of labor and consumption.
Ultimately, however, a communist society, regardless of its stage of development, has no choice but to accept the separation of labor and consumption. In order to prevent the first one wins everything basis that might arise, it is necessary, as suggested in the previous chapter, to regulate the quantity of goods that each person can obtain, such as how many pieces or how many grams each person can obtain. This acquisition quantity can be confirmed by a procedure equivalent to accounting in the current store.
In order to deal with shortages that may nevertheless occur, as was also pointed out in the previous chapter, in the field of FMCGs, it is necessary to oblige production organizations to produce surpluses and create a system of relative overproduction (with sufficient stockpiles) system.
