09.17.09
Nutjob speaks at GCC!
Tonight this guy will be presenting his let’s-all-be-socialists movie at GCC. Sadly, I have to work, so I cannot follow through with my original plan to heckle and/or pass out literature that points out all the flaws in Mr. Wolff’s reasoning. Which is probably okay, because I’m sure no one in charge of organizing the presentation, least of all Wolff himself, is interested in actual informed debate taking place; it’s just one more little piece of the indoctrination that is the public school system.
The main trouble with Wolff’s criticism of capitalism is that it rests entirely on two easily debunked fallacies, the first being the supposed stagnation of wages in the 1970′s. In fact, no such stagnation occurred; Wolff (and many other socialist economists) do not factor in the value of non-cash compensation to employees, which began to increase greatly in the seventies. Here, here, and here are some facts regarding the myth of wage stagnation.
Wolff uses that initial fallacy, in conjunction with the fact that corporate profits have continued to rise over the last thirty years (this one is actually true!) to argue that employees are not seeing any benefit from the increased profits and are therefore being exploited by their employers. This is demonstrably false: just look around you. It’s impossible not to notice the increase in the standard of living for the average American over the past thirty years. I’m not a particularly well-off person, but I have more luxuries just in this room than I can count. When your average worker has a cell phone, refrigerator, microwave, TV, and computer, well, that’s a pretty good indicator that his actual compensation is sufficient. How exactly could our average standard of living have improved so much if not because we’ve received increased compensation in relation to our increased production?
The second fallacy is that an ever increasing gap between corporate profits and employee wages is a necessary result of a capitalist system, but Wolff provides absolutely no evidence for this claim. In fact, a true free-market system, by its very nature, will always result in increasing wages, as companies compete for the best workers in order to be more successful. The only way to keep wages lower than employee production warrants is through — you guessed it — regulation! While companies in a particular industry may mutually decide to keep wages artificially low, the only way to enforce such a decision is with the help of the government. Without such enforcement, the first smart businessperson to come along will see a great opportunity to snap up all the best employees by offering a higher wage. Any such wage stagnation, if it were to exist, would therefore be a result of the interference with the free-market system, not the system itself.
Okay, so the wage stagnation never happened, and even if it had it wasn’t caused by the capitalist system. But just for kicks, let’s take a look at Wolff’s proposed solution for this inevitable failure of capitalism that did not and could not happen.
What we have to do, see, is all be both owners *and* employees of our places of work. That way we’ll just have to split up all those growing profits evenly! Hey, it worked for some tech guys in California, so it has to work everywhere, right? Wrong. It should be pretty self-evident, first of all, that not everyone is good at or interested in making business decisions. Some people, like maybe music students who are waitressing to pay the bills while they go to school, would much rather go to work, get paid, and spend their free time thinking about things they actually enjoy, like, say, music and video games.
But just for argument’s sake let’s pretend that every worker ever wants to spend time deciding how his company should be run. When are the decisions made? Well, in Wolff’s example, said tech guys did work Monday through Thursday, and spent Friday making business decisions. Okay, but that means no work got done on Friday. Or it means that Friday’s work got smooshed into Monday through Thursday. And don’t even start thinking about the headache of finding time for an all-emplowner meeting when you’re the type of business that actually has to be open for customers in order to make any money.
Wolff’s proposal seems to forget one of the most basic principles of civilization: division of labour. Let the people who are good at making decisions make the decisions, and let the people who are good at making widgets, or who only want to flip burgers, make widgets and flip burgers. We are not little worker-drones who are all exactly the same, and we maximize our production, efficiency, and compensation by realizing and working with that rather than denying it.
In conclusion: Richard Wolff’s “Capitalism Hits the Fan” offers a solution that could not work for a problem that does not exist. I sure do hope *somebody* at that lecture tonight has the brains to call him on it, but I’m not holding my breath.