Edward McClelland — Communism saved the American worker

Wiping out Communism removed the final obstacle to the global triumph of capital. No longer did corporations doing business in the Third World have to worry about workers’ movements, or nationalization of their assets. Globalization exploded in the 1990s because the entire globe was finally under a single economic system. And if corporations didn’t have to worry about treating workers abroad well, they didn’t have to worry about treating workers at home well, either. They could simply threaten to move their operations abroad if Americans demanded high wages, or job security.

Communism’s defeat has done more than its 75-year-long victory to validate the theories of its founder, Karl Marx, who foresaw both globalization and the misery it would cause the common worker.
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production … compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeoisie mode of production. In one word, it creates a world in its own image,” Marx wrote.

He also wrote this:

Big industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., when the overpopulation is the greatest. The… theory… which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as other natural event without bestirring himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason, and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of development.

Marx was right about those things, but he was wrong about the solution....

An economy without a marketplace will produce only the bare minimum necessary for survival. But capitalism, in its rawest form, leads to the same result. Unless tempered by unionization or a social welfare state, the iron law of wages reduces the majority of workers to a subsistence level, while creating vast wealth for a tiny ownership class.

Salon
Communism saved the American worker

Edward McClelland