[Translated from P. Decker and K. Hecker: Das Proletariat. Munich: 2002; p. 152-163]
1. On “prosperity for all”
The modern wage earner has his disposal an abundance of consumer goods that did not exist in the times of the “classic” industrial proletariat, certainly not for the toiling masses in grey factory buildings. And not only in comparison over the centuries: much of what, decades or years ago, was still too expensive 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 too expensive 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 the “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-earning contemporaries mostly rather superfluous could hardly indicate how the requirements of a viably designed world profit-making workplace, streamlined for extreme speed and flexibility in production, whether in a digitized metropolitan office or an online-connected home PC, could 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 …: such basic requirements for an up-to-date labor force in a competitive capital location would not be so 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 engineered exercise for restoring the physical and psychic condition sapped by the job; etc. Already a lot of essential basic equipment clusters there without a family, even more so with a family – 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 for. What he then collects in possessions testifies more to the drastic functionalization of private life for the objective compulsions of profitably executed wage labor than to freedom and adventure.
The second point which casts doubt on the standard of living is already addressed with the keyword “profitable,” namely the reason why the things from “modern developments” that enter the necessary consumption of employees really become affordable for an average wage earner. It is not a free gift from the capitalistic commodity producers and suppliers to their customers, or an otherwise philanthropic feature of the free-market economy, but the effect of a merciless competition over the profits that can be realized on the market. In the long run, this fight is carried out by the competing companies on the field of production costs, and the most important weapon that can be deployed in this is lowering unit wage costs. Reducing labor in price, but above all increasing its efficiency and saving relatively or even absolutely 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. Looked at the other way around, what makes a product cheaper, so that it also ultimately becomes affordable to less well-to-do customers, is the successful minimization of the operational cost of labor in proportion to the product of labor, the mass of products for sale which belong to the company; hence, increased output from the capitalistic use of the “labor factor.” Exploitation progresses when consumer objects for the rich gradually become mass-produced commodities within the reach of the purchasing power 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.
So, thirdly, it is quite clear what is going on when capitalists use successfully pressed-down production costs to establish a line of goods for a new group of buyers, which includes the wage earners; they open up a competition against other manufacturers for the money of the less well-funded masses – certainly not for supplying them; that’s why there can be no talk of an oversupply. A company wants to sell, whatever and for whomever; it has work done in order to engross with commodity sales a maximum of social purchasing power for the realization of the profit that its workers produce in its products. Social wealth is not generalized, nor is participation in it conceded, but if anything the opposite: even the paltriest wage sum is mobilized 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's 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 exchange for the necessary and sufficiently reduced in price mass-produced goods, money “flows back” to their till and thus helps complete the purpose for which it is generally spent: to increase ever further the monopolized ownership and command power of property over labor.
The selling of cars, air travel, built-in cabinets, etc., to everyone, as well as to simple wage earners, revolves around the “absorption” of purchasing power for completing the capital turnover in certain industries, and most definitely not the fulfillment of a somehow constituted social “supply order”; this is the reason for it, and it appears in reverse that, fourthly, some “high end” consumer goods' affordability by the average wage earner signifies anything but the fact that an average wage earner can pay for them with no problem. Wages are as little assessed by the amount and price of commodities that must usually be bought with them, as prices for mass consumption goods are calculated by capitalistic retail businesses according to the sum that an employee earns on average and still has on hand after deducting 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 happens not only at the expense 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 one's admiration for the accomplishment of universal mass prosperity: all the consumer goods that make modern life so unbeatably progressive are really only affordable because resourceful producers and sellers have made the nice stuff in special cheaply producible variants. However, the problem of smart budgeting and the need to sacrifice does not thereby disappear; rather, yet another trouble is added to the banal financial one: the cheap stuff is not good for much, its use often does not last very long, so 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, to drive safe cars and look down disdainfully on the cheap tourism of poor people that at the same time testifies to their excessive prosperity. 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 here means, they can still afford and enjoy luxuries.
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 such splendidly and already suspiciously “over-supplied” employee conditions are comprehensively and perfectly functionalized for the interests of the employer: increases in labor productivity, which gives the capitalistic owner more marketable commodities for sale with a lower labor “cost factor,” thus completely serves the company’s profit; it is just for this purpose, that 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 demands 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 is part of 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 poor people's wealth from wage labor.
2. On consumer needs
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 accumulation of capital – massive need satisfaction takes place. This can even produce an argument, which the friends of mass purchasing power consider sweeping and unbeatable: “The people want it this way!” 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 adjunct to it, just forget about all the needs they cannot realize “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, to the point that the “subjective factor” feels exactly this and nothing else, the free-market economy has already worked violently with those needs that “the market” serves so cheaply that even wage earners can afford to meet them. 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 capitalist entrepreneurs and, secondly, much too insecure as a basis for calculating the risks they expose their precious property to when they “allow it to work.” Anyone who wants to do business with capitalistically produced commodities sets to work more offensively. He assumes the use value that the product always has for him as a capitalist 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 purchasing behavior; their solvency is estimated; and, according to these premises, the use values of the stuff are designed for the purpose of attracting peoples’ willingness to pay for them. With the range of products on offer, the people’s needs are subsequently spelled out and defined, what they have to get accustomed to in consumption. So the capitalistic business world, in its interest in making every income and wage specifically useful as purchasing power and leaving nothing to chance in competition, arrives at a self-posed education objective: it educates the masses in the correct use of the freedom that is carried out in consumption. It shapes the picture that the modern world has of itself.
The stimulation of demand by an appealing offer is taken as the smallest problem and is generally no special trick. Because what a person feels as needs with his few types 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 newer 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 rational-as-possible relationship between socially expended labor and a well-supplied existence for all. Instead, the producers mobilize all social ingenuity just to construct offers that allow money to be earned from any living condition they come across, no matter how absurd and how brutal it 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 taken care of, over the wide range of items for medical and other personal care, without which the rest of everyday life isn't survived, up to the industrially produced “mental diversions,” without which the continuously strained will to adapt hardly gets by. 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, in inexpensive variants, enjoyments which promise compensation as well as relief of the pocketbook, but which really compensate nothing at all and nevertheless always cost too much. This wonderful range of products on offer, planned for the masses as customers, aims at a character of needs which combines needs 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 production of such complex needs is left neither to nature nor to reason. For the businessman who wants to be of service here, it is generally not about humanity’s essential need for things whose indispensability had not been realized until now, but a discovered and calculated special peculiarty offered by him that rewards his crap with people's willingness to pay for it. He sees the necessity of making his interest in people’s money something they feel as their own need, and he also knows the correct means to do it: his money. He buys a special sort of inventiveness, 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; not infrequently, even children 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 perpetually successful sales must consider a “moral deterioration” of their products: to secure the “brand loyalty” of its supporters, a necessary moment of continuity in change is added, by the becoming outdated of its even still vaunted features, the triumph of an innovation or the creation of a new style. In contrast, other companies make an undisguised appeal to the lack of money of their customers, who are nevertheless “not so dumb” as to put down one cent extra on 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 conflict between the economic purpose which they pursue with their line of products and the restricted purchasing power they want to absorb, by swaying a suitable socially created need in their favor by brainwashing.
So 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, which indeed includes the freedom to shape their daily lives 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.
3. On saving and going into debt
This obviously works so well that it can’t be left there. Wage recipients and capitalist service providers get to deal with each other on still a second level: in the mass business of the banks and credit card companies. Because that is the system-appropriate answer of financial capital to the fact that in the free-market economy, even with all its bargains and cut-price offers, life is nevertheless absolutely too expensive for a modern employee, thus doing business with him constantly impinges on its narrow limits: the credit business helps in financial issues, by no means to its misfortune.
It grants even the poorest customer the ability to put money aside and “allow it to work,” because it brings in interest just like a properly invested capitalist property. Without any discriminating prejudice, 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, as wages do not make a person rich, a fortiori a saved fraction of them is never real property in the sense that it is suitable for vital necessities by yielding a livelihood quasi-automatically. In the end, it never becomes a larger gain or even a cash reserve for emergencies – hence it is 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 it 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 highly-valued moral 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 afford is granted by his savings bank – presupposing he has a steady income – the ability to take out a loan and to live for once above his own circumstances; almost like a proper capitalist who invests borrowed money and – if he does not make a mistake and the market plays along – “makes” still a lot more money with it than he could with his property alone and, indeed, so much more that the interest payments and repayment of the borrowed sum are a detraction from the growth of profit. Therein, however, lies the essential difference: to wage laborers, “consumer credit” – not so named by chance – contributes nothing at all to their wage income; on the contrary, it demands interest and amortization payments in addition to the sum that he does not yet have for the happily bargained purchase. If so, the interest is 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 saving, and lasts a lot longer under the circumstances than the use value, which one at least has immediately in hand. A certain risk of remaining deep in unpayable debt – e.g., in the 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; with a lot of renunciation and their own work quite many 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 a rather unscrupulous one without real “security”: on the whole, they do not do too badly earning money on their less wealthy customers.
Thus the credit industry serves in a comprehensive way the massive need of getting by on 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 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 their savings banks' accommodating services. 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 attractive offers for financing necessities, it allots whatever fits their purse from the wide varieties of means of living and luxuries; 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 are the true masters of the market economy, have control over the entire commodity production with their purchase decisions, and in this respect would be also to blame for nuclear power and mad cow disease. 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 free democratic standard of living.
* Anyone who relativizes the indicators of modern wage laborers by pauperism will perforce not discover poverty; 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 explaining all demands that go beyond these necessities to be presumptuous. The share of the worker in the social wealth is measured by this and not by the needs that adjust themselves as necessary requirements each time the level of production increases; rather, the mere reproduction of the workforce appears in this interested comparative standpoint as prosperity, and thus reason for a hot praise of capitalism. When this viewpoint is brought up by the worker himself as a judgment about his position – “I could be worse off”, “it goes (relatively) well for me” – he is also not driven to an objective judgment, but usually avails himself of a comparison with his nearby surroundings: the co-worker who is paid worse, the unskilled man at the bad machine and similar negative models, leading to a positive conclusion, which is nevertheless recognizable as an expression of his discontent – why else would one relativize one’s own needs by the poverty of others?