[Translation of P. Decker and K. Hecker, Das Proletariat. Munich: 2002, 152-163]
The modern employee has command over an abundance of consumer goods that did not exist in the times of the “classic” industrial proletariat, not at all for the workaday working masses streaming into grey factory buildings. And not only in comparison over the centuries: Much of what was still exorbitant decades or years ago for the average wage recipient is today an ordinary consumer item: the television in the home, possibly the PC, the mobile phone for the children, the lower middle class car … And this is universally considered an admirable achievement -- no, not of the people who produce the stuff so cheaply, but of the free market itself. But seriously: should modern employees keep up with the “inherent necessity” of “mobility” on foot? Should Volkswagen bosses drive their Rabbits and Polos? And should cars remain exorbitant for workers, even when the auto industry calculates on each worker producing one per week? The fact is: wage laborers also have a slice of “modern life” whose material accoutrements they produce; they are confronted not only in their workplaces with the newest achievements in technology and other advances, they also privately consume always newer and insanely innovative products. However, in evaluating this progress, one should consider the following.
First of all, the enlargement and perpetually changing composition of the “basket of commodities” which the average employee’s household lives on, as appraised by the statistics offices, has nothing to do with abundance, let alone with an increase in freedom and enjoyment of life. Even those friends of a modest “prosperity for all” who find the standard of living of their wage-working contemporaries mostly rather superfluous could hardly indicate how the requirements of a viably designed world record-making workplace, streamlined for extreme speed and flexibility in production, whether in a digitized metropolitan office or an online-connected home PC, would be adequately professional without the appropriate appliances and appurtenances for the corresponding private life. Constant availability for every task demanded a moment ago, on-call at any time for full effort, the monotony of habitually dealing with electronic devices, unlimited motivation …: Even such basic requirements for an up-to-date labor force in a competitive capital location would not be massive, unrelenting and constant if the wage laborers of the 21st century remained squatting in the rural or tenement squalor of the first generation of industrial workers or grappled with the survival difficulties of third-world slum dwellers. What a capitalistically useful worker does and affords outside their work life must – by the way, always – keep pace with the continuously advancing demands of their employers, and with the corresponding ever more refined requirements of the state power on its self-reliant citizens. A person without a settled residence has no chance from the get-go; he must be accessible and mobile at any time; he certainly can’t get by without a more or less orderly household with “healthy food” in the refrigerator and media for “relaxation” and without engineered exercise for restoring the physical and psychic condition taken by the job; etc. That’s why even without family many pool together essential basic equipment, the same with family support only much more so – and in the freedom of the wage working individual to access the commodity world completely according to his personal needs and preferences, he discovers a whole bunch of social imperatives that he must work off. What then collects in possessions testifies more to the drastic functionalization of private life for the objective constraints of profitably executed wage labor than to freedom and adventure.
With the keyword “profitable” the second point casting doubt on the standard of living is already addressed, namely the reason that what enters into the necessary consumption of employees from “contemporary developments” is really affordable for an average wage earner. That is no free gift by the capitalistic commodity producers and suppliers to their customers or otherwise a philanthropic feature of the free-market economy, but the effect of a merciless competition over the profits that can be realized on the market. This fight is carried out by the competing companies in the long run on the field of production costs, and therein the lowering of unit wage costs is the most important weapon to be deployed. Reducing labor in price, but above all increasing its efficiency and an appropriate relative or even absolute saving on paid labor is the company’s means to conquer larger shares of the market and more profit with relatively or even absolutely lower commodity prices. What – looked at the other way around – makes a product cheaper, so that it also becomes affordable in the end to less well-to-do customers, is the successful minimization of the operational costs for labor in proportion to the product of labor, the mass of products for sale which belong to the company; thus the increased output from the capitalistic use of the “labor factor”. Their exploitation progresses when consumer objects for the rich gradually become mass-produced commodities within the reach of the solvency of average wage earners. The fact that their normal accoutrements comprise a certain amount of previously “unaffordable” consumer goods testifies more to an enormous shift in the average wage-output relation than to growing comfort in the average workers’ existence.
Thus, thirdly, it is quite clear what it is about if capitalists use the successfully pressed-down production costs to establish a line of goods for a new group of buyers, also among the wage earners, thus opening up the competition for the money of the less well-funded masses against other manufacturers – not in any case for supply; that’s why there can be no talk of oversupply. A company wants to sell, whatever and for whomever; it has work done in order to engross with the sales of the commodity a maximum of social solvency for the realization of the profit that its workers produced in its products. There is no social wealth generalized or participation in it conceded, but if anything the opposite, the mobilization of the paltriest wage sum in order to always concentrate more social wealth in its sole universally valid mode of existence, in money form, in the hands of the company owners. Wages, with which the entrepreneurial class collectively buys profitable work, may perform still a second service for a part of this class, i.e. in the exchange for the necessary and sufficiently reduced in price mass-produced goods, money “flows back” into their till and thus helps complete the purpose for which it is generally spent: to increase the monopolized ownership and command power of property over labor ever further.
That the selling of cars, air travel, built-in cabinets, etc. to everyone, also to simple wage earners, revolves around the “absorption” of purchasing power for completing the capital turnover in certain industries and most definitely not around the fulfillment of a somehow constituted social “supply order“; this is the reason for it and appears in reverse in that, fourthly, the affordability of some “high end” consumer goods for the average earner signifies anything other than the fact that they could be paid for by an average earner with no problem. Wages are as little assessed by the amount and price of the commodities that must usually be bought with them, as prices for mass consumption goods are calculated by the capitalistic retail business according to the sum that an employee earns on average and still has on hand after deducting for all other payment obligations. They are and remain hopelessly overstrained. For that very reason a bitter competition rages over “mass purchasing power.” The sale of each article goes at the expense not only of competing sellers of the same commodity, but the sales prospects of all other articles of mass consumption. And the consumer in his freedom of choice is in nonstop demand: In view of the enormous variety of goods available to him in principle, he must ration his earned money “rationally,” make “wise choices” and find a compromise between necessary expenditures and unavoidable sacrifices.
Anyway, he finds a lot of support in today’s developed market economy for coping with this continuous problem – this is the fifth and last point, which one should not completely forget in admiration for the accomplishment of general mass prosperity: All consumer goods that modern life creates so unbeatably progressively, resourceful producers and sellers have developed especially cheap producible variants that only make the nice stuff really affordable. However, with it the problem of clever budgeting and the need to sacrifice does not disappear; rather yet another trouble is added to the banal financial ones: the cheap stuff is not good for much, it often does not outlast its use very long, thus it is not at all worth its cheap price. The practical proof leads the better-earning customers who have enough money to keep to products of real value, drive safe cars and look down disdainfully on the cheap tourism that testifies at the same time to the excessive prosperity of poor people. Since that does not create problems for the bourgeois mind, it takes that unmistakable cheapness of the proletarian standard of living as evidence that the standard that is “lived” there is simply too high: too high for that kind of people, which there means, luxuries could be affordable for them and still enjoyable.
It should not be overlooked that the living standard of the wage-earning majority thus goes with the times. However, their continual modernization includes – of course, completely unintentionally -- the side effect that so splendidly and already suspiciously “over-supplied” employee conditions are functionalized comprehensively and perfectly for the interests of the employer: increases in labor productivity, which with a lower “cost factor” for labor gives the capitalistic owner more marketable commodities for sale, thus arises completely in the service of the company’s profit; just for this purpose private life is equipped with consumer goods that enable its proud owners to be as flexible, mobile, ready for service and deferential as a modern employer must demand of his workforce; the mass purchasing power, which is expended for it, allows the social wealth to flow reliably back to where it belongs in capitalism, namely as money in the accounts of the business world; a not uncomplicated allocation problem remains for the masses who spend their purchasing power so appropriately -- to which certainly nobody may give the name poverty. Because -- completely to the contrary -- all this is credited to the modern employee as his post-proletarian prosperity. That is on the one hand a mockery. It is traitorous in addition: It always requires a ridiculous comparison with “bad times” -- or with regions in which starvation belongs to normality -- in order to arrive at the saying: “Today -- for the German, British, Polish…? – the workers are so well off!”* At third hand, however, it contains the denial as honest information: Anything more is not possible in the wealth of poor people from wage labor.
Of course, one can also disregard all this and simply adhere to the abstract fact, which can hardly be denied, that – irrespective of the functionalization of wages for the turnover and increase of capital -- massive need satisfaction takes place. An argument can even be produced from it, which the friends of mass purchasing power consider sweeping and unbeatable: “The people want it so!” It does not even need much intellectual talent to put the thing completely upside down and derive the whole capitalistic line of commodities from the needs and free discretionary decisions of its buyers.
However, it might be that “the people,” busy their whole lives as an aside to it, just forget about all their needs that cannot be realized “anyway” – e.g., for a really “stress-” and problem-free life – because they simply do not fit the functional “vested rights” of a wage laborer. In any case, here the free-market economy has already worked violently with the needs that “the market” serves so cheaply that even wage earners can afford them, to the point that the “subjective factor” feels exactly this and nothing else. Because it is not at all the free market way to simply determine needs and have the necessities produced and kept for sale -- that would almost be supply, if not yet planned economy, and in any case, first of all, much too primitive for capitalistic entrepreneurs and, secondly, a much too insecure basis for calculating the risks they expose their precious property to if they “allow it to work.” Anyone who wants to do business with capitalistically produced commodities goes to work more offensively. He gets the use value that the product always has for him as a capitalistic producer and buyer, i.e.: to be a bearer of sales. From there he takes into consideration the needs that the public, out of necessity or voluntarily, already has taken to and realized in their buying behavior; their solvency is estimated; and, according to these premises, the use values that the stuff has are designed for the purpose of attracting peoples’ willingness to pay for them. With the offer the people’s need, which they have to get accustomed to in consumption, is subsequently spelled out and defined. So the capitalistic business world, in its interest of making all incomes and wages specifically useful as purchasing power and leaving nothing to chance in the competition, arrives at a self-posed educational objective: It educates the masses in the correct use of the freedom that is carried out in consumption. This stamps the picture that the modern world has of itself and gives off.
The stimulation of demand by an appealing offer is taken as the smallest problem and generally no special trick. Because what a person feels as needs with his few kinds of idiosyncratic impulses, he has always acquired from the social supply of consumer goods; those objects of longing teach the ordinary consumer what he needs and what rather not. However, in the free-market economy this direct relationship gets a little ambiguous. Because social ingenuity, which is always squandered on ever new commodities and the corresponding culture of wants, is directed by a purpose that really has nothing to do with economics in the sense of a relationship established as rationally as possible between socially expended labor and a well-maintained existence for all. Instead, the producers mobilize all social ingenuity just for the construction of offers that allow money to be earned from any living condition they come across, no matter how absurd and how brutal they may be. Every damage and every need which the system of wage labor brings with it, every call of nature that the customs of competition produces is alright for them if purchasing power is mobilized for it -- the well known range of offers reaches then from the private vehicle, without which the modern “inherent necessity” of “mobility” can scarcely be mastered, over the wide field of medical and other personal care, without which also the rest of everyday life is survived, up to the industrially produced “mental diversions,” without which the continuously strained will for adaptation hardly gets along. After the model of the more expensive entertainments that are offered to the rich in their arduous search for an unmistakable “identity”, the rest are also offered life enjoyments in inexpensive variants, which promise compensation as well as relief of the pocketbook, but really compensate nothing at all and nevertheless always cost too much. This wonderful offer, with the masses planned as customers, aims at a character of needs which combines the urge from necessity, supposed enjoyment and reflection on one’s own limited budget and is completely certainly none of them: neither really a need arising from nature nor a rational interest.
However, the fabrication of such complex changes in needs is left neither to nature nor to reason. For business people it is generally not about wanting to service humanity’s primal urge for something whose indispensability they had not previously noticed, but developing the special attributes of their offer and just rewarding their crap with willingness to pay. Human nature in its neediness is indeed finally over-challenged by this, but the capitalistic entrepreneur is only well challenged. He sees the necessity to make his interest in people’s money something they feel as their own need and he also knows the correct means for it: his money. He buys a special sort of inventive wit, which takes care of his special need for successful sales and serves him with the appropriate product: advertising. This is a matter of staging a propaganda event that connects the commodity with an irrefutable need for it or better still: sets it in a scene of totally idealized pleasure so that the addressee immediately feels the appropriate need. The ideal ultimate goal has been reached when enough customers feel like a fan club of the advertised commodity. This actually works; even children not infrequently base their friendships on the brand name of their backpack; then later on, men form friendships over preferred motorcycle trademarks. Certainly, so much insanity requires constant fostering. In particular, a company with perpetual sales success must consider a “moral deterioration” of their products: a becoming outdated of its even still vaunted features, the triumph of an innovation or the creation of a new style adds at the same time however the necessary moment of continuity in change in order to secure the “brand loyalty” of its supporters. In contrast, other companies make an undisguised appeal to the lack of money of their customers, who are nevertheless “not so dumb” to put down one cent extra for the useless luxury of a brand name article. And so on. All sales people, experienced in free-enterprise, take care of this and price things so as to dissolve the contrast between the economic purpose which they pursue with her line of products and the restricted solvency which they want to absorb, by cultivating through brainwashing a suitable socially created need in their favor.
Thus the wage laboring class – and the whole rest of the society with it equally – is instructed by the business world in their assignment, to be in their private lives, and indeed including the freedom to shape their daily life with the commodity basket they put together according to their own individual taste, a functional free market quantity and otherwise nothing at all; namely, to serve as available purchasing power.
This obviously works out so well that it can’t be left there. Net wage recipients and capitalistic service providers get to deal with each other on still a second level: in the mass business of the banks and credit companies. Because that is the system-appropriate answer of financial capital to the fact that life for a modern employee in the free-market economy, even with all its bargains and cut-price offers, is nevertheless absolutely too expensive, thus business with him is constantly impinging on narrow limits: the credit business helps in financial questions, by no means to its misfortune.
It grants the poorest customer the ability to put money aside and “allow it to work,” because it brings in interest like a properly invested capitalistic property. With no discriminating prejudices it makes available to any bankbook owner an intuition of what property is and affords in the true sense. However, only to the extent that the frugal wage earner practices renunciation; and hence, as wages do not make a person rich, a fortiori the saved fraction is never real property in the sense that it is suitable for life necessities because it yields a livelihood quasi-automatically. It never becomes a larger gain at the end or even a cash reserve kept for emergencies -- thus never more than postponed consumption: renunciation in order to some day no longer have to renounce something special or ease a tight spot. A piece of financial freedom is bought by previous restriction and never exceeds this amount; the average saver can be quite happy if the interest saved at least makes up for the price increases that occur at the same time. In any case, the frugal employee never gets beyond the moral highly valued skill of making a virtue of necessity. For the bank, however, the collected nest egg functions like its own capital: it enhances its power to create credit and make money from it.
Any wage laborer who absolutely needs and wants to buy something that he cannot pay for is granted by his savings bank – presupposing he has a steady income – the ability to take out a loan and for once live above his own circumstances; almost like a proper capitalist who invests borrowed money and “makes” with it yet a lot more money than with his property alone – if he has not made a mistake and the market plays along -- and indeed so much more that interest payments and repayment of the borrowed sum detract from the growth of profits. Therein, however, lies the essential difference: “consumer credit” – not so named by chance – to wage laborers contributes nothing at all to their wage income, on the contrary, it demands in addition to the sum, which he does not yet have for the happily bargained purchase, interest and amortization payments. If so the interest is also always then determined so that a compensation or overcompensation of this burden by a nominal pay increase is not definitely not anticipated. So the financial freedom that a modern wage laborer can procure through a loan leads quite directly to the compulsion to sacrifice consumption, which on balance turns out to be superior to the opposite way of savings and under the circumstances lasts a lot longer than the use value, which one has at least directly in hand. A certain risk of remaining on top of unpayable debts – e.g., in event of a cut in wages, perhaps because of a completely normal gradation, and even more by a layoff -- is included completely in passing in the small freedom of credit for everyone; quite many with a lot of renunciation and their own work will establish their own home already before its completion to his savings and loan bank or know in any case what he has to do for the rest of his life. The financial institutions, for their part, take the complementary risk of not being able to completely collect the interest paid on the lent money, also without real “security” a rather unscrupulous one: on the whole they do not earn badly from her less wealthy customers.
Thus the credit industry serves in a comprehensive way the massive need of getting by with what for an average existence in the free-market economy is always the much too narrow limits of the wage, without making its proletarian customers even a bit richer – anyone who is out to get rich can try his luck at the Lotto; because at least in capitalism there is a cheap version of gambling that is affordable to everyone. With its debts and savings efforts the wage-laboring public contributes to the accumulation of capital someplace else; and therein lies the real purpose and reason for the accommodating services of their savings banks. The limitations on proletarian purchasing power are calculated to serve the limitlessness of the credit business – a final small irony in the history of the net wage and the art of the modern employee who thereby finances an up to date standard of living.
The free-market economy does not leave the net wage earner disoriented in the rain with his proud material freedom of choice. With its bargains, whose charm the employees -- troubled by all kinds of modern life necessities -- can hardly avoid, including interesting offers for the financing of necessities, it allots to them from the wide varieties of means of living and luxuries whatever fits their purse; and it does everything to develop a private need character that fits the available commodities. Thus it turns its wage-dependent foot soldiers into a bunch of “consumer happy citizens” who maturely and self-consciously deliver their money to where it can function again as capital. And as mockery some political administrators of the general living standard of the perfect functionalization of people for the circuit of capital still put forward the lie that, of all things, consumers would be the true masters of the market economy, have control over the entire commodity production with their purchase decisions, and would be in this respect also to blame for nuclear power and mad cow disease beef. Thus the modern employee gets his free-market commodity basket, from which swells forth car, house, beef and savings account, all wrapped up in the myth that he has chosen all this by himself with the irresistible power of his take home pay, completely freely and independently – and with it he disposes over his first and foremost vested right: a liberal standard of living.
* Anyone who measures the indicators of modern wage labor by pauperism will not discover poverty perforce; because he employs his comparison for this reason. The purpose of the exercise consists solely in certifying the arrogance of depicting the supply of a worker with necessities as the good deed of the free-market economy and its democratic state and to explain all demands that go beyond these necessities as presumptuous. The share of the worker in the social wealth is measured by this and not by the needs that adjust as necessary requirements each time with the attained level of production; rather the mere reproduction of the work force appears in this interested comparative point of view already as prosperity and thus already as reason for heated praise of capitalism. Where this viewpoint is brought up by the worker himself as a judgment about his position -- “I could be worse off“, “for me it goes (relatively) well” -- he is also not driven to an objective judgment, but usually avails himself of a comparison with his closer surroundings: The worse earning coworker, the unskilled man at the bad machine and similar negative models lead to a positive result, which is nevertheless recognizable as an expression of his discontent – why else would one relativize one’s own needs in the poverty of others?