Groucho Marxism

A recent post on twitter caught my attention as I thought it perfectly summed up the absurdity of the working world. The post went like this: “Wake up early to go to a job you don’t care about. Work all day doing things that don’t matter to you, for people who wouldn’t care if you disappeared. Come home exhausted with barely enough energy to cook, clean, or even think. Try to squeeze in 30 minutes of ‘your time’ before passing out and doing it all again. Weekends? Spent recovering, running errands, or worrying about Monday. Vacations? Maybe two weeks a year if you’re lucky, and you’re still checking emails. And this is considered ‘normal’? I don’t want to ‘climb the ladder’. I don’t want to hustle for a promotion to get slightly better crumbs.”

The post went on: “I want to wake up without anxiety. I want time to create, to move slowly, to breathe. Whatever this system is, it’s not living. It’s survival with a salary attached. Anyone else feel like the whole setup is one giant scam we’ve been tricked into calling life?” This post doesn’t just sum up the absurdity of the working world; it sums up the absurdity of capitalism. Our capitalist system is a giant scam that we are all forced to participate in against our will. When did any of us agree to this?! A critic might counter that we all have to do things we don’t want to do in order to keep society functioning effectively. But this ignores the fact that under capitalism, the vast majority of work people do is not designed to keep society running; it is designed to create surplus value for the ruling class.

This is particularly true for people working in office jobs, who now comprise over half of the working population in the UK (including me). I am firmly of the view that we could get rid of 90% of office jobs overnight and society would continue to function just fine. In fact it would probably function more effectively. One peculiar thing about working an office job is that you often find yourself with nothing to do. Tell someone with a ‘real’ job this and they will act incredulous: “Surely you must have something to do? Otherwise they would just get rid of you!” But there are many reasons firms keep staff on even when they don’t actually have any work for them to do – the main one being that staff are kept on in case they are needed at some point in the future.

From the point of view of a corporation, people are essentially no different to machines. In the same way you might buy a machine – say, a vacuum cleaner – and use it only when you need to, a firm will hire an employee and only use them when they need to. The rest of the time, the employee will be sat around twiddling their thumbs. That might sound nice – and it would be, if you were free to pursue your own interests during this down time. But instead you are still expected to be present and demonstrate that you are using your time ‘effectively’. Which practice means using your time in a way which will benefit the corporation, or more accurately, the corporation’s shareholders. These shareholders don’t care about your hobbies or interests; all they care about is that you make them money.

One thing you soon learn about the working world is that the reward for hard work is not more money; it is more work! This makes sense in light of the way that employees are treated as machines: if you had two vacuum cleaners, and one was more effective at cleaning than the other, you would obviously tend to use the more effective one more than the less effective one. Company CEOs will often argue that employees shouldn’t just be motivated by money, that ‘hard work is it’s own reward’, and so on. But this is a bit rich given that the entire point of the enterprise they are overseeing is to make money for shareholders, and that their job is do this by extracting as much surplus value from their workers as they possibly can.

Many companies will argue that they are ‘employee friendly’ and that they treat their employees well. And it’s certainly true that some companies treat their staff better than others. But all firms must operate within the constraints of the capitalist system, which necessarily involves making money through the exploitation of workers. Any firm that doesn’t do this will end up going bust. A company has no choice but to exploit its workers, no matter how nicely they might want to treat them. In this sense, firms are just as much a slave to the system as workers are. This absurdity will continue as long as we continue to live under capitalism. Our only way out is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a system centred on people rather then profits.