In the fight to defeat lifestyle and wage inequality, we must understand how we got here by understanding the history of humans and how they have been controlled. First, it was just savagery, which lasted more than a million years. Then barbarism came along and lasted five thousand years. And then it was slaves where we belonged to the master for life, followed by the feudal serfdom or tenant, who were also likely bound for life to the lord and his land.
From there we went to capitalism, which is only 450 years old. In this time the industrial age was launched around the start of the 19th century, which brought large numbers of new wage slaves from the countryside to the cities and factories creating capitalist captains of industry and later masters of entire countries and their continents as their riches increased, riches that included wage slaves. Their riches also came from using our Commons to get ahead and using the wealth accumulated from our Commons and our labor swelled their riches and power to majestic proportions.
To understand how capitalists make their money off the backs of wage slaves, consider how most people go into the labor market through a personnel office or an employment agency, and the employer buys people’s labor at a prevailing wage whether by the hour, day, week or month. Then applies it under his supervision who is the Boss (the word boss was imported from the Dutch) to produce goods, which is sold at a profit. That profit is derived from the fact that wage slaves produce more valve then the capitalist pays for their labor.
If the bosses can keep labor low like the last 30 years, they get very rich and the workers are now with very little. If this is not revisited, we will see capitalism swept aside just like feudalism, which swept aside barbarism and savagery. How and by whom is this revolutionary transformation to be effected?
The wage slaves of the world are demanding a change in the inequality and if they don’t, capitalism could be relegated to the museum of antiquities. The workers will not stand for the exploitation and abuses any longer. Wages must be raised to $15 to $18 an hour, free education, universal healthcare, pensions and jobs for all who want to have one and the protection of unions.
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…