The Fate of Individuals in Capitalism

You begin life in a capitalist system as an undifferentiated package of energy and skills — labour. Labour is an expendable resource in capitalism. If labour is cheap, or being replaced by machines, you do not want to be in the labour market. The imperative of the capitalist system is to increase profit. If your skills and energy are too expensive a commodity, the company will try to find the skills and energy elsewhere or pay you less. Today’s labour is cheap — there is lots of it around the world. In addition, technology continues to reduce the need for human employees.

Oh dear, oh dear, what to do?

Individuals in a capitalistic society are born with the potential to do anything or to be anything within the box labelled “capitalism.” There are three fundamental “anythings” a person can do or be: the first is to be a labourer or employee or unemployed and in-waiting, the second is to become an entrepreneur (someone who makes and sells something on his or her own), and the third is to become a capitalist (someone who owns part of a larger commercial or business enterprise). Within each of these fundamental categories, there are of course a great many variations and specialties. But basically every single person born within a capitalist system is capable to a greater or lesser extent of becoming any one of these three or even in some cases a mix of any of the three.

The biological metaphor is helpful. Think of an individual as similar to a biological stem cell. Stem cells under the right circumstances can develop into just about any type of cell in an organism. They have the genetic code for the entire organism built right into their cell structure. The same is true of an individual; anyone under the right circumstances can develop the skills and characteristics needed to take on just about any role. Much of the information needed is built into the actual DNA of a person. However, in the economic model, part of the needed information to become anything is acquired during our entire lives.

In stem cells, once they have been directed and are starting to develop, the cell can still deviate from its path, but not as easily. Once the cell gets further along in its specialization, changing direction becomes even more difficult. The same is true for an individual. If a person is born into a family with a strong capitalistic business, the offspring tend to stay with the business or move on and start their own. A person born into a family that has generational history of working as an employee, the more that newborn is likely to repeat this pattern. In both these examples it is because a great percentage of the early learning is done within the family context and this sets the development along a predefined path.

Because we have been in the capitalism box for some time, most people start out with labour (highly skilled, skilled, or unskilled) as their probable destiny, a few will become entrepreneurs in small businesses, and even fewer will become capitalists. The same is true of stem cells. In a multicellular organism most stem cells start out destined for routine areas of the body, with only a few in specialized organs, and fewer still destined to be nerve and brain cells.

In a simple multicellular animal, there are not many specialty organs. Just as in early capitalist years, there were not many types of capitalist ventures. So in both cases, most of the cells/people were in the body or support functions. In more advanced multicellular animals, like us, there are lots of specialized organs, including one of the most specialized and complicated — the brain. In today’s capitalist system, there are lots of specialized entrepreneurs and capitalist companies. Just like the body, that means lots of specialized skill sets.

BUT there is a problem for would-be employees. Think about building a car, for example. While a single person could build a car, it would take a very long time and require many skills. It is easier to break the tasks down and spread them around to people with highly specialized (not necessarily complex) skills. These skills get translated into simpler and simpler tasks so they can be done in an assembly line. The more specialties, the more elaborate a car an be built. Ultimately, if it can be arranged, it is cheaper to replace a person with a machine to turn a particular bolt on a particular component. Over time and with the continued selective pressure on the corporation to increase profits, more and more people will be replaced by machines. The same is true of cells. In simple organs, a given cell might have a number of tasks, but in more specialized organs, the cells have fewer, more specialized tasks. Just as in animals where the proportion of relatively unspecialized cells diminishes and specialized cells become more abundant, in specialized corporations, the number of specialized skills outnumber the unspecialized until in the end most are done by machines, because each task is so small and specialized.

So what to do? Well, if you are one of those few who are capital owners (shareholders) of large capitalist corporations, that is safer than being an employee. The safety depends on the survivability of the corporation. The survivability depends on the ability of your corporation as an individual of the lucrespecies to which it belongs to compete successfully in the econosystem.

If you are a small business owner, then your survivability depends on how well your business competes with others to supply the product in your limited region and marketplace. If a megacorporation decides to compete with you, the likelihood your business will survive depends on how well it can adapt to the changed conditions. This is identical to an ecological situation where the conditions change. It does no good to struggle harder at the same tasks. Change in strategy is required. In an ecological context individuals in species that adapt easily to the changes will survive much better than those that are specialized and try to compete with the megacorporation. In an economic system, it is also possible to become a supplier to the megacorporation (equivalent to a commensal in a biological system). If the megacorporation buys out a small business and incorporates its production and distribution, it has acquired a symbiont equivalent. If a small business sells to the corporation, the corporation reduces its competition at a cost and the entrepreneur loses the business, but at least survives for another day. Some animals do this on purpose. A squirrel’s long tail for example will easily break off if a hawk grabs the tail. The hawk pays a price for the predatory strike, but gets at least the tail. While the squirrel suffers a lost tail, it gets to live another day.

What about everybody else? Well, in an unfettered capitalist system, everybody else is just a package of undifferentiated energy and skills to be used or not as needed by the capitalists in the least expensive manner possible. As I mentioned earlier, if there are lots of these packages lying around (high unemployment), it pays to be something else — either a single entrepreneur or a capitalist, anything but a cheap package of undifferentiated skills and energy.

In a future blog I will investigate where there seems to be a new set of conditions arising to allow undifferentiated energy and skill sets (labour) to adapt and become entrepreneurial.

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