lemm.ee

2 points

5 months ago

Do you even understand what it means for the workers to be commodities under capitalism?

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Gladaed@feddit.de

1 point

5 months ago

I don’t think I do. At least not in the way you do. I guess you mean that they are a means of production and are considered to be kind of fungible. I don’t know how that relates to the post though.

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4 points

5 months ago

What? The post is about how under capitalism, with the workers being commodities, schooling and education are just processes to add value to a product. That’s THE point of the post.

Commodity in this context means something produced just for its trade value. Capitalism in pursuit of profits, which tend to fall in existing markets, must expand commodification into every aspect of reality. Including humans, and their labour. It was one of the first markets capitalism expanded into actually. It’s the whole reason slavery ended basically.

This is basic shit we learn in school the “Global South”.

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newfie@lemmy.ml

1 point

3 months ago

What do you mean about this being the reason slavery ended?

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0 points

3 months ago

It was more profitable for the nascent capitalist class to have a wage workers than slaves, it’s just that.

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newfie@lemmy.ml

1 point

3 months ago

Why was that more profitable for them? Isnt the permanent maintenance of a slave underclass the most profitable structure imaginable? Assuming you aren’t meaningfully concerned about them revolting

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2 points

3 months ago

Slaves don’t earn wages to buy products. The slave-owners have to spend funds to feed, house them etc.

But it was really more about creating consumer markets. There is no capitalism without vast consumer markets for mass produced goods.

Mercantile slavery produced less, more artisanal goods, for a very small class of people (aristocracy and nascent bourgeoisie).

And it wasn’t possible to expand the consumer markets without creating a new class of people who had an income to spend on commodities.

This is extremely simplified, but it’s the main interpretation for the end of slavery. Like, when we study the Industrial Revolution, the British empire and the end of slavery in school, it’s always under that lens, of creating new consumer markets.

But just to make it clear, slavery is still lucrative, to this day. Which is why we have more slaves in absolute numbers now than at any other point in history. But it can’t be the main relation of production, because capitalism depends on mass consumption by masses of people. So slavery can only ever exist as a marginal system.

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