"(1) By reducing the worker's need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus [the capitalist--RJG] says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For [the capitalist--RJG] declares that this life, too, is human life and existence.
(2) By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard--general because it is applicable to the mass of men. [The capitalist--RJG] turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need--be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity--seems to him a luxury. [The economics of laissez-faire capitalism--RJG], this science of wealth , is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise . This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism , and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus [the economics of laissez-faire capitalism--RJG]--despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance--is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save --the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour--your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth ; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power--all this it can appropriate for you--it can buy all this: it is true endowment . Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that. " [Emphasis added--RJG.]
I keep coming back to these two paragraphs of Karl Marx because they epitomize Marx's thinking on what is morally wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, and what was true more than a century-and-a-half ago is still true today. This dehumanizing aspect of laissez-faire capitalism, this economic system which turns people and their labor into commodities--things--more surely than slavery ever did, is inherently evil. Turning people into "things," as I first stated in my June 16, 2007 OpEdNews article, " Choosing the Hardest Thing , " is where human evil begins.
We must ask ourselves, is every part of capitalism irredeemable? Or is it like fire, a terrible master and a dangerous servant? I believe that in answering these questions, we will also find our answer to the two questions that I posed originally: What is a Human Being? And why must we both ask and answer this question?
I think we first must overcome, or at least diminish, the idea of money defining our importance in society. A society that defines how important one is in it by their wealth, is by definition a plutocracy, a form of oligarchy in which the rich rule. When Marx defined his utopian, classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless society, it was because he could conceive of no other means of eliminating wealth as a measure of an individual's importance to the world. As with most utopian ideas, it has no practical application in the real world. Everyone working to the best of their abilities, giving the product of their labor to the commons, and everyone taking from the commons only that which they need, is a lovely dream; but that is all that it is, a dream.
Money is not a concrete idea; its value, like any other form of power, is purely illusory. Money is nothing more than a medium of exchange, whether it is specie or currency. It is a means of normalization of the values of items that is not inherent in the barter system, taking away the advantage a man with good bargaining skills has over those who do not. It permits the value of labor to goods and services provided to remain more or less constant in the case of indirect transactions, i.e., you are paid for your work in a factory in currency, which you then take to a store to buy groceries; a consistency that you do not have in a barter system if you attempted to directly exchange the output of your labor for goods and services. This is especially important in long term projects, where you are building, for example, a home, a school, a road, or a dam for someone else. You cannot show up at the local Wal-Mart with photos of the hospital you helped build last week, and say "Give me food and clothing for my family."
President Abraham Lincoln, in his First Annual Message to Congress--forerunner of the State of the Union Address, and delivered in written form, rather than in person--wrote, "Labor is the superior of Capital, and comes first." Excess labor is the basis of capital, in terms of money or material possessions. Labor sells its time and talent to the capitalist in exchange for wages. Wealth has capital as its foundation, but it is a secondary derivative of labor, and may have no basis in reality except the fact that a group of humans believe in it. For example, as we saw with the so-called "derivatives" in the stock market meltdown in 2008, there was no physical component involved, simply "paper instruments" as Lenin called them--no more substantial than the numbers on a roulette table. Yet, these "derivatives" nearly brought down the World's economy in 2008.
Tangential to this, we must get past the idea of solely being defined by work in our society. When we are asked "So, what do you do?" we give the name of our employer, plus the title and description of our job. But in terms of the percentage of time we spend doing things in our lives: education, hobbies, other forms of recreation, eating, and sleeping are far more important than our employment, in which we spend perhaps one-quarter of our adult lives. In a moral sense, our work is far less important than our responsibilities as a parent, spouse, family member, friend, neighbor and citizen. For most of us, our work for wages does not define us as human beings, because we work to live; we don't live to work.
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