In conditions of global "free" market with no tariffs every the labor has to be a commodity driven to the lowest possible level. When surplus labor is available it means below subsistence level.
Marx predicted it long time ago but backward Soviet block prevented this revolutionary situation to take place in the most developed countries. Bussiness class is too stupid not to hand over the rope to hang its members.
Precisely correct. The creation of the proletarian class (i.e. that class which has no means of obtaining income other than wages for labor) shattered the traditional Christian and Western economy. Small crofters, farmers, artisans, and others who had formerly eked out a living from their various self-owned enterprises were stripped of their livelihoods by social or economic factors (pun intended) and reduced to working for wages rather than workingfor a living. This social upheaval stripped labr of its intrinsic dignity and social character and transformed it into a commodity. This is why G.K. Chesterton said
"The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital."In other words: Capitalism is not defined by private ownership of Capital; it is defined by the existence of a mass of people without capital. Capitalism is defined by the presence of a propertyless working class.
The commodification of labor has been a disaster for the vast majority of people. A man whose sole means of supporting his family is his (commodified) wage is going to suffer every time market forces reduce the value of that wage. (This is why trade unions were created — they were attempts by the owners of a given commodity (labor) to "corner the market" in that commodity, establishing a monopoly power over the price of labor which Capital would be forced to pay.) This worked as long as Capital was largely tied to local or national structures that prevented it from moving. The problem with this idea is that Capital is now more mobile. In a teleconnected, jet-speed world, Capital is free to seek markets where the commodity price of labor is as low as possible, i.e. sweatshops. All unions do today is "bid up" the price of labor in their locales, driving Capital (and jobs) to low-priced labor markets overseas. Ecce outsourcing; one cannot blame Capital for buying labor as cheaply as possible; those who manage it on behalf of their shareholders have a duty to maximize their investors' returns.
Communism, socialism, and the collectivist sorts of anarchism was an attempt to rig the market by creating "one big union" (the Party) and "one big company" (the State), both owned by the working class (the "dictatorship of the proletariat"). In theory, this would allow the State to match supply and demand ccording to plan and ensure an equal distribution of both work and wages to all ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). In practice, however, the Party nomenklatura not the people at large, ended up in control of both the State and the People, using both for their own ends. Under the Soviet system, ruthlessness was the coin of the realm, not labor, and most of the State's revenues were used for things that tended to soldify State power. (i.e. military adventurism, prestige projects, subversion of other countries, etc.) Unable to to match supply and demand by bureaucratic fiat, the State concentrated on the production of staple goods for the masses, but without the profit motive to motivate them, Soviet laborers had no incentive to work any harder than was necessary to avoid criminal charges; in return, wages just above subsistence were the norm for workers in State-owned industries ("We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us"). Such a system was doomed from the outset.
The situation in the West is similar. Most people in the U.S., Europe, and Japan own no capital of any sort outside of the equity value of their own homes. By exchanging their labor for wages, most are able to live reasonably comfortable lives and accumulate a wide variety of consumer products through installment buying, high-interest debt, and other forms of credit. Owning a business is considered by most workers to be a prerogative of the wealthy — something impossible for the Average Joe. This leads to both a sense of cynical fatalism about the system ("The rich get richer, the poor get poorer") and a sense of futility ("No matter how good a job I do, the Company pays me the same"). Without the profit motive to motivate them, Western laborers have no incentive to work any harder than is necessary to avoid getting fired from their jobs; in return, wages just above the level needed to live and support one's heavy consumer debts are the norm.
The lessons of history show that in a command economy a dearth of physical commodities is unavoidable, leaving the average worker impoverished and angry. In a free market economy, the flight of commodified labor prices to the lowest levels possible cannot be stopped, leaving the average worker bankrupt and angry. In both, working people are alienated both from Capital and from their labor: work becomes drudgery, something one does for the State (or the Man) in order to get enough money to live on.
What is to be done? The solution won't be easy. Capitalism and communism are siblings — both cannot exist without masses of proles who have nothing to trade but their labor. In order to escape the tyranny of these two monsters, it may be necessary to rethink the relationships between man and capital and man and labor by which our economy has organized itself over the past several centuries since the death of Christendom and the rise of Man, the Measure of All Things. Perhaps we should reconsider the idea of the West as a Christian civilization, and with it the idea of work as both sacrament and vocation.
One thing is clear: in a world of ten billion people, the price of labor will only continue to drop. In time, even the most inexpensive sweatshop labor will be undersold; after all, the ultimate low-wage worker is a slave (or a machine). In areas of the world where Western concepts of law and order and human rights do not hold sway, slavery and other forms of forced and uncompensated labor (such as the Chinese laogai system) will be Capital's outsourcing option of choice; in high-tech countries, robots will bear the burden of productive labor. In both cases, the era of the Job is over. Man the Human Resource – individual men as disposable labor units, easily discardable should he becomes expensive — is ended. Without jobs, those billions without other means of generating income will have no wages, and no way to support themselves and their loved ones — and a man with hungry children is capable of anything. If there is to be any hope, it lies in the elimination of the proles — by restoring them to their proper place in Christian society, that of human beings created in the Maker's image. Rather than human resources, men need to be restored to the dignity of human beings — each working at his own vocation with his own tools, each benefting directly from the profits made by his own hands. An economic philosophy that champions such a revanchiste theory of economy exists. It is called Distributism.
The word distributism comes from the idea that a just social order can be achieved through a much more widespread distribution of property. Distributism means a society of owners. It means that property belongs to the many rather than the few. It is related to the idea of subsidiarity, emphasized in all papal encyclicals relating to social teaching and economics. Subsidiarity, in the words of the Quadragesimo Anno, means that "It is an injustice and at the same time a great evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social and never destroy and absorb them."
Dorothy Day, writing in The Catholic Worker in June, 1948, described Distributism thus:
"The aim of distributism is family ownership of land, workshops, stores, transport, trades, professions, and so on. Family ownership in the means of production so widely distributed as to be the mark of the economic life of the community-this is the Distributist's desire. It is also the world's desire."If you are a worker, and your desire is to own your own business instead of being a wage-slave your entire life, Distributism may be the answer.
In China in the 1920's, labor was so cheap that humans were used instead of horses to pull loads. The horses actually had to be fed, where the humans...were left to their own devices.
Which usually mean't starving.
When anyone reads Marx's philosophy, they wonder (if they have logical thought) "how could such nonsense obtain so much credibility with so many people. There isn't any reality to back this drivel up!" Well, look at the history books, and you'll know why. Marx never said or did anything to make his views and ideology credible. So where did Marxism get the credibility to be embraced by so many? The answer is, the business community gave Marxism credibility. The owners and managers of big business behaved so horribly, with so much cruelty, greed, and corruption, that they lived up to the worst stereotypes of themselves.
Well, they're doing it again. If capitalism is to succeed, then everybody who is willing to do what they are capable of must be able to earn the necessities (food, housing, basic medical care) to be able to do so. But supporters of outsourcing want to turn America into a third-world plantation ogilarchy. And if they succeed, we could see a resurgence of Marxism or something like it.