Gracias a un amigo de Twitter, acabo de encontrarme con unos comentarios del año 2005 de Lee Scott, CEO de Walmart, pidiéndole al congreso que aprobara un aumento del sueldo mínimo:

“El sueldo mínimo de 5,15 dólares en los Estados Unidos no ha subido en casi una década y creemos que está fuera de sintonía con los tiempos que vivimos. En Wal-Mart podemos ver directamente como muchos de nuestros clientes tienen dificultades para llegar a fin de mes. Nuestros clientes simplemente no tienen el dinero para comprar artículos de primera necesidad”.

A primera vista estos comentarios parecen sumamente extraños, pues la fuente es el máximo ejecutivo de una empresa que, tal como usted sabrá si ha seguido las noticias durante el Viernes Negro, se caracteriza por mantener los sueldos de sus trabajadores tan bajos como sea humanamente posible.

Pero si lo piensa bien, en realidad no existe contradicción alguna. Existe un fundamental dilema del priosionero en el corazón mismo del capitalismo. A las grandes corporaciones les interesa garantizar colectivamente un nivel suficientemente alto de poder adquisitivo que permita que los camiones se sigan moviendo y que los inventarios sigan rotando.

Dicho de otra manera, el interés de un empleador individual es pagar solo lo necesario para mantener a los empleados en un nivel de subsistencia mientras trabajan, sin excedente suficiente para cubrir perídos de enfermedad o desempleo. Pero el interés colectivo de todos los empleadores es que se pague lo suficiente a los trabajadores para cubrir el costo de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo.

El propósito fundamental del estado capitalista es resolver estos dilemas del prisionero. Cuando el estado impone un sueldo mínimo suficienemente alto para facilitar la reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo (aunque este no sea el objetivo explícito fuera del modelo socialdemócrata europeo), los costos recaen igualitariamente sobre todos los empleadores de una industria determinada. Y al contrario del caso de un cártel privado y voluntario, ningún empleador puede violar el acuerdo con sus competidores para obtener una ventaja cortoplacista. De esta manera, el financiamento del costo de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo deja de ser un motivo de competencia de costos entre empleadores; se conveirte en un costo colectivo de la industria entera que puede ser pasado completamente a los consumidores como un recargo vía precios administrados.

Marx tuvo mucho que decir sobre este fenómeno, ilustrado por el Acta de las Diez Horas de Trabajo en Gran Bretaña (El Capital, vol. 1, cap. 10).

“Estas actas limitan la pasión del capital por un drenaje ilimitado de la fuerza de trabajo, limitando forzosamente la duración del día de trabajo a travez de regulaciones estatales, hechas por un estado regido por capitalista y latifundista. … La limitación impuesta sobre la mano de obra de las fábricas se debió a la misma necesidad que exparció el guano sobre los campos ingleses. El mismo entusiasmo ciego por el saqueo que en un caso drenó los suelos, en el otro arrancó de raíz la fuerza vital de la nación”.

Marx argumentaba que este interés común en prevenir “el drenaje de los suelos” era lo que explicaba el apoyo que muchos capitalistas (como por ejemplo el empleador Josiah Wedgwood) dieron al Acta de las Diez Horas.

El estado funciona de manera polifacética como el comité ejecutivo de la clase económica regente, llevando a cabo muchas funciones que a sus miembros no les interesa llevar a cabo individualmente.

Los salarios mínimos, la negociación colectiva y los esquemas de cobertura médica universal pueden ser percibidas individualmente por los capitalistas como restricciones o imposiciones. Pero en general son apoyadas por los capitalistas más iluminados, especialmente por aquellos en las industrias que más se benefician de estas medidas. Considérese, por ejemplo, el rol de Gerard Swope, CEO de General Electric, en la coalición empresarial que respaldó al New Deal.

El salario mínimo aumenta el poder adquisitivo agregado de la clase trabajadora, y ayuda a los empleadores a asegurarse una fuente confiable de fuerza de trabajo de manera sostenible. El estado del bienestar impide que el desempleo, el hambre y la damnificación lleguen a niveles políticamente desestabilizadores que derrumbarían al capitalismo desde abajo. La cobertura médica universal bajo el modelo británico o el canadiense externaliza los costos laborales que de otro modo serían sufragados por los empleadores (como se hace en países como Estados Unidos), que proveen seguro de salud como beneficio a sus empleados.

Cada vez que usted oiga retórica de ama de casa acerca de “nuestras familias trabajadoras”, o declaraciones auto-congratulatorias como “a los demócratas le importa”, trate de ir más allá de lo que dice la voz y échele un vistazo a lo que hacen las manos. En un mercado liberado (sin el estado para velar por los intereses de los capitalistas) el capitalismo corporativo se marchitaría como un caracol de jardín al que se le echa sal en la espalda. El estado trabaja para los capitalistas. No trabaja para usted.

Artículo oroginal publicado por Kevin Carson, el 26 de noviembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.

“The U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade and we believe it is out of date with the times. We can see first-hand at Wal-Mart how many of our customers are struggling to get by. Our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.”

At first glance this seems decidedly odd, coming as it does from the CEO of a company which — as you know if you’ve been following the Black Friday news — is notorious for keeping its workers’ pay as low as humanly possible.

But if you think about it, there’s really no contradiction at all. There’s a fundamental prisoner’s dilemma at the heart of capitalism. It’s in the interest of large corporations collectively to guarantee sufficient purchasing power to keep the trucks moving and the inventories turning over. But it’s in the interest of individual large corporations to keep labor costs as low as possible.

Likewise, it’s in individual employers’ interests to pay only enough to maintain employees in subsistence while they’re actually working, without enough of a surplus to save against periods of sickness or unemployment. But it’s in the collective interest of employers to pay enough to cover the minimum reproduction cost of labor power.

Overcoming such prisoners’ dilemmas is the main purpose of the capitalists’ state. When the state mandates a minimum wage sufficient to facilitate the reproduction of the workforce (of course it doesn’t in practice, outside the European “social democratic” model of capitalism), the cost falls on all employers in a given industry equally. And unlike the case of a private, voluntary cartel, individual employers are unable to defect for the sake of a short-term advantage from double-crossing their competitors. So funding the minimum reproduction cost of labor-power is no longer an issue of cost competition among employers; it’s a collective cost of an entire industry that can be passed on to consumers as a cost-plus markup, via administered pricing.

Marx had a lot to say about this phenomenon, as illustrated by the Ten-Hours Act in Britain (Capital, vol. 1 ch. 10).

“These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. … [T]he limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation.”

This common interest in preventing “exhaustion of the soil,” Marx argued, explained the counterintuitive support of many capitalists — as exemplified by employer Josiah Wedgwood — for the Ten-Hours Bill.

The state, in many ways, functions as an executive committee of the economic ruling class, carrying out for them in common many necessary functions it’s not in their interest to carry out individually. The state, in short, cleans up the capitalists’ messes for them.

Things like the minimum wage, collective bargaining, and universal healthcare may be perceived by individual capitalists as a restraint or an imposition. But they’re supported by the smarter capitalists — especially those in the industries that benefit most from them. Just consider the role of General Electric CEO Gerard Swope in the business coalition behind the New Deal.

The minimum wage increases aggregate purchasing power among the working class at large, and helps secure employers a reliable pool of labor power on a sustainable basis. The welfare state keeps unemployment, hunger and homelessness from reaching politically destabilizing levels that — without the state cleaning up the capitalists’ mess at taxpayer expense — might result in capitalism being torn down from below. Universal healthcare, whether on the British or Canadian model, externalizes labor costs on the taxpayer which would otherwise be (and are, in countries like the U.S.) borne by employers who provide health insurance as a benefit.

Any time you hear soccer mom rhetoric about “our working families,” or self-congratulatory platitudes to the effect that “Democrats care,” look behind the voice and take a look at what the hands are actually doing. In a freed market — without the state to do the capitalists’ bidding — corporate capitalism would wither like a garden slug with salt on its back. The state works for the capitalists, not for you.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, La Función Fundamental del Estado del Bienestar es el Bienestar Corporativo.
• Dutch, De Hoofdfunctie van de Verzorgingsstaat is het Verzorgen van Grote Bedrijven.

One frequent effect of licensing regimes is that they stand in the way of transforming one’s skill into a source of income, and raise the cost of doing so. The result is that they raise the overhead cost of daily living by several orders of magnitude for the average person, so that (as Paul Goodman put it) decent poverty becomes impossible. The minumum amount of labor required for comfortable subsistence is inflated unnecessarily–and guess  who collects the difference? You guessed it: the controllers of the various licensing cartels, the owners of “intellectual property,” and the wage employers who profit from the artificial restriction of self-employment alternatives.

For example:

“Washington had no schooling until he was 11, no classroom confinement, no blackboards,” notes John Taylor Gatto in the first chapter of “The Underground History of American Education.”….

He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County. “For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent  of about $100,000 a year in today’s purchasing power,” Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor — a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what  with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least — 18, more likely.

George Washington attended school for two years.” –Vin Suprynowicz

Another example, mentioned by Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality, is self-built housing. As late as the 1940s, some one-third of housing in Massachusetts was still self-built. In the sixty years since, we’ve seen quantum increases in the user-friendliness of modular housing technology, and alternative techniques like earthships, cob houses, papercrete, and the like. The population surely has more average years of schooling (albeit  probably a lower literacy rate) than the people who constructed their own homes sixty years ago. And yet the legal barriers to self-built housing are far greater now than then. The main function of the building codes is not  to enforce objective safety requirements, but to define “safety” in such a way that the standard can only be met by licensed contractors. The main practical effect is to add another contributing factor to the inflation of  housing costs. The average worker who might have owned his house free and clear in less than ten years, back in the 1940s (and therefore have been not utterly at his boss’s mercy for keeping a roof over his head), will be  mortgaged for most of his life today. Housing costs, which were maybe 20% of the average monthly budget back then, are pushing half these days.

The Democratic Freedom Caucus (a vaguely Georgist-tinged libertarian group within the Democratic Party) includes in its platform one promising suggestion that might serve as a consensus position for scaling back  licensing regimes: “license fees should be no higher than administrative costs, and there should be no arbitrary quotas on the number of licenses issued.” In other words, eliminate the power of licensing bodies to restrict  the number of practitioners based on some estimate of what the market will bear, or to enable the monopoly profits of current license holders by inflating the costs of market entry. To take just one small example of the  effect of such a reform, imagine what it would do to the taxicab “medallion” system that exists in so many large American cities, with a license to operate a cab costing into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The effect of the medallion system is to criminalize the countless operators of gypsy cab services. For the unemployed person or unskilled laborer, driving carless retirees around on their errands for an hourly fee seems like an  ideal way to transform one’s labor directly into a source of income without doing obesiance to the functionaries of some corporate Human Resources department.

The primary purpose of the medallion system is not to ensure safety. That could be accomplished just as easily by mandating an annual vehicle safety inspection and a criminal background check (probably all the licensed  taxi firms do anyway, and with questionable results based on my casual observation of both vehicles and drivers). And it would probably cost closer to fifty bucks than three hundred thousand. No, the primary purpose of  the medallion system is to allow the owners of licenses to screw both the consumer and the driver.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 11:17 am

The American government spent $6.5 million last year through the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion to teach Americans about eating healthier. At the same time the state spent $136 million encouraging more consumption of the same dairy products the previously named center was combating. The New York Times printed an article (“While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sale”) on November 6th, 2010 which addressed this incident:

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Dairy Management is a state marketing/consulting agency (were you aware these even existed?) of the Agriculture Department.  It has been central in challenging the empirical trend against American dairy consumption. This natural process toward healthier choices threatens established economic actors: Dairy producers. In response, dairy interests have utilized the bounty of state power through political organization to assist them in achieving what they couldn’t accomplish through normal market mechanisms. 

These privileged producers use the power of the state to tax dairy producers — themselves — as well as average American citizens, to pay for their advertising campaigns, in order to remove a vector of competition between the firms engaged in dairy production. In this way, such a tax is not an affront to large interests, but a cartelizing force to be desired.

Smaller, locally oriented dairy producers are forced to fund centralizing and homogenizing campaigns which they might not want, against their will, when their money may have been better spent elsewhere. The excess capacity of overly capitalized firms who are producing too much milk is artificially bolstered in anti-market fashion rather than being redirected into more profitable pursuits. This function is supported by taxpayer and industry money when this sort of intervention is not conducive to natural economic development or individual consumer health. It is a state gift to established corporate producers; the dark side of a Janus-faced statism which overpowers mealy-mouthed concerns about consumer welfare.

Let someone else comment on the pitfalls of bureaucracy and waste; the knee-slapping story of the American state pursuing contradictory goals. The lesson here is simple: For every dollar of your money it spends to protect you, it is spending twenty to enrich a corporation at the expense of the market, the consumer, and your health. That one dollar receives attention and diverts people from realizing just how complicit the state is in the complex economic problems of today. It is a convenient smokescreen. The intolerance of fairness lactose producers and other “market” actors are receiving to non-exploitative markets is apparent. Don’t fall for it.