As in all previous stages of human social development, today wealth is produced and can only be produced by the application of human labour power to the resources of nature. Capitalism complicates the process of wealth production by the separation of these two productive essentials; a relatively small minority of human beings claim a right to the ownership of nature’s resources, which are effectively the means of life of the whole of humanity, while the great majority are obliged to sell their physical and mental abilities to these owners. The wealth that results from this combination of resources and labour power becomes the property of the owners who give those who have expended their labour power tokens which are called wages with which they can purchase the part of the vast aggregation of wealth they have created. That is the basic nature of capitalism. However, in effect it is much more convoluted and wasteful than this might suggest. In today’s world all the goods and services needed by people are produced mainly in the form of commodities against the background of their real or imagined use value. But the shareholders who own the enterprises that produce these goods and services and the usually richly-rewarded directors who organise the enterprises are not philanthropists concerned with the public good. Their interest is not primarily the use value of the commodities they produce; it is the exchange value of those commodities; the price for which they are bought and which contains, in normal circumstances, that surplus beyond the cost of production (including the cost of sale) which enriches the shareholders and allows for continued economic viability. So the kernel of this complex and extremely wasteful exercise is profit which is yielded only when purchasers are persuaded to buy specific goods or services from among the competing suppliers. It is important for capitalist enterprises to ascertain public attitudes either to adopt their products or prices to prevailing modes or to influence change in those attitudes by product design, price or advertising. Politics and public opinion In the last British General Election, the Labour and Tory parties spent some £18 million each and the Liberal Democrats spent £4.3 million. These large sums were additional to what might be called their ’constant capital’ in the form of existing organisation, publicly-funded offices, salaries and equipment; vast sums that must surely conflict with the notion of ‘free’ elections. These amounts are being dwarfed by the massive sums currently being invested in the US primaries, where the two candidates for the role of capitalism’s political office manager are being selected. In contradistinction to the nonsense about ‘spreading democracy’ in areas deemed of consequence to US interests, the American variety of that system reveals a monumentally expensive and cynical exercise between two politically indistinguishable groups concerned with sculpting politics in the general interests of capital. As in Britain and the rest of the developed world, other aspiring politicians, denied real public exposure by a pensioned media, will be permitted to enter the hustings to make up the numbers and reinforce the fiction that the public are offered a fair and informed choice. Obviously Public Opinion in both politics and commerce is of considerable importance; but it is politically innocuous in that it never questions the fundamental way in which the needs and requirements of the human family are organised. Politicians, the business fraternity, clerics and journalists may criticise some aspect or aspects of the system: show a preference for making some adjustment in planning or administration or suggest a different political or economic strategy but always within the framework of the existing social system. Such people may display courage, energy and enthusiasm in campaigning for a cause but always they do so on the assumption that there is no alternative to the present order of things; that the old political and economic fundamentals of capitalism are as inevitable as the seasons; that they have always existed and that there is no other way of running society. continued on next page 15 |
