Modern Wage Labor and Capitalism - Essay Example

MODERN WAGE LABOUR AND CAPITALISM affiliation: Capitalism and wage labour According to Tucker p. 795), capitalism is an economic structure in which a private individual of the society owns the factors of production. It is the prevailing economic system in the world, as it encourages free trade, which is a big stimulator of economic growth. In the capitalism economy, there are two classes of person; the owners of the factors of production and the workers. The trade laws in such economies ensure that the ownership of the factors production remains protected, and that there is little government intervention. In capitalism system, the companies and the individuals can contend with each other for their economic expansion. People tend to believe that the poor countries economy has improved due to capitalism. This capitalism has raised their standards of living meaning work defines people and their relationships among others. Human beings continue working round the clock, and the work continues changing over time. This paper discusses capitalism and its relationship to modern wage labor. More labour means more power because more production means more impression in achievements. While creatures like the bees and ants have ability to complex works, it is clear that unlike the human beings they do not relate to the natural world. Anderson and Tylor (2008 p. 216) noted that Karl Max argued the worst human architect raises his structure from imagination unlike the bees. Other creatures may engage in instinctive work through routine, but a human being thinks creatively, and relates to the world around him. Therefore, according to Max, the human being can separate the conception of work from its execution. Currently, human beings construct not only bridges, and houses among others, but the relations of a labour process. The human labor remains a collective process with the social labour remaining greater than the sum of its parts. Through work, people enter into relations of cooperation with each other, and the social relations evolve just like nature and knowledge. It is important to understand the uniqueness of labour and its evolving process in a capitalist society in order to understand modern man. There are three vital elements to consider in a capitalist society and they include understanding that work happens under private ownership. This process means that a small group of people owns the production apparatus, while the rest sell their labour for wages in the modern society. Secondly, a capitalist only invest for profits, and lastly, the concept of value measured through money is the exchange of labour and its products. At this point, it is important to identify the distinctive way that the capitalists use labour. In capitalism, when a worker produces labour, he does not sell his labor but rather he sells his labour-power (Dillon 2010 p. 44). Therefore, a worker does not sell a definite amount of work to the capitalist, but rather his ability to work in a given period. This conclusion means that it is up to the capitalist to maximize labour during this given period in order to make the most profits. As a result, capitalism brings about the problem of management regarding control and organization of the labour process in order to maximize efficiency. Capitalists’ value time raises the question of its relation to productivity. Alavi (1982 p. 270) notes that capitalism inherited a pre-existing labour process, and it did not create it. The feudal society had skilled goldsmiths, artisans, and cobblers among others owning their means of production, and with full control over their businesses. They took a long time to master their skills, and parents passed down their collective knowledge to their children. This process meant that the whole family shared a collective labour process. However, during the transformation to capitalism, the government separated these skilled workers from their production to wage labourers who depended totally on capital to survive. This long and painful process known as primitive accumulation still works in some of the developing countries especially in the agricultural sector. Free trade policies in these areas send the people out into the job market to look for work as wage labourers. The first innovations during this process of capitalist labour process included collecting all the workers into one workplace. This process allowed the capitalists to have more control over the employees and the labour process. It also helped the capitalists to manipulate the nature of work in order to maximize their profits from these labourers. These capitalists ensured that they increased the numbers of labour hours for the workers bringing constant battles on the number of hours worked daily. However, in 1833, England passed its working hours as 5.30am -8.30pm (Engles & McLellan 1993 p.22). In addition, they forbid the children from working for more than 12 hours a day. Nevertheless, the Civil War in the United States saw the labour hours reduce to 8 hours daily in 1936. However, it is clear that the issue of working hours continues manifesting in petty struggles with some employers trying to overwork their employees. This manifestation shows during vacations, retirement, and week work schedules among others. It is clear that as long as labour power remains a commodity, struggles will continue over time. The capitalist continues increasing the surplus that workers produce in any given time. Therefore, the capitalist continue exerting more control on the labour process in order to increase efficiency. Capitalism work bases on experiments and theories like human relations theory, industrial, sociology, and management theories among others, and they all relate to labour control. Fredrick Taylor is among the popular theorists that came up with the concept of scientific management, a pure distillation of capitalist management. He wanted to separate the conception and execution of labour process, and the process entailed mainly breaking down of work into tasks. These component tasks would spread out amongst different workers, and this differs from division of labour in a society. The latter includes workers of independent producers coordinating through a market. In a scientific management, the management divides the labour process itself and reorganizes it. This process ensures that each worker performs a simple repetitive task before passing it to the next worker, and this works well in a capitalist labour market. The worker rarely watches the product from start to finish because of the broken duties or tasks. Therefore, the tasks break down to simple and repetitive tasks that require minimum skills. This method means that a worker does not need to have a complete knowledge of the production or the labour process a process referred to as a work rationalization. Work rationalization comes with many implications including a worker’s loss of control over the pace of work. The system forces the worker to apply a certain speed usually controlled by the management. Consequently, the management acquires more control of the amount of value workers produce within a given period. However, as more science and planning enter into the labour process of any organization, the lesser the worker understands the process. On the other hand, the capitalist fails to meet the demands of the management due to its complexities. The worker does not learn anything from experience but instead remains to follow simple instructions. This unskilled labor comes with cheapness and increased profits. In the end, all works look similar, and anyone can work in any industry making it easier to change jobs and hire new employees. The new wage labour requires a full host of new occupations, and a good example is the engineering department responsible for mapping out shop floors, timing workers, designing machines and labour processes among others. This process complicates the job of management in a capitalist labor process. However, the job of managing the employees in this system remains equally rationalized with classes of salaried managers handling the management work in capitalism. In a capitalist labour, the CEO and the top managers tend to blur although the CEO remains the business’ image. Rationalization in this capitalism requires more bookkeeping in every business. Some of the areas requiring tracking include payrolls, debts, profits, and inventories among others. As well, this department requires rationalization whereby a large shift of occupation tracks the flow of the company’s inflow and outflow. After all, the company cannot entrust one person to evaluate all the bookkeeping, and this tracking of values in a capitalist company tolerates duplication of labor. Increased labour efficiency means an increase in commodities sold by these capitalist companies. For that reason, the process calls for more marketing of these commodities since marketing helps in the customer production. The capitalist business ensures a large marketing department with rationalized tasks making it a vital tool in a capitalist labour market. It is clear that the current market cannot thrive without marketing, and everyone advertises everything in today’s market. However, not every capitalist business has unskilled labour. After all, rationalization of labour only ensures capital movement. However, in order for this capital to move, the companies require scientists to design effective machinery, expert managers, and engineers among others. Therefore, higher number of unskilled labourers, requires higher number of specialists to ensure efficiency. According to Ogle (2007 p.125), Babbage’s principle dictates that breaking down of tasks means saving money. He argues that with a skilled doctor, the hospital may not require him to waste time filling forms or performing other simple duties like taking temperatures among others. Therefore, a person can hire fewer skilled doctors, and employ lesser-paid nurses to do the work, and secretaries to fill the forms. In addition, the hospital will have the billing offices and lab technicians as rationalized tasks to quicken the process among others. Therefore, a hospital offers the best example of rationalizing duties as demanded by the capitalists with gradation of skills from a doctor to a janitor. The management breaks down all tasks required in hospital operations separating every skill and consequently ensures a smooth workflow. This task explains why it takes less than 10 minutes to see a doctor, while spending more time with the secretaries and the nurses. Another great example is the computer industry and Peters and Bulut (2011 p. 75) argue that it requires very high skills in its operation or the labour process. However, over time, rationalization in this sector saw skills squeezed out of the labour process. This process happened through breaking down into software designers, technical support, and code writing among others (Peters $ Bulut 2011 p. 76). The breakdown has made it easier to write codes, replace spare parts, and design websites among others. Therefore, a person does not have to own skills in the computer world to do some of the basics like earlier days. Computerization continues breaking down into smaller commodities, and a good example is a person on the phone with a customer care representative. The system has managed to break down computer guidance because chances are that the human representative may not have an answer to all the client’s requests. Therefore, instead of holding for over 10 minutes waiting for a human being representative, the system provides options to accessing different departments as required by the client. Workers have computers designed to guiding then in answering all the questions. In capitalism, the worker does not need to know all the labour process. The labor process controls the worker because if they say that no one can help a client, it is true. The terrifying potential about capitalism is that no one knows what happens because people become part of the system in a very large process that is hard to understand. People become like robots doing repetitive jobs that are simple, and require no skills. However, whenever there is a change, people tend to think that it is normal, and that labour is always a commodity. People assume that the progress tends to make labour cheap whenever possible. From a capitalist point of view, the progress comes with more profits in terms on money. However, from a human perspective, there is nothing progressive in capitalist labour market other than wasting of human potential in order to satisfy these capitalists. A person may argue that capitalists tend to suck the blood out of their labourers in order to prove their efficiency. Karl Max defined capitalist profit as deriving essentially from exploitation of labour through systematic coercion of workers (Dillon 2010 p. 36). He mainly focused on the purchase and consumption of labour power among the capitalists as capital exploitation. However, many people may argue that wage labour is voluntary, and a person is free to sell his or her labour power. The socialists argue that people sell their labour power due to lack of alternatives. These labourers require money to purchase essential commodities like food, water, and clothes among others, and therefore they have to work. A person may own capital, but in order to generate to it to bigger businesses, it requires accumulating money by partaking wage labour. They also argue that wage labour is voluntary since the worker has a choice to change jobs. However, this does not mean that these wage labourers have an option of being anything else other than a wage labourer but in a different company. A good example is a poor homeless person who cannot buy a house despite the freedom to buy one. During the 18th century, according to Chartier and Johnson (2012 p. 136), a system called the mercantilist economic system persisted among the major super powers. This argument based on the premise that for a nation to increase its economic proficiency, it had to major in exports and minimize its import activities. This notion is however, not true because, creating a global economy encourages the concept of specialization. States can to focus on producing goods in which they have the knowledge and resources to produce (Norberg 2003 p. 15). The false premise above kills the notion of specialization on matters of production. One of the dominant features of capitalism is the concept of free trade areas. With an open market, capitalism provides an open competition. Private possession of a property gives one haven and means to control their property. In this economy, an individual has to work extremely hard to make huge sums in profits. The lazy ones remain to suffer. Capitalism provides individuals with better opportunities hence economic growth. Another advantage is that it is not centralized thus the individuals have open options in the markets. There are certain states within an economic partnership such as the East African Community, where there is no imposition of tariffs among member states (Duina 2008 P. 56). This stimulates the economies of the concerned states. The other concept of the economic alliance is the ability to import and export labor, raw materials and ideas across borders (Norberg 2003). As the other advantages mentioned above, it also stimulates the economy, as agents of supply and demand have a wider market as opposed to being limited within a single state. Conclusion Capitalism bases upon wage labor in all ways. There are more advantages of capitalism in relation to wage labor especially with globalization. However, capitalism without the aspect of government control, results to the formation of monopolistic ventures within the markets. Capitalism has one significant shortcoming, which is the fact that the rate of population growth is always less than that of production rates. Therefore, there is a danger of rising poverty levels after a certain period. Unfortunately, the poverty remains unfairly spread. This fierce antagonism is a drawback. While some of the people believe in its strengths, others complain of the unfair poverty .Allotment of Global wealth should distribute to all but capitalism leaves the poor under the rich man’s mercies leaving a gross disparity. Nevertheless, the above study shows that while capitalists succeed in production, they continuously waste the human potential, while sucking off their blood in labour. References Alavi, Hamza. Introduction to the Sociology of "developing Societies". New York u.a: Monthly Review Press, 1982. Print. ANDERSEN, M. 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