#hadas thier

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics by Hadas Thier (2020)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJun 26, 2025

[eelhound]

"Class and wealth surely have everything to do with each other, but they are not the same thing. A stable, well-paid job (to the extent that these still exist) such as a train conductor in New York City may pay upward of $70,000 a year, and a small bodega owner in the Bronx may earn much less. But the former is a worker — who does not control her own hours and conditions of work, and the latter is a small business owner, charged with his own exploitation, as well as that of others (even if few in number).

The numbers on someone's paycheck can't tell you everything. It can't tell you, for instance, that a manager at Starbucks, who makes less than a subway conductor, has the power to fire every worker in the store. We can see then that wealth is just one part of the picture, and one that is more symptomatic of class inequality than explanatory of its origin. In fact, power, control over working conditions, and financial decision-making are the bedrocks of exploitation.

Economics Professor Michael Zweig explained it this way: 'By looking only at income or lifestyle, we see the results of class, but not the origins of class. We see how we are different in our possessions, but not how we are related and connected, and made different, in the process of making what we possess." [emphasis added] The Marxist explanation instead emphasizes that one's position in society is not measured quantitatively, but is determined by a person's relationship to labor, the fruits of labor, and the means of production. Anyone who controls the means of production, has political power, dictates the terms of other's working conditions, or owns capital that can be invested in production, is part of the CAPITALIST CLASS. And anyone who must sell their labor-power for a wage and has no access to the means of production themselves is part of the WORKING CLASS.

This does not just extend to workers engaged in production of physical goods. Teachers and nurses must sell their labor in order to provide services, and thus are part of the working class. As Marx argued: 'If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation.'

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels wrote that the 'proletarian is without property.' PROLETARIANS is another word for workers; and private property does not mean personal belongings, like your TV or laptop, but the means of production — the buildings, machinery, software, equipment, tools, and other materials owned by capitalists. Marx wasn't saying that workers literally have nothing, although that is often and increasingly true. He meant that we are without any means to produce and reproduce our livelihoods, and therefore we are at the mercy of capitalist exploitation. A construction company has mechanical shovels, drills, and dozers, which allow them to exploit laborers and turn a profit. I have a shovel, which I can use to grow flowers or tomatoes...

Wealth and poverty do not determine class, rather they are manifestations of it."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

[enjambedlife]

4/8/21 | 64/100 Days of Productivity

It was actually warm out and I had free time this afternoon, so I got some outdoor reading time in! A People’s Guide to Capitalism has been on my reading list for a while now, and I finally started it because I think it’ll be helpful for my paper on The Hairy Ape.

🎧: Black Lung - The Dead South

[eelhound]

"If we start from this understanding of value, [how use-value is created by workers and nature] rather than with a surface appearance of prices, the real character of money loses its mystique. Value — which is just a crystallization of abstract labor — is represented by money... Money is itself a commodity, which by custom and circumstance, has become a universal measure against which all other items on the market are exchanged.

Instead of saying that it takes an equal amount of time to produce a ballpoint pen as a Life Savers candy, we can simply say that they both have a value of ten cents. Thus by being a portable and universal embodiment of value, money simplifies and mediates the process of trading goods.

In Marx's words, 'Money necessarily crystalizes out of the process of exchange.' As markets developed, money became a convenient and necessary substitute for simple barters of commodities based on socially agreed upon labor-times. With money, a producer of bread doesn't have to go to the marketplace with ten loaves of bread in order to buy a chair. At the same time, a chair maker doesn't need to exchange her chair for ten loaves of bread if she only wants one today and another loaf later in the week. Money conveniently stores value over time, which its owner can dispense of as he or she sees fit.

Money also conceals the true nature of value, so that when you go to the supermarket, you don't think you're trading an equivalent amount of your 'congealed mass of labor' with someone else's. As David Harvey explained:

You go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce. In order to buy the lettuce, you have to put down a certain sum of money. The material relation between the money and the lettuce express a social relation because the price — the 'how much' — is socially determined, and the price is a monetary representation of value. Hidden within this market exchange of things is a relation between you, the consumer, and the direct producers — those who labored to produce the lettuce.... The end result is that our social relation to the laboring activities of others is disguised in the relationships between things. You cannot, for example, figure out in the supermarket whether the lettuce has been produced by happy laborers, miserable laborers, slave laborers, wage laborers, or some self-employed peasant. The lettuces are mute, as it were, as to how they were produced and who produced them.

The real social relations of production and exchange are therefore hidden behind a veil of what appears to be a relationship between money and commodities. Instead of human relationships, we have economic relationships between goods... The hidden relations of production — wage labor and exploitation — behind this 'fantastic form' [of money] are specific and peculiar characteristics of capitalism. They did not exist in pre-capitalist class societies, which, despite their brutality, lacked the cloak of 'fairness' that capitalism purports. The process of producing commodities, Marx wrote, 'has mastery over man, instead of the opposite.'

This is the essence of what Marx dubbed COMMODITY FETISHISM. What other way can you describe the modern worship of every new generation of Apple products than fetishism? We idolize these things that we consider to be outside and external to us, but in fact are our own creations. By using the term 'fetishism,' Marx was also taking a jab at the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who saw superstition as primitive, and hailed the rationality of capitalism. The thinkers of the Enlightenment promoted science and logic, yet had no problem with a warped reality in which things are powerful and valuable, while human beings relate to each other through the exchange of those things."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

[eelhound]

"The compulsion to increase the intensity of labor ratcheted up to an obsession in the 1890s with the methods of 'scientific management.' Frederick Taylor developed the ideas of industrial efficiency first as a manager at Midvale Steel Works and later at Bethlehem Steel. Every task was studied, broken down into individual components, and timed in order to determine the minimal intervals required to accomplish each. The timing and methods of work could then be standardized — whether that be through speeding up the conveyor belt in an auto plant or using keystroke counters to mechanize office jobs.

Scientific management is based on a severe alienation of labor, which assumes that the greatest and most specific level of supervision will yield maximum productivity. So long as workers have any control over the labor process, goes the argument, they will try to thwart their full productive potential. According to Taylor, managers should specify 'not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.'

Taylor wrote at length about his own experience as a manager at Bethlehem Steel. While studying the physics of loading pig iron, he discovered that a pig iron handler ought to handle between 47 and 48 tons per day, but in fact they averaged 12½. To resolve this situation, he set upon buying off the most fit workers and training them to follow second-by-second instruction in order to produce optimal efficiency. These workers were then set as examples and their work-speed imposed as the standard on the shop floor.

Taylor outlined the process by which this was accomplished in his book, The Principles of Scientific Management. First they picked out a man who seemed physically capable and who they assumed could be sufficiently convinced to work harder by the promise of a raise: 'a little Pennsylvania Dutchman who had been observed to trot back home for a mile or so after his work in the evening about as fresh as he was when he came trotting down to work in the morning.' (Imagine the nerve, leaving work still feeling fresh!) Taylor recounted a very patronizing conversation with the man he called 'Shmidt,' which ended in the following lecture:

Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he's told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him. Now you come on to work here tomorrow morning and I'll know before night whether you are really a high-priced man or not.

For the reward of being judged a 'high-priced man,' Shmidt and eventually others were paid $1.85 a day in stead of $1.15, an increase of 60 percent in their wage. In exchange, the workers each loaded 47.5 tons of pig iron on average instead of 12.5, an increase in productivity of 280 percent. Not a bad deal for the bosses. Taylor justified his astonishing condescension toward the workers by explaining that they were too 'mentally sluggish' to understand how to efficiently do the work themselves:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this other very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.

But the real implication of Taylorism is not that workers are too 'mentally sluggish' to efficiently work themselves to the bone. Quite the opposite, their own interest would lead them to work as little as possible in order to preserve their health and well-being. This very intelligent sense of self-preservation is in fact the reason that workers need to be supervised to the second. Indeed, more often than not, management observes their employees only to discover that the workers have found ways to shorten the labor-time it takes to perform various functions. They do this in order to have more downtime for themselves, but managers take that knowledge in order to enforce speedups and to steal more surplus labor-time.

Capitalism uses our ingenuity to further immiserate us. Socialism would use every advance to make more time for humans to rest, play, and thrive. This is why Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky was onto something when he lauded human laziness as a quality necessary for human progress:

As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. It would appear, then, from this point of view that human laziness is a progressive force. Old Antonio Labriola, the Italian Marxist, even used to picture the man of the future as a 'happy and lazy genius.'"

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

[eelhound]

"Capitalist society is organized around the quantitative exchange values of goods, rather than qualitative human need for use-values. While you or I are primarily concerned with the use-value of items, whether we can sit on a chair or on a loaf of bread, a capitalist does not care what an item's use is, so long as it will make him money. Use-values only matter to capitalists insofar as they know they must produce something that can be sold, and useless things can't be sold. But what matters most is exchange-value — how much money can be made from selling those goods.

Put another way: the use-value of grain and whether there are people that need to eat is not the system's main concern, rather its exchange value is what matters — whether and for how much grain can be exchanged. And so capitalism is responsible for such grotesque events as dumping grain reserves into the ocean rather than selling at a loss in order to feed hungry people. At the same time, boundless quantities of plastics and disposable everything are churned out without any regard for human and environmental consequences."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

[eelhound]

"The cost of the subsistence and reproduction of workers is both socially and historically determined. It reflects the changing cost of producing food or acquiring skills; as well as differences — based, for instance, on the balance of class forces — in what is deemed a socially acceptable requirement for subsistence. For both of these reasons, the cost of labor differs, too, between countries or regions with disparate levels of productivity and histories of class struggle. This is why US based companies chase cheaper wages to other countries like China or Mexico, or to the closer distance of the 'right-to-work' states within the US.

The cost of labor also reflects the injustice of oppression. As of 2019, women in the United States were still paid 79 cents to a man's dollar. (Or in the case of the country's most talented and famous soccer team, the United States women's national soccer team earns 38 cents to their male counterparts, despite generating greater revenue.) Black men are paid 70 cents and Black women 61 cents in comparison to their white counterparts. Latina women earn 53 cents to a white man's dollar. Increased education does little to change this ratio for women or people of color. Blacks, Latinxs, and women at all education levels earn less than white men. Women of color occupy the bottom of the totem pole. American capitalism relies upon women and people of color to populate permanent, low-wage sectors of the labor force.

The disparities in racial and gender wage gaps point to the fact that 'socially determined' is not only dependent on public perception of what is acceptable, but is also based on historic and systemic institutions of oppression. People of color, for example, have less inherited familial wealth on average to draw from, and therefore disproportionately suffer from the accumulation of considerable amounts of debt in order to go to college or earn an advanced degree. Combined with the reality of severely underfunded, under-resourced, segregated public schools, this ensures that they never enter a level playing field. Then come long-documented discriminatory practices, which ensure that they are the last to get hired and the first to be fired, contributing to higher rates of unemployment and a more desperate workforce, forced to accept lower wages for equal work.

Capitalism also depends on the superexploitation of immigrants — and particularly those who are not protected by legal documentation. Disenfranchised and disempowered by the threat of deportation, undocumented workers are subject to draconian conditions and wages, and fired if they protest or attempt to unionize. As author Justin Akers Chacón has written, the criminalization of immigration has been 'used widely by employers to structure lower-wage tiers within and across whole industries, setting the low-wage standard of immigrant labor by the early 1990s. The declining wage benchmarks for undocumented labor had the further effect of holding all wages down within those same industries.'

Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone's wages are pushed down.

Lastly, the value of labor will also vary among industries and skills. One reason is the cost of education and training required for different jobs, and another is the expectation of how stable of a workforce bosses are looking to buy. Fast food workers, home health aides, farm workers, and other low-wage workers are consistently paid wages far short of the cost of living (and therefore their true value). The capitalists bank on getting away with it because they expect, in fact depend on, a high turnover rate and unemployment rate, which will ensure that those positions will fill easily. Bosses see low-wage workers as quickly replaceable commodities, bought and employed as easily as one would buy other cheap 'inputs.'

Meanwhile, higher paid workers don't suffer the crushing weight of poverty, but this does not mean that they are not exploited. In fact, they often face even greater rates of exploitation if the value of the goods that they produce are significantly higher. A Boeing engineer may earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year, but she contributes to products that sell for millions or billions of dollars. More importantly, varying rates of exploitation make up an integrated web of labor. The extraction of value does not happen on a case-by case basis, but is a collective process. Google's high-paid programmers work in buildings cleaned by low-paid janitors. The one's work is, in fact, dependent on the other's, and therefore so is the extraction of its value."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.

[eelhound]

"If all things were fair and just, you would give over to your boss only the amount of time that it takes to reproduce the value of your labor-power. Say it takes four hours to produce $120 worth of goods, the equivalent of your daily wage, you could go home after four hours.

But if your boss allowed that, his inputs and outputs would be equal... What would be the point? Why not just keep the money he started with? But all things are not fair and just. The capitalist pays you for the cost of your labor-power, not for the value of the goods you produce. Thus your paycheck is worth the exchange-value of your labor-power. But the use-value of your labor-power is the production of greater value.

Let's say you work for Starbucks and they pay you $120 for an 8-hour shift. But you can probably make $120 worth of fancy coffee in an hour, or probably in a half hour at a busy store. Even once you subtract the cost of materials and use of the equipment, Starbucks doesn't pay you anywhere near the value you've created (hundreds of dollars a day). They buy your labor-power from you, not the actual fruits of your labor. And you make that value back for them in an hour. The rest of your shift, you're basically working for free!

This extra labor they extract from us is called SURPLUS LABOR. While NECESSARY LABOR is that part of the day required to reproduce the cost of labor-power, the surplus labor is the free labor that the capitalist benefits from during the rest of your workday. Thus, if after you finish making $120 worth of coffee, instead of throwing down your apron and going home, you finish out your eight-hour shift, one hour will be necessary labor, and seven hours are surplus labor! (This seven to one ratio is overly simplified because it doesn't yet factor in the machinery and equipment we mentioned above)...

In this way, through the 'charm of something created out of nothing,' capitalism disguises a process of exploitation, of appropriating surplus labor from the working class, as a 'fair day's wage for a fair day's work.'... Appropriating surpluses was a visible and obvious norm of previous class societies. But in examining capitalist society, we have to go beneath the surface appearance of a 'fair day's work,' to find the inner essence of exploitation."

- Hadas Thier, from A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, 2020.