Understanding the Economic and Ecological Crises of

Capitalism, Part 1
● Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore, “Prison Town: Paying the Price”
● David Bacon, “The Political Economy of Migration”
● Alan Sears, "Queer in a Lean World"
● Michael Zweig, “Six Points on Class”
● John Bellamy Foster, “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological
Destruction”

Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore, “Prison Town: Paying the Price”
http://www.realcostofprisons.org/materials/comics/prison_town.pdf

David Bacon, “The Political Economy of Migration”

Mr. Sensenbrenner’s Family Business

In December 2005, Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner convinced his

Republican colleagues (and to their shame, 35 Democrats) to pass one of the most
repressive immigration proposals of the last hundred years. His bill, HR 4437, would
have made federal felons of all 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.,
criminalized teachers, nurses or priests who helped them, and built a 700-mile wall on the
U.S. Mexico border to keep people from crossing.

Representative Sensenbrenner is more than just a leader of Congressional xenophobes,

however. His family is intimately involved in creating the conditions that cause
migration, and then profits from the labor it makes available. In fact, the Sensenbrenner
family connections are a microcosm of the political economy of migration itself.

James Sensenbrenner’s grandfather started Kimberley Clark, one of the world’s largest
paper companies, and Sensenbrenner and the family trust remain important stockholders.
The company’s Mexican counterpart, Kimberley Clark de Mexico, is a close associate of
the Mexican mining giant, Grupo Mexico. One of K-C’s former executives, J. Eduardo
Gonzalez, sits on its board.

Grupo Mexico was a big winner in the neoliberal economic reforms that transformed the
Mexican economy over the last twenty years. In the 1990s, the corporation became the
owner of two of the world’s largest copper mines, in Cananea and Nacozari, which were
formerly nationally-owned enterprises. The mines lie just a few dozen miles south of the
Arizona border.
In 1998, Grupo Mexico provoked a strike in Cananea, over moves to reduce its workforce
and labor costs. Close to a thousand miners lost their jobs. Many were blacklisted and left
for “the other side.”

Then last year the mining giant prevailed on the Mexican government to depose the
president of the country’s miners union, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia. Gomez had accused
the company of industrial homicide after the terrible Pasta de Conchos disaster, when 68
men died in a coalmine explosion. Grupo Mexico also didn’t like his drive to raise
mining wages beyond government-set limits.

Miners in Cananea and Nacozari stopped work for months to force Gomez’
reinstatement. Finally, last summer, the government gave Grupo Mexico the green light
to fire all 2500 miners in Nacozari. Since there are no other jobs in tiny Sonoran mining
towns the displaced families had to leave to survive. With the border just a few miles
north, many sought their survival by crossing it. The profits of Grupo Mexico and its
business partners went up as they destroyed unions, terminated thousands of workers, and
forced their families into the migrant stream.

During those very months when workers began to go north, Sensenbrenner organized a
series of rump Congressional hearings to defend his bill. He fulminated against
undocumented immigrants, claiming they had no place in the United States and should
leave. No one asked the Congressman about those miners from Cananea and Nacozari,
however. Where did he think they would go?

Other voices in Congress criticized the Representative, arguing that the labor of migrants
was needed in the U.S. economy. Not even Sensenbrenner could deny this. Some 16
million immigrants live in the U.S. with documents, and 12 million without them. If they
actually did go home, whole industries would collapse. Some of the country’s largest
corporations, completely dependent on the work of immigrants, would go bankrupt.
One of these dependent corporations is Mr. Sensenbrenner’s family business.

Every year, Kimberley Clark, a large paper company, converts tons of wood pulp into
leading brands of toilet paper. Deep in U.S. forests thousands of immigrant workers plant
and tend the trees that produce that pulp.

Every year, laborers from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are recruited for
this job. In towns like La Democracia, Guatemala, where the global fall in coffee prices
has driven families to the edge of hunger, recruiters promise jobs paying more in an hour
than a coffee farmer can make in a day. They offer to arrange visas to come to the U.S. as
guest workers. For their services they charge thousands of dollars. Hungry families will
mortgage homes and land, just to put one person on the airplane north.

In the U.S., recruiters hand the workers over to labor contractors. They, in turn, work for
land management companies, who tend the forests for their owners. The landowners
grow the trees, and sell them to the paper companies.
The debts of guest workers are so crushing that in 1998, 14 men drowned as the van
carrying them to work careened off a bridge into the Alagash River in a Maine forest.
They were speeding because it had rained the day before, keeping them from working.
Carrying that load of debt, even one lost day puts a family in jeopardy.

No one gets overtime, regardless of the law. Companies charge for everything from tools
to food and housing. Guest workers are routinely cheated of much of their pay. If they
protest, they’re put on a blacklist and won’t be hired the following year. Protesting
wouldn’t do much good anyway. The U.S. Department of Labor sees no problem with
this abuse. It almost never decertifies a guest worker contractor, no matter how many
complaints are filed against it.

The paper industry depends on this system. Twenty years ago, it stopped hiring
unemployed workers domestically, and began recruiting guest workers. As a result, labor
costs in the forests have remained flat, while paper profits have soared. Mr.
Sensenbrenner’s family business didn’t invent this, but the low price of labor allows
landowners to sell their trees for less. Kimberley Clark certainly profits from that.

Displaced People – an International Reserve Army of Labor

In Latin America, the neoliberal system displaces workers, from miners to coffee pickers,
who join a huge flood moving north. When they arrive in the U.S., displaced workers
become an indispensable part of the workforce, whether they are undocumented or
laboring under work visas, in conditions of virtual servitude.

The U.S. immigration debate needs a vocabulary that describes what happens to them
before they cross borders – the factors that force them into motion. In this political
debate, people like the miners or pine tree planters are called job seekers, rather than
political refugees. It would be more accurate to call them migrants, and the process
migration.

The miner fired in Cananea or Nacozari is as much a victim of the denial of human and
labor rights as he or she is a person needing to find a job in the U.S. to survive.
This year, teachers and farmers left Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, seeking a viable
economic future, after they were beaten in the streets for protesting that their state’s
government can’t and won’t provide one. Oaxaca’s poverty is worse than almost
anywhere in Mexico, and last year teachers struck, and the capital erupted in a virtual
insurrection because of it. An intransigent political elite, benefiting from the existing
order, not only refused to consider any change, but tried to stop criticism with police
attacks, arrests and even assassinations.

Are the fleeing Oaxacans job seekers or refugees? They’re both, of course. But in the
U.S. and other wealthy countries, economic rights are not considered human rights. In
this official view, hunger doesn’t create political refugees. In effect, the whole process
that pushes people north is outside the parameters of political debate.
The key part of that process is displacement, an unmentionable word in the Washington
discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress last year tried to come to grips with
those policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters and farmers, in spite of the fact
that Congress’ members in many cases voted for them.

Whether acknowledged or not, displacement has been indispensable to the growth of

capitalism. As early as the 1700s, the English enclosure acts displaced home weavers by
fencing off the commons where they raised sheep for wool. Hunger then drove weavers
into the new textile mills, where they became some of the world’s first wage workers.
The textile mills produced the wealth of the first British capitalists. At the same time,
displacement created the beginnings of the British working class.

Not long after, Karl Marx called Africa “a warren for the hunting of black skins,”
describing the bloody displacement of communities by the slave traders. Uprooted
African farmers were then transported to the Americas, where they became an enslaved
plantation workforce from Colombia and Brazil to the U.S. south. Their labor created the
wealth that made the growth of capitalism possible in the U.S. and much of Latin
America and the Caribbean.

Displacement and enslavement produced more than wealth. As slaveowners sought to

differentiate slaves from free people, they created the first racial categories. Society was
divided into those with greater and fewer rights, using skin color and origin. When Mr.
Sensenbrenner called modern migrants “illegals,” he used a category inherited and
developed from slavery.

Today displacement and inequality are just as deeply ingrained in capitalism today as
they were during the slave trade and the enclosure acts of English in the 1700s when the
system was born. In the global economy, people are displaced because the economies of
their countries of origin are transformed. That transformation enables corporations and
elites to transfer value, or wealth, out of those countries. After World War Two, the
former colonies of the U.S., Europe and Japan sought to stop that export of wealth. In
countries like Iraq, Mexico and the Philippines, they embraced national economic
development plans, which encouraged industries and enterprises producing for their own
people. Creating stable jobs and income helped build a national market where workers
and farmers could buy what was produced. Foreign investors were kept out, and
important industries like oil were nationalized.

The economic reforms that followed the end of the cold war, imposed by rich countries
and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, destroyed those
systems of national development. It was a very brutal and chaotic process for those at the
bottom of the income scale, but for those at the top, immensely profitable. Mexico
created more billionaires during the 1990s than the United States, while at the same time
the government documented an official poverty rate of 40%, and an extreme poverty rate
of 25%.
Mexican mines like Cananea and Nacozari, along with factories, railroads and other
industrial enterprises were sold off to private investors. New owners then increased
profits by attacking unions and laying off thousands of workers.

The oil industry, nationalized with the contributions of schoolchildren in the 1930s, no
longer produced money for loans to small farmers or enterprises. Instead, in 1994 as the
North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, US President Bill Clinton
demanded that Mexico use oil exports to pay off U.S. banks, who bailed out U.S.
investors in Mexican government securities.

NAFTA rules required the Mexican government to dissolve the Conasupo stores. This
government enterprise bought corn from small farmers at subsidized prices to enable
them to keep farming and stay on the land. Then the stores sold tortillas made from the
corn, along with milk and other farm products, to poor urban consumers at subsidized
prices. NAFTA rules called this form of social welfare a barrier to the free market.
Without price supports or rural credit, hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it
impossible to sell corn or other farm products, even for what it cost to produce them.
When NAFTA pulled down customs barriers, large U.S. corporations (receiving U.S.
subsidies) dumped agricultural products on the Mexican market at low prices. Rural
families went hungry when they couldn’t find buyers for their crops.

One company, Gruma, monopolized tortilla production, while the largest retailer in
Mexico became Wal-Mart. In February the price of tortillas doubled. A small group of
investors in both countries got even richer. But where did they expect the people
displaced by this process to go?

Where Do Displaced People Go?

Displaced people become an indispensable and growing part of the workforce in this new
world order. Not all cross borders. The explosive growth of export processing zones,
where maquiladora factories produce for export, depends on migrant labor.

The creation of the original maquiladora program, the Border Industrial Program, on the
U.S. Mexico border in 1964, was originally conceived as a way to absorb thousands of
unemployed braceros, who had been laboring in the U.S. during the 22 year run of this
contract labor program. In 1964, Chicano activists like Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona and
Ernesto Galarza led a movement that convinced the U.S. Congress to repeal Public Law
78, which set the program up. The Mexican government then needed to find jobs for
those workers, many of whom were living in burgeoning cities just south of the border.
To supply those jobs, it changed laws that had prohibited direct U.S. ownership of
factories in Mexico, allowing investors to build plants taking advantage of lower
Mexican wages, producing goods for the U.S. market. Over 40 years this model grew to
include more than 3000 factories, employing two million people. Cities like Tijuana,
Mexicali, Juarez and Matamoros mushroomed.
The maquiladora workforce was drawn from the south, from migrants displaced by the
same economic changes – privatization, rural poverty, job elimination – that permitted
construction of the maquiladoras themselves. A new labor regime was put in place to
attract foreign investment, including the brutal repression of independent unions or
challenges to the low-wage model.

Prior to the economic reforms, the U.S. Mexico border was a remote area, with a very
low population, far from Mexico’s industrial base and workforce. Without the
simultaneous dislocation of workers from Mexican factories, and farmers from south
Mexico’s countryside, there would have been no labor force available to make
maquiladora development possible.

This development model has since been reproduced in developing countries all over the
world. In the early 1990s the U.S. Agency for International Development not only
financed the construction of industrial parks in rural El Salvador and Honduras, but then
contracted with Price Waterhouse to study ways of producing workers for the factories.
The recommended the incorporation of women into the maquiladora workforce at ages as
young as 14, taking them from school and family farms. To keep these young women at
their machines through their most productive years, USAID taught the companies to
distribute birth control pills to keep them from getting pregnant.

Attention has focused on the construction of the factories and industrial parks, while the
dislocation that produced the workforce has been much more hidden. Yet maquiladora
workers often later become migrants traveling far beyond the nearest export processing
zone. When the maquiladoras are located a stone’s throw from the border, crossing it is
almost inevitable.

In developed countries migrant labor is even more important.

In the U.S., industrial agriculture has always depended on it. The farm labor workforce in
the U.S. southwest was formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans,
and more recently, Central Americans. A growing percentage of farm workers are now
indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic
dislocation has reached far into the most remote parts of Mexico’s countryside. On the
U.S. east coast, migrants come from the Caribbean as well, joining large numbers of
African Americans displaced from rural, or even urban communities.

In other industrial countries, a rising percentage of the rural workforce is now made up of
migrants. Industrial agriculture based on migrant labor has expanded to developing
countries also. Large corporations like Dole and Del Monte draw a workforce from
displaced and impoverished rural communities, like those of AfroColombians in
Colombia, or Oaxacans in Mexico.

Migrants now dominate the service industry workforce in most developed countries. As
the most recent job seekers, they begin in the most marginal and contingent jobs. Day
laborers on California street corners arrive from Mexico and Central America, while in
Britain they come from Romania and Africa.

But migrant labor doesn’t remain at the fringe of the economy. The world’s oil industry is
completely dependent on it. The oil kingdoms of the Gulf states – Kuwait, Qatar,
Bahrain, Abu Dhabi – have many more immigrant workers than native-born ones. It was
no coincidence that Halliburton Corporation brought migrants from Bangladesh and the
Philippines into Iraq in the wake of the advancing U.S. invading force in 2003, intending
to use them to replace Iraqi workers on the oil rigs and pipelines. Only organized action
by the Iraqi oil workers forced Halliburton to retreat, and prevented the company from
taking control of their industry.

Once the oil is put aboard tankers, more migrant workers guide them to their destinations.
The seafaring workforce in large scale shipping today comes overwhelmingly from the
Philippines and Indonesia. Migrant workers provide the world’s oil and transport its
goods to market.

What’s In It for Employers?

Employers gain great advantages from this system, particularly lower labor costs and
increased workforce flexibility. Large meatpacking companies in the U.S. Midwest, for
instance, hire a workforce in which immigrants make up a majority. A steady stream of
migrants crosses the border, finds its way to small meatpacking towns, and gets jobs.
Over the last 20 years, the industry’s wages have steadily fallen behind the manufacturing
average, a major accomplishment, from the companies’ point of view. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1980 slaughtering plant wages were 1.16 times the
manufacturing average. After twenty-five years, they are now .76 times that average. US
manufacturing wages certainly haven’t soared – in fact, they’ve fallen behind inflation.
But meatpacking wages, in relative terms, have fallen faster.

Companies depend on this river of labor – not just on the workers in the plants
themselves, but on the communities from which they come. If those communities stop
producing workers, the labor supply dries up.

Seeking to keep wages low, meatpackers don’t want to pay the social cost of maintaining
communities that supply workers to the plants. In the tiny Mexican and Guatemalan
towns that now provide workers for the plants, that cost is very low, and getting lower as
economic reforms take hold. Free-market and free-trade policies have eliminated rural
credit, the Conasupo system and the other subsidies.

The government budget in Guatemala’s Santa Eulalia, for instance, does not provide any
healthcare system for the town’s residents. In public schools parents and teachers must
buy the paper, pencils, books and other materials. If a road needs repair, residents can’t
expect a government repair crew to fix it.
The cost of all these services is now borne by workers themselves, in the form of
remittance payments sent back from jobs in Nebraska slaughterhouses. Former Mexican
President Vicente Fox boasted that in 2005 his country’s citizens working in the U.S. sent
back $18 billion. Some estimate that in 2006 that figure reached $25 billion.

The real beneficiaries of this huge flow of money are the companies that employ the
labor in the U.S. Meatpackers already pay a low wage in U.S. terms. From it, workers
pay not only for their own subsistence, but for that of their families thousands of miles
away. Indirectly, the companies pay a much lower cost for the production of a new
generation of future workers than they would if their families were living in Iowa or
Nebraska. No company pays directly for a single school or clinic, nor do any pay taxes in
Mexico or Guatemala that could provide those services.

At the same time, companies dependent on this immigrant stream have great flexibility in
adjusting for the highs and lows of market demand. U.S. employers historically have
treated immigrant labor as a convenient faucet, easily turned on and off. In the depression
of the 1930s, Mexican workers were rounded up and deported by the thousands when the
unemployment rate went up. When World War Two started, the U.S. government
negotiated their return as braceros, when growers needed workers, but didn’t want to
raise wages to draw them from cities.

Guest worker and employment-based visa programs were created to accommodate the
labor needs of employers. When demand is high, employers recruit workers. When
demand falls, those workers not only have to leave their jobs, but the country entirely.
Disabled guest workers, injured because of high line speed on the killing floor, can’t stay
in the community around the plant, making demands for treatment. They have to go back
to hometowns where there is virtually no medical care at all. The employer doesn’t have
to provide compensation for those forced out of the country.

The rule of this new system, which the British government calls “managed migration,” is
that immigration policy and enforcement should direct immigrants to industries when
their labor is needed, and remove them when it’s not. As President George Bush puts it,
the government should “connect willing employers with willing employees.”

As guest worker programs expand, large corporations become even less responsible for
the conditions of their workforce. The pine tree planters don’t work directly for the paper
companies, but for labor recruiters and contractors. The paper corporations control labor
costs indirectly, through the price they pay for harvested trees or wood pulp. This has
been the employment model in the garment and janitorial industries and in agriculture for
decades, industries that depend completely on immigrants.

As these conditions are established, they expand to other industries. In the 1970s,
production workers in Silicon Valley electronic plants worked directly for big
manufacturers. Today women working on the line assembling printers for Hewlett
Packard work for Manpower, a temporary employment agency with an office in the plant
itself. Sometimes they do the same job they did when they worked for HP directly, but
now without healthcare or other benefits. They get a lower wage, and can be terminated
at any time. Most are women from the Philippines, Mexico and the countries of Latin
America and the Asian Pacific rim.

Immigrants and Unemployment

It’s no wonder that native born workers and settled immigrant communities look at the
growth of this employment system with alarm. This system fosters competition among
workers for jobs, and uses it to expand the section of the workforce with lower wages and
fewer rights. It’s not hard for people to see the system’s impact on their own lives, even if
they can’t always identify its cause.

One of the biggest mistakes made by immigrant advocates in the last decade was arguing
that immigrants have no impact, or only a positive impact, on the wages or jobs of people
in the communities around them, or that immigrants are just taking the “abandoned” jobs
others won’t do. This denies a reality workers can easily see for themselves. More
important, advocates thus stop making clear the real causes of migration, unemployment,
low wages and job competition, and no longer point to the system and corporations
responsible.

The first targets of competition are other workers of color. In Los Angeles in the early
1980s, the janitor’s union was driven out of the city's office buildings when contractors
dumped their union workers, most of whom were African American. New janitorial
contractors appeared, with no union, hiring the wave of refugees flooding into LA from
repression and civil war in Central America.

Contractors and building owners thought they’d found a docile, low wage workforce, but
they miscalculated. Immigrant workers used popular education and the militant union
traditions of Central America, making common cause with the national organizing
department of the Service Employees International Union. Together they built the first
Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Mexican
janitors poured into the streets, confronted building owners and the LA Police
Department, and eventually won new union agreements. The campaign became a model
for organizing immigrant workers across the country, and rebuilt the presence of SEIU in
building services. SEIU head John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO, using this
campaign as a symbol of his commitment to organizing and revitalizing the labor
movement.

But the African American community has faced a color line keeping employment very
low in janitorial services in Los Angeles ever since, despite the high Black
unemployment rate. In San Francisco hotels, where a similar demographic transformation
took place, the percentage of African American workers is falling as industry
employment grows. African Americans now make up less than 6% of the San Francisco
hotel workforce, and only 6.4% of the LA hotel workforce.
In 2005 the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found that
between 2000 and 2004, jobs held by immigrants rose by 2 million. At the same time, the
number of employed native-born workers fell by 958,000, and of longtime resident
immigrants by 352,000. According to the report's authors, "the net growth in the nation's
employed population between 2000 and 2004 takes place among new immigrants, while
the number of native-born and established immigrant workers combined declines by
more than 1.3 million."

Black unemployment nationally has grown at a catastrophic rate – from 10.8% to 11.8%
in May of 2005 alone. Nearly half (172,000) of the 360,000 people who lost their jobs in
June, 2005, were African American, although they were just 11% of the workforce. In
New York City, only 51.8% of Black men from 16 to 65 had jobs in 2003, according to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For Latinos it was 65.7%, and for whites 75.7%.
Very little of the rise in African American unemployment is a result of direct
displacement by immigrants. It’s caused overwhelmingly by the decline in manufacturing
and cuts in public employment. In the 2001 recession 300,000 of 2,000,000 Black factory
workers lost their jobs to relocation and layoffs.

But demographics in the workplace changed during a period of massive plant closings,
which eliminated the jobs of hundreds of thousands of African American and Chicano
workers in unionized industries. Through the postwar decades, those workers broke the
color line, spent their lives in steel mills and assembly plants, and wrested a standard of
living that supported stable families and communities. In the growing service and high
tech industries of the 80s, those displaced workers were anathema. Employers often
identified them with pro-union militancy, according to sociologist Patricia Fernandez
Kelly.

In the face of this reality, the unity needed by workers today to rebuild unions and
working-class political strength can’t be achieved by stirring speeches. Concrete
problems affect relations between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Trying to solve
these problems unites people

Unions Struggle to Respond

The age-old question confronting the U.S. labor movement, and increasingly those of
other industrial countries, is inclusion or exclusion. In the past decade, U.S. unions made
real progress in organizing immigrants, and connecting migration issues to the effects of
free trade and free market policies. This was a significant change from the cold war
period, in which unions supported U.S. foreign and trade policy abroad. They ignored its
disastrous impact on workers of developing countries, and even assisted the destruction
of the most militant sections of their labor movements.

During the cold war, unions clung to an official ideology of partnership with large
corporations, maintained discriminatory policies towards women and people of color, and
viewed immigrants as job competitors. In 1986 the AFL-CIO supported the Immigration
Reform and Control Act because it contained employer sanctions, which prohibit
employers from hiring workers without papers. If those workers couldn’t get jobs, the
argument went, they’d leave.

The impact of the law was disastrous, however, especially for those unions trying to
organize new members in industries like janitorial services and garment manufacturing.
The new law made it a federal crime for an undocumented immigrant to hold a job, and
employers used it to fire union supporters. Eventually, when organizing new workers
became a higher priority, the AFL-CIO changed its position at the Los Angeles
convention in 1999. It called for repeal of employer sanctions, amnesty for all
undocumented people, immigration based on family reunification, and expanding the
organizing rights of immigrant workers. The federation already opposed expanded guest
worker programs, because of their long record of abuse and exploitation.

Unions began to see inclusion as the key to their survival. Labor support for immigrant
rights was not a moral issue, but a pragmatic one. Immigrants today are the backbone of
organizing drives from the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina to Houston janitors
and Cintas industrial laundry workers. The unions that are growing are mostly those that
understand the willingness of many immigrants to fight and join. As a result, immigrants
have gained a growing base in union leadership, and now speak out on political questions
from the war in Iraq to immigration and labor law reform.

This was not an easy process. Often newly organized immigrants found themselves
members of established organizations that wanted their dues and numerical strength, but
not necessarily their participation in leadership. Some union leaders still see immigration
itself as a threat. The 2006 national convention of the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers invited Lou Dobbs as its keynote speaker, whose anti-immigrant
tirades rival James Sensenbrenner.

On the other hand, two unions, SEIU and UNITE HERE, abandoned their support for the
position they won at the 1998 AFL-CIO convention. Instead, they joined an alliance
dominated by the country’s largest employers, whose main purpose is convincing
Congress to set up new guest worker programs. Two farm worker unions, the United
Farm Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, have signed union agreements
with guest worker contractors.

The meatpacking industry started lobbying for guest workers in the late 1990s, when
companies organized a shadowy group, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition
(EWIC). Today it encompasses over 40 huge employer associations, including Wal-Mart,
Marriott, Tyson Foods and the Associated Builders and Contractors. They recruited the
Cato Institute to produce guest worker recommendations, which President Bush repeats
almost word-for-word. The hard-right Manhattan Institute provides additional cover.
The corporate lobby made other inroads. John Gay, who heads the National Restaurant
Association and EWIC, became board chair of the National Immigration Forum, a major
Washington lobbying group. The list of corporate sponsors for the National Council of La
Raza includes Wal-Mart and 14 other multinationals. They all set up umbrella groups to
advocate the EWIC agenda, including the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration
Reform and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

While Republicans are strong guest worker supporters, the bills in Congress creating the
programs have been bipartisan, with active participation from liberals like Senator
Edward Kennedy and Congressman Luis Gutierrez. The most recent immigration
proposal (as of the time of this article) would allow corporations to bring in almost a
million guest worker a year, and expand the kind of immigration enforcement that has led
to workplace raids around the country. It would scrap immigration based family
reunification (an achievement of the rights movement) for a point system favoring skills
desired by large corporations. Liberals justify the proposal by arguing that employer
support is necessary to gain some kind of legalization for 12 million undocumented
people. Guest worker and enforcement programs are the price for that support.

Meanwhile, unions have failed to formulate a bill that would unite the needs of workers
across race and national lines, and campaign in Congress to pass it. Winning amnesty and
greater rights for immigrants could be linked to the creation of jobs programs to reduce
unemployment in those communities where it exists at crisis levels. This was the
approach taken by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who introduced a proposal to
grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants and simultaneously establish job training and
creation programs in communities with high unemployment.

Some unions have tried to link these issues together in bargaining. In San Francisco
hotels, UNITE HERE Local 2 already has strong contract language protecting the rights
of its immigrant members. In the 2006 negotiations, it added new language requiring
hotels to set up a diversity committee to increase the percentage of African American
workers. This could become a step toward an affirmative action program requiring hiring
reflecting the diversity of San Francisco’s overall workforce, benefiting immigrants and
non-immigrants alike.

But unions trying to grapple with the impact of migration have to decide with whom they
want to build alliances to win power. Winning affirmative action and jobs programs,
linking them to amnesty and immigrant rights, would help build an alliance between
workers – immigrants and native-born, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans
and whites. But some unions see an alliance with employers as the key, and are willing to
give them new guest worker programs. This would increase job competition, put
downward pressure on wages, and make affirmative action in hiring impossible. Concrete
gains in jobs and wages would become much harder, and unity among workers more
difficult to achieve.

Alternatives to Growing Inequality

In all industrial countries the problem of unity between immigrants and non-immigrants
is becoming much more important. The anti-immigrant riots in the UK, France and
Germany are a window on what the future could be in the U.S., if unions and working
communities don’t make progress in resolving it. Understanding the importance of
community and equality is they key to making that progress.

Migration is a complex economic and social process in which whole communities

participate. Migration creates communities, which today pose challenging questions
about the nature of citizenship and equality.

Migrants are creating transnational communities all over the world. They exist at
different stages of development in the flow of migrants from Algeria to France, Turkey to
Germany, Pakistan to the UK, South Korea to Japan, and from developing to developed
countries worldwide. According to Migrant Rights International, over 180 million people
live outside the countries in which they were born – a permanent factor of life on the
planet.

Today US immigration policy (and that of other industrial countries) is institutionalizing

this global flow. Increasingly, the mechanisms for managing it are guest worker
programs. In the Hong Kong negotiations of the World Trade Organization, corporations
tabled a proposal regulating migrant labor, called Mode 4, which would establish a new,
international guest worker scheme.

Conservative governments of developing countries, which have abandoned national

development policies and have adopted the free market framework, see big advantages in
a deal with corporations. They would gain access to workers’ remittances, already the top
source of foreign exchange for many, and could use them to finance services formerly
financed by taxes. They could even eliminate those paid by their own elites. This would
institutionalize not only inequality between migrants and non-migrants in developed
countries where they work, but would divide even further the rich and poor in their
countries of origin. It would create whole new forms of inequality.

Inequality is the most important product of US immigration policy, and a conscious one.
Washington’s current reform proposals all assume that immigrants should not be the
equals of the people around them, or have the same rights. This assumption denies the
reality that the migration of people is as much a product of the global economy as the
migration of capital. At the same time, the philosophy these proposals reflect would
reverse a 400-year history of struggle in the US to expand the rights of all people.
US immigration policy doesn’t deter the flow of migrants across the border. Its basic
function is defining the status of people once they’re here. And a policy based on
supplying labor to industry, at a price it wants to pay, has inequality built into it from the
beginning.

Immigrant communities from Latin America and Asia face a hypocritical exclusion,
which demands that people give up their culture, language and identity, while
maintaining a color line that denies them equal social status. Chinatowns and
Manilatowns owe their existence, not simply to the desire for community and group
identity, but to a century of social segregation. Filipino farm workers were forbidden
from marrying women of other races, while the immigration of Filipina women was
prohibited. Chinese immigrants were brought as debt-enslaved workers on railroads, and
then prohibited from owning land. Braceros were recruited from Mexico from 1942 to
1964, on temporary work visas, contracted to western growers. The objective was the
same in every case – the creation of a mobile, rootless low-wage labor force.

The roots of this inequality lie in slavery. The current concept of the “illegal” person has
its roots in the Black Codes, used to define who could be enslaved and who couldn’t. It
reinterprets the idea that a slave counted as only three-fifths of a person.
Calling someone an “illegal” doesn’t refer to an illegal act or the violation of a law. It is
the existence, the status of the person that is illegal, or illegitimate. This justifies
exclusion from the rights and social benefits accorded people in the surrounding
community. Braceros called themselves illegal, even though they had temporary visas,
because they used the word in this sense of exclusion.

Illegality is a social category. Workers forced into it receive a smaller share of the value
they produce, an additional exploitation. The value they produce, but don’t receive, is a
source of additional profit for companies dependent on that labor. Inequality is profitable.
An immigration policy that denies community inevitably produces rootless people,
vulnerable to exploitation. It undermines workplace and community rights, affecting non-
immigrants as well. It inhibits the development of families and culture.

The alternative is a policy that recognizes and values communities, and sees their creation
and support as desirable. It reinforces indigenous culture and language, protects the rights
of everyone, and seeks to integrate immigrants into the broader society.

The UN’s International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant
Workers and Members of Their Families proposes this kind of framework, establishing
equality of treatment with citizens of the host country. Both sending and receiving
countries are responsible for protecting migrants, and retain the right to determine who is
admitted to their territories, and who has the right to work.

Predictably, the countries that have ratified it are the sending countries. Those countries
most interested in guest worker schemes, like the U.S., have not. In the global migration
of labor, the countries sending migrants have little influence over the conditions facing
their citizens in the places they go to work, or the rules under which migration is possible.
In evaluating the various proposals for immigration reform in Congress and elsewhere,
labor and immigrant rights activists need clear criteria to decide which promote equality
and community, and which don’t. Some ideas for criteria include:

• A long-term perspective. Some proposals help to prepare for longer-range efforts

to change a system that produces insecurity and inequality. Others, like guest
worker programs or increased enforcement of employer sanctions, create a
playing field on which progressive movement becomes even more difficult.
• Greater equality, which itself is the prerequisite for unity among workers across
race and national lines. Proposals to deny people rights or benefits because of
 immigration status move away from equality. Equal status itself is a common
ground, a goal uniting many diverse communities.
• Immigration status must not be linked to employment. That link is one main
characteristic of guest worker programs, and the common thread running through
exploitative schemes going back a century. Workers can’t be free if they have to
leave the country if they lose their jobs. Healthy immigrant communities need
employed workers, but they also need students, old and young people, caregivers,
disabled and those who don’t have traditional jobs.
• More protection for the right to organize. To raise the low price of immigrant
labor, immigrant workers have to be able to organize. Given half a chance,
immigrant workers and their communities will organize for better jobs and wages,
schools and healthcare. When they gain political power for themselves, other
working class communities around them benefit. Measures like permanent legal
status make it easier to organize. Employer sanctions, enforcement and raids, even
as a price for legalization, make organizing much more difficult.
• Linking trade and migration. Modern migration is a “problem” because so much
of it caused by forcible dislocation. Changing corporate trade policy and stopping
neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration reform as gaining legal status for
undocumented immigrants.
• Greater solidarity between workers and unions. U.S. workers have been forced
into a global labor market. They have a direct interest in helping workers abroad
to organize and raise living standards, fighting privatization and the plunder of
developing countries, and stopping U.S. wars and military intervention. They
need not minor protections in trade agreements, but unity with workers globally to
scrap those agreements, and to change the economic and political structure of
which they’re a part.
• Protecting the right to move. Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a
more just world, migration will continue. Families and communities are now
connected over thousands of miles and many borders. Links between people will
grow – they are part of the human potential. Immigration policy should make
movement easier, without selling workers to employers as a price for it.
• Creating common ground between immigrants and other workers. It’s not
possible to win major changes in immigration policy without making it part of a
struggle for other goals. To end job competition, workers need the Humphrey-
Hawkins Full Employment Act. To gain organizing rights for immigrants, all
workers need the Employee Free Choice Act.

Congress isn’t deciding “what can stop immigration?” With over 180 million people in
the world living outside their countries of origin, nothing can. The real question Congress
is deciding is the status of people here. Outside the Washington beltway, community
coalitions, labor and immigrant rights groups are advocating alternatives that would give
immigrants far more rights and equality than employment-based visas. Congress could,
for instance,
- Give permanent residence visas, or green cards, to people already here. Those visas
don’t require people to stay, but give them the chance to come and go – to work, study, or
take care of family in the U.S. or their home country. Green card holders can’t be
deported if they lose a job.
- Expand the number of green cards available for new migrants, opening the door to legal
immigration far enough to accommodate those now coming illegally. Most immigrants
already come through family networks. Eliminating the years-long backlog in processing
family reunification visas would help them, and strengthen communities.
- Allow people to apply for green cards, in the future, after they’ve been here a few years.
The U.S. wouldn’t develop the huge undocumented population it has today.
- Stop the enforcement program that has led to thousands of deportations and firings, and
a border so heavily militarized that migrants cross, and die, in the most dangerous areas.
- Prohibit companies from recruiting outside the U.S. – formerly a traditional part of US
immigration policy. At Ellis Island, having a pre-arranged job was grounds for being sent
back. Companies can always hire immigrants with green cards (or anyone else) living
here, and green card holders are in a much better position to demand rights and higher
wages.

It’s not likely that many corporations will support such a program. That’s why those who
claim to represent the interests of immigrants in Washington must choose whose side
they’re on.

Today working people of all countries are asked to accept continuing globalization, in
which capital is free to go wherever it can earn the highest profits. By that same token
migrants must have the same freedom, with rights and status equal to those of anyone
else. People in Mexico, Guatemala, China, the US and every other country need the same
things. Secure jobs at a living wage. Rights in our workplaces and communities. The
freedom to travel and seek a future for our families. The borders between our countries
should be common ground to unite us, not lines to divide us.
Alan Sears, “Queer in a Lean World”
THE QUEER MOVEMENT has made impressive gains in the thirty-one years since the
Gay Liberation Front emerged out of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. It is now
possible for many lesbians and gay men to live relatively open lives in fairly supportive
environments with access to real community resources.

Yet many others have benefited little from these gains. There has been little change in
the lives of the most vulnerable queers, including transgender people, queers living in
poverty, people of color, people living in the closet and many women.

Before the Stonewall riots, queers were largely culturally invisible except for negative
stereotypes. A predatory gay man or lesbian was sometimes depicted in a movie, play or
novel, but they were usually killed off by the end of the story. Now shows like "Will and
Grace" are prime time hits on conservative American networks.

Magazines, books, movies and plays have lots of queer characters, ranging from lesbian
heroes in detective novels to the closeted high school teachers. It is a real gain to have
some point of reference in popular culture, even if these are often chaste images of white
middle-class gay men or lesbians.

In Canada, queers have made significant gains in the areas of human rights protection and
workplace benefits. The Federal government and every Canadian province now include
non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in their human rights codes. Many
unions, particularly in the public sector, have bargained for non-discrimination clauses in
collective agreements and full benefits for same sex-partners.

Indeed, from the perspective of Canada or much of Western Europe, the United States is
an exceptional backwater in its denial of human rights. This is particularly surprising
when you remember that the contemporary lesbian/gay liberation movement first
emerged in the United States.

Yet these gains should not make us smug. The state continues to coercively police
sexuality. Male Toronto police officers recently raided a women’s night at a Toronto
bathhouse, using liquor license standards as an excuse to harass and terrorize.
Extensive spying and entrapment operations in parks and washrooms across North
America continue to turn up vulnerable, closeted men who are often exposed to the glare
of destructive publicity. High school is still a hotbed of harassment and violence against
young people who are labeled "queer."

Indeed, the threat of heterosexist violence and harassment is pervasive. The horrifying
incidents that come to public attention, such as the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard,
are just the tip of the iceberg. The threat of violence hangs over even the most open
queers, who often do complex calculations of the risk of exposure in specific settings.
The danger of violence increases dramatically the farther one strays from the gender-
normative gay male and lesbian images that have entered public consciousness.
Transgender people, people of color and queers on the street are openly targeted for
harassment and everyday violence, including ongoing abuse at the hands of police.

Victories in Lean Times

This is a situation in which real and important gains for some gay men and lesbians have
to be understood in the context of the many queers who have won little or nothing.
Further, the most important of these victories have been won in the last 20 years, a period
marked by a sharp shift to the right. The overall political climate has been marked by
poor-bashing, anti-affirmative action measures, immigrant-bashing, the rise of the right,
the decline of the left and a generally defensive stance on the part of the labor movement.
Those gains that were won have come for two reasons. First, they came through struggle:
Queers have mobilized again and again, taking to the streets to protest against state
violence, queer-bashing, inaction around AIDS and the denial of our human rights. In
doing so, we have changed the world and, perhaps more importantly, changed ourselves
into activists. None of these gains would be here today if it was not for this gutsy
activism.

Queers are not the only people, however, who mobilized in the face of this right-wing
offensive. Anti-poverty groups, immigrants rights organizers, anti-racist activists,
feminists and labor movements activists have fought back hard. We need to probe a bit
farther, then, to understand the changes in capitalist society that have created certain
spaces for the consolidation of lesbian and gay identities in a generally hostile climate.

Capitalism and Sexuality

The word "homosexual" first emerged in the 1860s. A new word was required to explain
a relatively new phenomenon. Of course, there was nothing new about women having
sex with women or men with men. The new aspect that this new word "homosexual" tried
to capture was the emergence of a same-sex orientation as a full-time sexual identity.
This shift was a product of specifically capitalist social relations. The separation of home
from paid employment in capitalist societies provided the ground for the emergence of
the homosexual.

In pre-capitalist societies, individuals would produce (expend energy to transform nature

to meet their wants and needs) and reproduce (restore energy and raise the next
generation) with the same people. People would hunt, gather, harvest, eat, play, raise
children and have sex in the same kinship-organized community.

In capitalist societies, production is separated from reproduction and paid employment is

removed from home. This opens up new spaces, as our access to the key productive
resources in society no longer depends directly on our location within kinship structures.
At some level, the employer in a capitalist society does not have to care about what
employees do on their own time, as long as they show up ready to work.
Capitalism both opened up new possibilities for the exploration of sexuality and eroded
family structures through long hours of work and inadequate pay. In the later 1800s and
early 1900s, state policymakers and moral reformers began to worry that the working
class was going through a process of "moral degeneration."

In many households, men, women and children were all employed for pay outside the
home. Overcrowded housing units meant that children were exposed to sex and that boys
and girls lived in close proximity. Non-marital heterosexual relations and homosexuality
seemed to be thriving in the streets and the bars. State policy-makers saw moral reform in
part as an antidote to working class militancy.

A revived working class family was seen as a potential pillar of stability as well as an
ongoing source of new workers. The state developed a range of new forms of moral
regulation to shape the working-class family in the period 1880-1920 in Canada, Britain
and the United States. Male homosexuality was outlawed. (Women were omitted from
this legislation in Britain, as sexist law-makers could not even imagine that women had a
sexuality independent from men.)

The new gender order was reinforced by activities, such as segregated home economics
classes for girls and shop classes for boys in schools. The unpaid labor of women in the
household was subjected to new forms of scrutiny, as public health nurses would
suddenly show up on the doorstep to inspect and instruct.

Moral Deregulation and Queer Capitalism

The regime of moral regulation that emerged in the early 20th century was incorporated
into the welfare state structures that emerged after World War II It remained largely
intact until the 1960s. The past thirty-five years have seen a partial moral deregulation,
in the face of changes in capitalist society and the emergence of militant lesbian/gay and
women's movements.

Capitalism, then, both opened up new spaces for the development of sexuality and shut
them down with a regime of moral regulation. In the recent past, this regime of moral
regulation has undergone important changes.

There has been a partial moral deregulation as rules have been relaxed in certain areas of
life. Yet at the same time, new forms of moral policing have been introduced, for
example in the harassment of people receiving welfare benefits and homeless people.
Moral deregulation has been closely related to the deeper penetration of commodification
(the production of goods specifically for the market) into our everyday lives. In North
America, bread once baked in the home is now mainly purchased on the market.
Birthday parties are increasingly organized at commercial venues like fast food
restaurants.

The market is fundamentally amoral. It is about making a buck. The old regime of moral
regulation was actually a barrier to making a buck in certain ways. For example,
restrictions on gambling kept that ultra-high profit industry on the margins of North
American life.

The shift to the right in the last twenty years has included a fair amount of deregulation as
barriers to market expansion at any cost have been removed. Transportation industries,
for example, have been deregulated in such a way as to decrease safety inspections,
health and safety protection and limits on competition. There have also been elements of
moral deregulation. Casinos now compete to suck money out of the pockets of working
class people in Windsor and Detroit.

This moral deregulation has largely followed market forces and has therefore included
elements of sexual liberalization. Commodification is strongly associated with
sexualization as advertising endeavors to charge everyday objects with desire. Overly
strict sexual regulation is an obstacle to this process of sexualization.

The deregulation of sexuality is in some ways parallel to the legalization of gambling.

The state has reoriented activities that stood in the way of profit-making. The market-
viable aspects of lesbian and gay existence have therefore gained some space.

Indeed, the whole idea of "gay community" is generally associated with commercialized
spaces such as bars, publications, stores, heavily sponsored pride marches and queer
personal style as expressed in clothes and haircuts. The last twenty years have seen many
non-profit gay community publications and spaces shut down in the face of
commercialized competition.

This commercialized gay lifestyle is not equally accessible to all. These spaces tend to be
oriented towards men rather than women, in part because men generally have greater
buying power. People with lower incomes have very limited access to these spaces,
which generally run on the principle of pay to play.

People of color generally don't fit the "image" generated by the commercialized queer
culture industries and face racism in queer communities. Transgender people are often
excluded by the gender-normative orientation of these spaces.

Indeed, gay men have been pioneers in the development of a new market-oriented
masculinity that is spreading to heterosexual men. Hey, it's okay to care about your
appearance, guys—you can be manly and shop all at the same time.

The rise of a commercialized gay lifestyle has been associated with a political shift away
from radical liberationist politics within queer movements. The radical lesbian and gay
liberation movements that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots had a set of
politics that marked a serious departure from earlier queer organizing. The focus was on
militant activism to confront power rather than trying to earn favor with the powerful;
visibility rather than respectability; and opposition to the compulsory family system
rather than assimilation into it, seeking an end to the official state monopoly on defining
acceptable relationships.
These liberationist politics have gone in and out of favor in the thirty-one years since
Stonewall. By the 1980s, a more moderate reform orientation dominated the movement.
This reform-oriented movement favored lobbying to get inside power rather than militant
activism, respectability more than visibility and assimilation into the family system rather
than opposition to it.

Liberationist politics were revived by a wave of militant AIDS activism beginning in

1987. AIDS had a devastating effect on queer communities. The official response to this
crisis by governments and the media was absolute silence except for the occasional
derogatory reference.

Queer communities organized a whole range of AIDS services and preventive

interventions. The anger around AIDS also relaunched militant liberationist politics,
around such organizations as ACT UP, AIDS Action Now, Queer Nation and the Lesbian
Avengers.

Queer Capitalism, Class and Liberation

The 1990s saw the consolidation of commercialized queer capitalism. An elite layer of
professional queers (including businesspeople, lawyers, doctors, journalists and
professors) as the spokespersons for queer communities. In the absence of radical
liberationist movements, this professional class often defines lesbian and gay
communities and politics.

This group tends to favor court challenges rather than mobilization and commercial
festivals (like Pride Day Parades) rather than protests. Given the specific location of
queer communities within many North American cities, this queer professional class has
often been a leading advocate of gentrification and the coercive policing of the homeless.
The emergence of queer capitalism makes it particularly important to understand the
relations between class politics and queer liberation. The business and professional types
who often speak for queer communities do not necessarily consider the interests of more
vulnerable queers. We are living in an era in which social polarization is increasing, so
the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer—a polarization reflected in queer
communities, where some are benefiting from contemporary social changes and others
are suffering.

The specific character of class relations within queer communities requires more
attention than I can give it here, for example looking at the relations between the queer
service working class (in bars, stores and services) and their (sometimes) queer
employers, work relations within the sex trades, and the specific experiences queers have
had with welfare systems and homelessness.

The class-divided character of queer communities is also a reminder about strategies for
organizing and building alliances. A strong labor movement can help drive queer rights
forward. The contemporary lesbian/gay movement emerged first in the United States,
and the infrastructure of organization there is very well developed; yet compared to
Canada, lesbians and gay men in the United States have gained relatively little in the way
of official rights and recognition.

Canadian queers have a proportionately weaker movement, yet substantially more rights.
One of the crucial reasons for this is that the more powerful labor movements in Canada
(and in much of Europe) have contributed in important ways to the development of rights
and recognition. In 1981, Canada's most militant union (Canadian Union of Postal
Workers) was the first to win a collective agreement clause specifying non-discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation. In 1985, library workers in the Canadian Union of
Public Employees were the first to win full benefits for same sex partners and their
dependents.

In each of these cases, queer unionists had to organize and fight to convince their sisters
and brothers that queer rights was a union matter. Once one set of workers have won
these rights, it is possible to spread them across the unionized population. These rights
have now spread across much of the public sector in Canada; breakthroughs in the private
sector have been harder to secure in the face of determined employer resistance.

Socialism and Queer Liberation

Real queer liberation is a crucial wedge in the struggle to smash the system of sex and
gender repression that impoverishes all of our sexual and emotional lives. Capitalism
sucks out our life energy into the effort to keep ourselves alive, either through work, on
inadequate benefits or in the streets.

This system displaces our sexual and intimate energies onto commercial transactions, so
we achieve gratification by shopping. It pits us against each other in cut throat
competition. If socialism means anything, it must be access to the resources, knowledge
and power to control our bodies and our lives. Queer liberation is not an optional add-on
to Marxism, but a fundamental feature of socialist politics.

Just as queer liberation will always be partial in a unequal capitalist society, so our vision
of socialism cannot be complete without an end to sex and gender oppression. Queer
liberation must be part of a struggle for all-round freedom.
Michael Zweig, “Six Points on Class”
1. We need to change the understanding of class in the United States,
going from the division of “rich and poor” to the division of “worker
and capitalist.”

When we popularize this more accurate and useful terminology, we will convey a better
grasp of class dynamics and make it easier to address the continuing operation of racism
and sexism in American society. We will also contribute to the construction of political
movements capable of reversing the decades-old trend towards ever-more-consolidated
corporate power at the expense of working people, regardless of race and gender.

We should identify the class divisions as between the working class, 62 percent of the
U.S. labor force—a substantial majority of the American people—and the corporate elite
(or capitalist class), who make up only 2 percent. In between these classes is the middle
class (36 percent of the U.S. labor force)

The “Two Americas” John Edwards identified in 2004 and the “Two New Yorks”
Fernando Ferrer identified in his 2005 mayoral bid refer to crucial realities that should be
front and center in our political conversations and social policy. But these divisions are
not best understood as simply the difference between “rich and poor.”

“Class” must be understood in terms of power rather than income, wealth, or life style,
although these do vary by class. Using power as the starting point allows us to see class
as a dynamic relationship rather than as a static set of characteristics. Investigating class
as a question of power also makes it possible to find the organic links among class, race,
and gender. Looking at class in terms of income, wealth, life style, or education separates
it from race and gender, which are best understood as power relationships rather than
inherent characteristics individuals possess.

The working class are those people with relatively little power at work—white-collar
bank tellers, call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction
workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and home-health-
care workers—skilled and unskilled, men and women of all races, nationalities, and
sexual preferences. The working class are those with little personal control over the pace
or content of their work and without supervisory control over the work lives of others.
There are nearly 90 million working-class people in the U.S. labor force today. The
United States has a substantial working-class majority.

The capitalist class are the corporate elite, senior executives, and directors of large
corporations, whose job it is to give strategic direction to the company, who interact with
government agencies and other corporate executives while leaving the day-to-day
operation of their company to intermediate levels of management and the workforce. In
this they are different from small business owners, who tend to work beside their
relatively few employees and manage them directly. These small business owners, while
literally capitalists in that they employ wage labor, are better understood to be in the
middle class, as will be discussed below.

The ruling class is considerably smaller than the full capitalist class and includes non-
capitalists as well. If we think of the ruling class as those who give strategic direction to
the country as a whole, extending beyond their own business or institution, we can
identify those corporate directors who sit on multiple boards, thus having an opportunity
to coordinate capitalist activity across enterprises, and add to them the political elites of
the three branches of national government and cultural and educational leaders who
contribute to the furtherance of corporate interests. The entire U.S. ruling class could fit
into the seats at Yankee Stadium (capacity: 54,000).

The middle class are professionals, small-business owners, and managerial and
supervisory employees. They are best understood not as the middle of an income
distribution but as living in the middle of the two polar classes in capitalist society. Their
experiences have some aspects shared with the working class and some associated with
the corporate elite.

Small business owners, for example, share with capitalists an interest in private property
in business assets, defeated unions, and weak labor regulations. But they share with
workers the work itself, great vulnerability to the capitalist market and government
power, and difficulty securing adequate health insurance and retirement security.
Professionals are also caught in the middle of the cross fire in the principal class conflict
between labor and capital. If we look at the experience over the last thirty years of
professionals whose lives are closely intertwined with the working class—community
college teachers, lawyers in public defender offices or with small general practices,
doctors practicing in working-class neighborhoods, and public school teachers—their
economic and social standing have deteriorated, along with the class they serve. But if we
look at those whose lives are more fully involved in serving the capitalist class—
corporate lawyers, financial service professionals, Big-Four CPAs, and doctors who
practice beyond the reach of HMOs and insurance company oversight—these
professionals have risen in fortune with the class they serve, albeit to a lesser extent,
absolutely and proportionately.

Professionals in most parts of the academic community (especially in colleges closely

linked to working-class constituencies) are experiencing the pain of corporate pressure as
working-class people do. In the process many academic jobs have been degraded. They
are no longer relatively secure tenure-track middle-class positions, but adjunct and visitor
positions staffed by a growing second tier of people working at will with virtually no
professional standing, a new academic working class.

“Working class” is best understood differently from the Department of Labor (DOL)
category “production and non-supervisory” employee. This DOL category includes every
employee who is not a supervisor, like most professors and other middle-class
professionals working for a salary. However, lumping all employees who have no
supervisory power over others into the working class masks the real differences in social
position that professional people enjoy, beleaguered as they may be. Appreciating the
contradictory location of professional and other middle-class employees helps to
understand the political vicissitudes characteristic of this section of the population and
suggests ways of approaching them as allies to working-class politics.

2. The usual talk of a mass middle class with some rich and poor at the
fringes around it is deeply misleading and contributes to two central
problems in American politics.

A. We get trapped in confusions about race and lose sight of class. In the popular
imagination and in political campaign speeches “the poor” usually stands for “black and
Hispanic” or “minority.” In fact, in the United States two-thirds of all poor people are
white and three-quarters of all black people are not poor. Racism continues to operate and
accounts for the fact that poverty is experienced disproportionately among blacks and
Hispanics (and among women because of sexism). But we should not allow their
comparatively heavy burden to blind us to the full realities of poverty in America.
Poverty is something that, in fact, happens to the working class. Most poor people in the
United States are in families where the adults experience periodic spells of
unemployment or work only part-time or at low wages. A family with two wage earners,
one year-round full-time and one year-round half-time, each earning minimum wage,
does not make enough to bring a family of three out of poverty. To address and reverse
poverty we need to improve the conditions working-class people experience. The
“underclass”—people entirely marginalized from the legal economy—is only a small
fraction of the poor and does not characterize most poor people. The “underclass” has
special needs which must be understood and addressed, but a majority of the poor are not
in this “underclass” they are working-class people experiencing hard times.

B. The political target gets confused between the false choices of “blame the poor, fix
their character, and give them job skills” and “take down the rich a notch or two.”
It is a mistake to identify “the rich” as the source of America’s political misdirection and
the target of our political organizing. When Al Gore challenged George W. Bush in the
2000 campaign by dismissing Bush’s plan for tax cuts as a benefit for the richest 1
percent only, polls showed, astonishingly, that 19 percent of Americans believed
themselves to be in that top 1 percent, and another 21 percent believed they would be
there in the next ten years. When we attack “the rich” too many people think we are
attacking them and their future.

The real source of the political and economic misdirection in this country is the
increasingly unbridled power of the capitalist class and their arrogant pursuit of profit for
the few at the expense of the vast majority of Americans and peoples of the world. This
should be the target of our politics. Being rich is not the key point—winning $380 million
in the Power Ball Lottery makes a person rich but not part of the corporate elite. The
people Dick Cheney met with in early 2001 to set energy policy were rich, but much
more to the point they were captains of industry, senior executives of U.S. energy
corporations.
Conservatives have convinced too many Americans that their problems stem from
government coddling the poor. We need to redirect this anger, not towards “the rich” but
towards the corporate elite. Such an approach could not be twisted into “threats to rob
working people of their future.”

Targeting “the rich” may, however, have some legitimate role in the environmental
movement, not in the usual sense but in the sense that the people of industrial countries,
especially the rich, need to limit their consumption. Unrestricted consumption is more a
question of income than it is of class power, although one can be sure that the capitalist
class, eager for expanding markets, will resist any challenges to unlimited consumption.

3. The reality of race and class in the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast is

dramatically different from the “lessons of race and class” the media
touted immediately after the catastrophe.

Headlines and news analysis across the country following Katrina announced the
“rediscovery of race and class in America.” But even as the U.S. media and an attentive
public reawakened to the reality of hard lives long quietly and privately endured by
millions of people, old confusions continued to obscure the facts of race and class in
America. In typical media coverage “race” meant “black” and “class” meant “poverty,”
both joining in the common identity of the African Americans trapped at the New
Orleans Superdome and Convention Center.

Looking at the situation through the lens of class brings important new information into
focus. Of the total labor force in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area (including seven
parishes in southeast Louisiana) 70 percent are in working-class occupations.3 Taking the
entire metropolitan area before Katrina, 37 percent of the labor force is minority, almost
all of that black, a fraction that varies widely across the three largest parishes (which
together account for 85 percent of the total metropolitan area): Jefferson Parish (the
largest), 26 percent minority; Orleans Parish, 66 percent minority; and St. Tammany
Parish, 11 percent minority.

One white worker in four is employed in a job that pays at or near official poverty wages.
This is equally true in both predominately black Orleans Parish and predominately white
Jefferson Parish. They are in low-paid working-class jobs (health-support occupations,
food preparation, building maintenance, personal care, and sales), occupations that pay
from $12,000 to around $18,000 a year—at best not enough to bring a family of four out
of poverty. Eighty-five thousand whites are among the working poor in the New Orleans-
area labor force. By contrast, there are about sixty-five thousand minorities (almost all
black) in this situation (30 percent of minority employment in the area).

Looking at the other end of the employment picture, managerial and professional
employment, blacks are by no means absent even though they are proportionately
underrepresented. Minorities held over 47,000 (or 26 percent) of all such jobs in the New
Orleans metropolitan area in 2004 (but were 37 percent of the labor force), while in the
city of New Orleans (Orleans Parish) minorities held 45 percent of the managerial and
professional jobs (compared with their 66 percent share of the overall labor force).

In the construction trades, blacks and whites hold jobs in just about equal proportion to
their numbers in the area, minorities holding 11,000 out of a total 29,000 such relatively
well-paying jobs. President Bush’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act—which requires
federally financed construction projects to pay union-scale wages—for Gulf-area
reconstruction hit equally hard at black and white communities of construction workers.
Similarly, Federal Section 8 housing programs are designed for the families of the
working poor. The refusal by the Bush administration to use this program in the
aftermath of Katrina has affected white as well as black working-class families.

If we look at Katrina and see and speak of black victims only we make a terrible mistake.
Without neglecting or underplaying the disproportionate suffering of the African
American community, it is essential—for moral as well as political reasons—to recognize
the devastation that hit tens of thousands of white families, almost all in the working
class, along with their African American neighbors. Neglecting white suffering only
contributes to racial resentment and undermines the development of political unity that
both black and white, working- and middle-class residents will need to rescue the
reconstruction for the common good.

4. Identifying class forces accurately is an essential starting point for

more effective politics to turn back the right-wing tide that has swept
across the United States with growing power for nearly forty years.

We need to reevaluate the constituent base of progressive politics and reformulate our
work with class as an important component. A New York Times news story evaluating the
2005 New York City mayoral race reported: “[Bloomberg’s] wide support among
minority voters is a sign that the strategy of the Democrat, Fernando Ferrer, to build a
dependable base of black and Hispanic voters fell victim to emerging political realities:
that blacks and Hispanics no longer vote reflexively as a bloc, and that a middle-class
coalition can trump traditional ethnic-based appeals.”

Class differences now divide ethnic and racial populations in ever-more-important

ways. Although blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately found more often in the
working class and less often in the middle and capitalist classes, compared with their
shares of the labor force (and in lower-paying jobs in all classes compared with whites),
there are nevertheless millions of black and Hispanic professionals, managers, and small
business owners, and growing numbers in the corporate elite as well. Each class is
divided by race and ethnicity; each race and ethnic group is divided by class.

Recombining forces within this mosaic of class and race into a progressive coalition
requires a direct appeal to class interests and identity, while continuing to address the
problems of racism and sexism that remain important sources of suffering across class
lines. Only a class-based politics that is attuned to issues of race and gender can produce
the social force necessary to turn back and limit the corporate power that has gotten so
destructively out of control in recent decades.

The closest recent experience in this direction was Jesse Jackson’s presidential races in
1984 and 1988, in which he got significant numbers of white male working-class votes
by tirelessly championing working people’s aspirations, unions, strikes, and other worker
campaigns, while never neglecting the continuing significance of race and gender.

Asserting the interests of working people can be the basis of political alliances that
benefit large sections of the middle class as well. As noted above, over the past thirty
years, as working-class lives have become more difficult, millions of professionals,
lower-level supervisors, and small-business owners—those in the middle class whose
lives are most closely linked to working people—have also suffered setbacks. At the
same time, those in the middle class most closely associated with serving the corporate
elite have done very well. Class-based politics can link working- and middle-class people
in their common interest to limit the power of the corporate elite. A politics for the vast
majority of Americans is hard to dismiss as “special interest business as usual.”

Class should play an important part in the evaluation of Supreme Court and other federal
court nominees, a point the corporate community already well understands. When John
Roberts was nominated in July 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported his corporate bona
fides in his experience as a successful and effective corporate lawyer, notably defending
Toyota against a worker’s compensation claim.

The New York Times reported that the Bush administration had worked behind the scenes
for a year preparing the religious right to accept the Roberts nomination. This was
accompanied by an organized corporate lobbying effort on federal court appointments, to
ensure that nominees backed by the religious right would also be sensitive to business
interests. Similar reports followed the nomination of Samuel Alito, who, in the midst of
many articles about his views on abortion, was in one story said to have “sided with
employers over employees.”

The protection of reproductive rights for women is an integral part of a progressive

political agenda, but it should not be pursued without close attention to the working-class
dimensions of the agenda as well. For instance, access to abortions will be much more
severely restricted for working-class women than for middle- and capitalist-class women
should abortion become illegal. Highlighting the anti-labor stand of anti-abortion judges
and their political backers will help expose the contours of power at play in the country
and broaden the coalition opposed to right-wing court nominees and committed to
progressive policies for women and working people alike.

The conventional wisdom has it that most Americans identify themselves as members of
the middle class so political appeals to the middle class are appropriate for building
winning messages. It is true that large majorities say they are in the middle class when
the choices given are “upper, middle, lower” or “rich, middle, poor.” But when “working
class” is given as a choice, 45 percent to 55 percent of Americans put themselves in the
working class.

We do not yet know just what people mean when they identify themselves as working
class. We do not know who else they think is in that class with them, and who is not. Nor
do we know the strength of that identity in comparison with other identities, whether
racial or in terms of particular interests such as being a hunter, a volunteer firefighter, a
little league coach, or a “pink lady” hospital volunteer. But it may well be that Americans
are ready to hear and identify with class talk when it illuminates the realities of their lives
and points to political practice that will improve their and their children’s lives.

Eight or ten years ago it seemed that class categories expressed in terms of power, a
working class, a capitalist class, were so far out of polite conversation that they were
useless for constructive political debate. But today even mainstream commentators are
increasingly referring to the working class, class warfare, and in general framing their
writing in class terms. The New York Times series on class in America, published as a
book in 2005, is a prominent example.9 Jeff Faux’s book The Global Class War is
another.10 Serious class talk is again possible and should be pursued with rigor, subtlety,
and confidence.

Back in 1981, after the first destructive round of concession bargaining in the auto
industry, UAW President Douglas Fraser characterized the process as “one-sided class
warfare,” in which labor was unprepared. The corporate elite—with a thorough
understanding of its class interests—has continued these attacks on labor ever since. It is
past time for progressive people to call this class warfare out for what it is and create a
political vision and policies squarely in the interests of working people and all whose
interests are turned aside by corporate power.

5. Class operates on a global scale.

The global economy is not separate from the domestic. The common view that
globalization refers to what is “out there” while the domestic economy is “here”—with
the “out there” threatening the “here” with job loss, cheap labor, and capital flight—fails
to see how capital accumulation operates in all of its dynamics, both nationally and
globally.

The global accumulation process under the neoliberal regime of the past thirty years has
generated robust capitalist classes in many developing countries (Brazil, China, and India
are principal examples) and has also begun to integrate these into a coherent international
capitalist class operating on a global scale.12 At the same time, the global reach of the
accumulation process is bringing into existence a global working class which already has
implications for cross-border labor organizing and within-country responses to
immigration.

The introduction of class analysis based on power rather than income reorients our view
of WTO and IMF dynamics. Rather than seeing the conflict as one between the poor
global south and the rich global north, we can see that class divisions divide both north
and south and recombine the people of each into international, as well as national,
groupings. While national interests certainly continue to operate, as long as the national
aspirations of the south are articulated by capitalists there, who lead the political
representation of those interests, working people will be disadvantaged in both the south
and the north. Broad acceptance of the idea that the south is progressive while the north is
oppressive empties the global playing field of the working class in the north as a
progressive force and turns a blind eye to murderous southern elites.

Integrating domestic and international aspects of the single economic system in which we
live also makes it easier to build movements among working people for just foreign
policy and against the Iraq war and occupation.14 A class analysis allows us to see beyond
the financial costs and lost public services resulting from the enormous military budget. It
helps make clear that the war and U.S. foreign policy seek to empower globally the same
corporate capitalist class that challenges working people on virtually every economic and
social issue at home.

6. Class is an idea for a movement of ideas.

If there is any hope of a progressive revival of the Democratic Party, or the rise of a third
party that seeks to represent working people, it must become a party of broad vision, not
just a party of interest-based policy proposals. The same is true of social movements that
hope to influence public policy and political outcomes.

Policy is essential but it must be placed in the context of the broadest understanding of
how the world works, how our life prospects are shaped, and how we create and use our
great capacity for wealth and community involvement. Introducing class into the national
conversation can invigorate the political process and bring new energy and understanding
to a broad range of questions, including the continued importance of race and gender as
points of tension and needed progress.

Class talk allows us to recall the language of economic and social justice and to revive
calls for economic democracy that have been the foundation of progressive social
movements for over a hundred years. The corporate agenda has stripped all reference to
morality from economic affairs. For the right, unrestricted markets are all that is relevant
in economic matters. This is a core question that progressives must address directly.
Class understanding will help us to illuminate and ground the ethical dimensions of our
politics and help us imagine and create organizations, coalitions, and social forces
capable of turning back the destructive power of capital and replacing it with values and
policies that relieve human suffering and promote the social good.
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Paradox
of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction”
Today orthodox economics is reputedly being harnessed to an entirely new end: saving
the planet from the ecological destruction wrought by capitalist expansion. It promises
to accomplish this through the further expansion of capitalism itself, cleared of its
excesses and excrescences. A growing army of self-styled “sustainable developers”
argues that there is no contradiction between the unlimited accumulation of capital —
the credo of economic liberalism from Adam Smith to the present — and the
preservation of the earth. The system can continue to expand by creating a new
“sustainable capitalism,” bringing the efficiency of the market to bear on nature and its
reproduction. In reality, these visions amount to little more than a renewed strategy for
profiting on planetary destruction.

Behind this tragedy-cum-farce is a distorted accounting deeply rooted in the workings of

the system that sees wealth entirely in terms of value generated through exchange. In
such a system, only commodities for sale on the market really count. External nature —
water, air, living species — outside this system of exchange is viewed as a “free gift.”
Once such blinders have been put on, it is possible to speak, as the leading U.S. climate
economist William Nordhaus has, of the relatively unhindered growth of the economy a
century or so from now, under conditions of business as usual — despite the fact that
leading climate scientists see following the identical path over the same time span as
absolutely catastrophic both for human civilization and life on the planet as a whole.
Such widely disparate predictions from mainstream economists and natural scientists are
due to the fact that, in the normal reckoning of the capitalist system, both nature’s
contribution to wealth and the destruction of natural conditions are largely invisible.
Insulated in their cocoon, orthodox economists either implicitly deny the existence of
nature altogether or assume that it can be completely subordinated to narrow, acquisitive
ends.

This fatal flaw of received economics can be traced back to its conceptual foundations.
The rise of neoclassical economics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is
commonly associated with the rejection of the labor theory of value of classical political
economy and its replacement by notions of marginal utility/productivity. What is
seldom recognized, however, is that another critical perspective was abandoned at the
same time: the distinction between wealth and value (use value and exchange value).
With this was lost the possibility of a broader ecological and social conception of
wealth. These blinders of orthodox economics, shutting out the larger natural and human
world, were challenged by figures inhabiting what John Maynard Keynes called the
“underworlds” of economics. This included critics such as James Maitland (Earl of
Lauderdale), Karl Marx, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, and Frederick Soddy. Today,
in a time of unlimited environmental destruction, such heterodox views are having a
comeback.

The Lauderdale Paradox

The ecological contradictions of the prevailing economic ideology are best explained in
terms of what is known in the history of economics as the “Lauderdale Paradox.” James
Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839), was the author of An Inquiry into
the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its
Increase (1804). In the paradox with which his name came to be associated, Lauderdale
argued that there was an inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches
such that an increase in the latter often served to diminish the former. “Public wealth,”
he wrote, “may be accurately defined, — to consist of all that man desires, as useful or
delightful to him.” Such goods have use value and thus constitute wealth. But private
riches, as opposed to wealth, required something additional (i.e., had an added
limitation), consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which
exists in a degree of scarcity.”

Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in

exchange, and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth,
which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also
what is abundant. This paradox led Lauderdale to argue that increases in scarcity in such
formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if
exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches, and
indeed the riches of the country — conceived of as “the sum-totalof individual riches”
— but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could monopolize
water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured
riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the
population.

“The common sense of mankind,” Lauderdale contended, “would revolt” at any

proposal to augment private riches “by creating a scarcity of any commodity generally
useful and necessary to man.” Nevertheless, he was aware that the bourgeois society in
which he lived was already, in many ways, doing something of the very sort. He
explained that, in particularly fertile periods, Dutch colonialists burned “spiceries” or
paid natives to “collect the young blossoms or green leaves of the nutmeg trees” to kill
them off; and that in plentiful years “the tobacco-planters in Virginia,” by legal
enactment, burned “a certain proportion of tobacco” for every slave working their fields.
Such practices were designed to increase scarcity, augmenting private riches (and the
wealth of a few) by destroying what constituted public wealth — in this case, the
produce of the earth. “So truly is this principle understood by those whose interest leads
them to take advantage of it,” Lauderdale wrote, “that nothing but the impossibility of
general combination protects the public wealth against the rapacity of private avarice.”

From the beginning, wealth, as opposed to mere riches, was associated in classical
political economy with what John Locke called “intrinsic value,” and what later political
economists were to call “use value.” Material use values had, of course, always existed,
and were the basis of human existence. But commodities produced for sale on the
market under capitalism also embodied something else: exchange value (value). Every
commodity was thus viewed as having “a twofold aspect,” consisting of use value and
exchange value. The Lauderdale Paradox was nothing but an expression of this twofold
aspect of wealth/value, which generated the contradiction between total public wealth
(the sum of use values) and the aggregation of private riches (the sum of exchange
values).

David Ricardo, the greatest of the classical-liberal political economists, responded to

Lauderdale’s paradox by underscoring the importance of keeping wealth and value (use
value and exchange value) conceptually distinct. In line with Lauderdale, Ricardo
stressed that if water, or some other natural resource formerly freely available, acquired
an exchange value due to the growth of absolute scarcity, there would be “an actual loss
of wealth” reflecting the loss of natural use values — even with an increase of private
riches.

In contrast, Adam Smith’s leading French follower, Jean Baptiste Say, who was to be
one of the precursors of neoclassical economics, responded to the Lauderdale Paradox
by simply defining it away. He argued that wealth (use value) should be subsumed
under value (exchange value), effectively obliterating the former. In his Letters to
Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce (1821), Say thus objected
to “the definition of which Lord Lauderdale gives of wealth.” It was absolutely
essential, in Say’s view, to abandon altogether the identification of wealth with use
value. As he wrote:

Adam Smith, immediately having observed that there are two sorts of values,
one value in use, the other value in exchange, completely abandons the first, and
entirely occupies himself all the way through his book with exchangeable
value only. This is what you yourself have done, Sir [addressing Malthus]; what
Mr. Ricardo has done; what I have done; what we have all done: for this reason
that there is no other value in political economy….[Consequently,] wealth
consists in the value of the things we possess; confining this word value to the
only admitted and exchangeable value.

Say did not deny that there were “things indeed which are natural wealth, very precious
to man, but which are not of that kind about which political economy can be employed.”
But political economy was to encompass in its concept of value — which was to
displace altogether the concept of wealth — nothing but exchangeable value. Natural or
public wealth, as opposed to value in exchange, was to be left out of account.

Nowhere in liberal political economy did the Lauderdale Paradox create more
convolutions than in what Marx called the “shallow syncretism” of John Stuart
Mill. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) almost seemed to collapse at the
outset on this basis alone. In the “Preliminary Remarks” to his book, Mill declared (after
Say) that, “wealth, then, may be defined, [as] all useful or agreeable things which posses
exchangeable value” — thereby essentially reducing wealth to exchange value. But
Mills’s characteristic eclecticism and his classical roots led him also to expose the larger
irrationality of this, undermining his own argument. Thus, we find in the same section a
penetrating treatment of the Lauderdale Paradox, pointing to the conflict between capital
accumulation and the wealth of the commons. According to Mill:

Things for which nothing could be obtained in exchange, however useful or

necessary they may be, are not wealth in the sense in which the term is used in
Political Economy. Air, for example, though the most absolute of necessaries,
bears no price in the market, because it can be obtained gratuitously: to
accumulate a stock of it would yield no profit or advantage to any one; and the
laws of its production and distribution are the subject of a very different study
from Political Economy. But though air is not wealth, mankind are much richer
by obtaining it gratis, since the time and labour which would otherwise be
required for supplying the most pressing of all wants, can be devoted to other
purposes. It is possible to imagine circumstances in which air would be a part of
wealth. If it became customary to sojourn long in places where the air does not
naturally penetrate, as in diving-bells sunk in the sea, a supply of air artificially
furnished would, like water conveyed into houses, bear a price: and if from any
revolution in nature the atmosphere became too scanty for the consumption, or
could be monopolized, air might acquire a very high marketable value. In such a
case, the possession of it, beyond his own wants, would be, to its owner, wealth;
and the general wealth of mankind might at first sight appear to be increased, by
what would be so great a calamity to them. The error would lie in not
considering, that however rich the possessor of air might become at the expense
of the rest of the community, all persons else would be poorer by all that they
were compelled to pay for what they had before obtained without payment.

Mill signaled here, in line with Lauderdale, the possibility of a vast rift in capitalist
economies between the narrow pursuit of private riches on an increasingly monopolistic
basis, and the public wealth of society and the commons. Yet, despite these deep
insights, Mill closed off the discussion with these “Preliminary Remarks,” rejecting the
Lauderdale Paradox in the end, by defining wealth simply as exchangeable value. What
Say said with respect to Smith in the Wealth of Nations — that he entirely occupied
“himself all the way through his book [after his initial definitions] with exchangeable
value only” — therefore applied also to Mill in his Principles of Political
Economy. Nature was not to be treated as wealth but as something offered “gratis,” i.e.,
as a free gift from the standpoint of capitalist value calculation.

Marx and the Lauderdale Paradox

In opposition to Say and Mill, Marx, like Ricardo, not only held fast to the Lauderdale
Paradox but also made it his own, insisting that the contradictions between use value
and exchange value, wealth and value, were intrinsic to capitalist production. In The
Poverty of Philosophy, he responded to Proudhon’s confused treatment (in The
Philosophy of Poverty) of the opposition between use value and exchange value by
pointing out that this contradiction had been explained most dramatically by Lauderdale,
who had “founded his system on the inverse ratio of the two kinds of value.” Indeed,
Marx built his entire critique of political economy in large part around the contradiction
between use value and exchange value, indicating that this was one of the key
components of his argument in Capital. Under capitalism, he insisted, nature was
rapaciously mined for the sake of exchange value: “the earth is the reservoir, from
whose bowels the use-values are to be torn.”

This stance was closely related to Marx’s attempt to look at the capitalist economy
simultaneously in terms of its economic-value relations, and its material transformations
of nature. Thus, Marx was the first major economist to incorporate the new notions of
energy and entropy, emanating from the first and second laws of thermodynamics, into
his analysis of production. This can be seen in his treatment of the metabolic rift — the
destruction of the metabolism between human beings and the soil, brought on by the
shipment of food and fiber to the city, where nutrients withdrawn from the soil, instead
of returning to the earth, ended up polluting the air and the water. In this conception,
both nature and labor were robbed, since both were deprived of conditions vital for their
reproduction: not “fresh air” and water but “polluted” air and water, Marx argued, had
become the mode of existence of the worker.

Marx’s analysis of the destruction of the wealth of nature for the sake of accumulation is
most evident in his treatment of capitalist ground rent and its relation to industrial
agriculture. Ricardo had rooted his agricultural rent theory in “the original and
indestructible powers of the soil”; Marx replied that “the soil has no ‘indestructible
powers’” — in the sense that it could be degraded, i.e., subject to conditions of
ecological destruction. It is here in Marx’s treatment of capitalist agriculture that the
analysis of the metabolic rift and the Lauderdale Paradox are brought together within his
overall critique. It is here, too, that he frequently refers to sustainability as a material
requirement for any future society — the need to protect the earth for “successive
generations.” A condition of sustainability, he insisted, is the recognition that no one
(not even an entire society or all societies put together) owns the earth — which must be
preserved for future generations in accordance with the principles of good household
management. For a sustainable relation between humanity and the earth to be possible
under modern conditions, the metabolic relation between human beings and nature
needs to be rationally regulated by the associated producers in line with their
needs and those of future generations. This means that the vital conditions of life and
the energy involved in such processes need to be conserved.

Few things were more important, in Marx’s view, than the abolition of the big private
monopolies in land that divorced the majority of humanity from: (1) a direct relation to
nature, (2) the land as a means of production, and (3) a communal relation to the earth.
Thus, he delighted in quoting at length from Herbert Spencer’s chapter in his Social
Statics (1851), “The Right to the Use of the Earth.” There, Spencer openly declared:
“Equity…does not permit property in land, or the rest would live on the earth by
sufferance only….It is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become
private property….A claim to the exclusive possession of the soil involves land-owning
despotism.” Land, Spencer insisted, properly belongs to “the great corporate body —
society.” Human beings were “co-heirs” to the earth.
Although Marx usually looked at nature from an exclusively human perspective, in
terms of sustaining use values, he also referred at times to nature’s right not to be
reduced to a mere commodity. Thus, he quoted Thomas Müntzer’s famous objection
that, in the developing bourgeois society, “all creatures have been made into property,
the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth — all living things must
also become free.”

Ecology and the Labor Theory of Value

Ironically, green thinkers (both non-socialist and socialist) frequently charge that the
labor theory of value, to which Marx adhered in his critique of capitalism, put him in
direct opposition to the kind of ecologically informed value analysis that is needed
today. In Small Is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher observed that, in modern society, there is
an inclination “to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Even
the great Dr. Marx fell into this devastating error when he formulated the so-called
‘labour theory of value.’” Luiz Barbosa, a contributor to a recent environmental
sociology collection, has written that Marx “believed raw materials are given to us gratis
(for free) by nature and that it is human labor that gives it value. Thus, Marx failed to
notice the intrinsic value of nature.” Eco-socialist Jean-Paul Deléage has complained
that, in making labor the only source of value, Marx “attributes no intrinsic value to
natural resources.” Social ecologist Matthew Humphrey gives credence to the view that
“Marx’s attachment to the labour theory of value in which non-human nature is
perceived as valueless” can be taken as an indication of “his anthropocentric outlook.”

Here, it is important to understand that certain conceptual categories that Marx uses in
his critique of political economy, such as nature as a “free gift” and the labor theory of
value itself, were inventions of classical-liberal political economy that were integrated
into Marx’s critique of classical political economy — insofar as they exhibited the real
tendencies and contradictions of the system. Marx employed these concepts in an
argument aimed at transcending bourgeois society and its limited social categories. The
idea that nature was a “free gift” for exploitation was explicitly advanced by the
physiocrats, and by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill
— well before Marx. Moreover, it has been perpetuated in mainstream economics long
after Marx. Although accepting it as a reality of bourgeois political economy, Marx was
nevertheless well aware of the social and ecological contradictions imbedded in such a
view. Thus, in his Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, he repeatedly attacked Malthus
for falling back on this “physiocratic notion” of the environment as “a gift of nature to
man,” while failing to recognize that the concrete appropriation of nature for production
— and the entire value framework built upon this in capitalist society — was, in fact,
associated with historically specific social relations. For Marx, with his emphasis on the
need to protect the earth for future generations, the capitalist expropriation of the
environment as a free object simply pointed to the contradiction between natural wealth
and a system of accumulation of capital that systematically “robbed” it.

Nevertheless, since the treatment of nature as a “free gift” was intrinsic to the workings
of the capitalist economy, it continued to be included as a basic proposition underlying
neoclassical economics. It was repeated as an axiom in the work of the great late-
nineteenth-century neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall, and has continued to be
advanced in orthodox economic textbooks. Hence, the tenth edition (1987) of a widely
used introductory textbook in economics by Campbell McConnell states the following:
“Land refers to all natural resources — all ‘free gifts of nature’ — which are useable in
the production process.” And farther along in the same book we find: “Land has no
production cost; it is a ‘free and nonreproducible gift of nature.’” Indeed, so crucial is
this notion to neoclassical economics that it continues to live on in mainstream
environmental economics. For example, Nick Hanley, Jason F. Shogren, and Ben White
state in their influential Introduction to Environmental Economics (2001) that “natural
capital comprises all [free] gifts of nature.”

Green critics, with only the dimmest knowledge of classical political economy (or of
neoclassical economics), often focus negatively on Marx’s adherence to the labor theory
of value — the notion that only labor generated value. Yet it is important to remember
that the labor theory of value was not confined to Marx’s critique of political economy
but constituted the entire basis of classical-liberal political economy. Misconceptions
pointing to the anti-ecological nature of the labor theory of value arise due to conflation
of the categories of value and wealth — since, in today’s received economics, these are
treated synonymously. It was none other than the Lauderdale Paradox, as we have seen,
that led Say, Mill, and others to abandon the autonomous category of wealth (use value)
— helping to set the stage for the neoclassical economic tradition that was to follow. In
the capitalist logic, there was no question that nature was valueless (i.e., a free gift). The
problem, rather, was how to jettison the concept of wealth, as distinct from value, from
the core framework of economics, since it provided the basis of a critical — and what
we would now call “ecological” — outlook.

Marx, as noted, strongly resisted the jettisoning of the wealth-value distinction, going so
far as to criticize other socialists if they embraced the “value equals wealth”
misconception. If human labor were one source of wealth, he argued — one that became
the basis of value under capitalism — nature was another indispensable source of
wealth. Those who — falling prey to the commodity fetishism of capitalist value
analysis — saw labor as the sole source of wealth were thus attributing “supernatural
creative power” to labor. “Labour,” Marx pronounced at the beginning of the Critique
of the Gotha Programme, “is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the
source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as is labour,
which itself is only the manifestation of a natural force, human labour power.” In the
beginning of Capital, he cited William Petty, the founder of classical political economy,
who had said, “labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.” “Man and
nature,” Marx insisted, were “the two original agencies” in the creation of wealth, which
“continue to cooperate.” Capitalism’s failure to incorporate nature into its value
accounting, and its tendency to confuse value with wealth, were fundamental
contradictions of the regime of capital itself. Those “who fault Marx for not ascribing
value to nature,” Paul Burkett has written, “should redirect their criticisms to capitalism
itself.”
As with Lauderdale, only with greater force and consistency, Marx contended that
capitalism was a system predicated on the accumulation of value, even at the expense of
real wealth (including the social character of human labor itself). The capitalist, Marx
noted, adopted as his relation to the world: “Après moi le déluge!” Or, as he was
frequently to observe, capital had a vampire-like relation to nature — i.e., represented a
kind of living death maintained by sucking the blood from the world.

Unworldly Economists and their Critics

Nevertheless, the whole classical conception of wealth, which had its highest
development in the work of Ricardo and Marx, was to be turned upside down with the
rise of neoclassical economics. This can be seen in the work of Carl Menger — one of
the founders of the Austrian school of economics and of neoclassical economics, more
generally. In his Principles of Economics (1871 — published only four years after
Marx’s Capital), Menger attacked the Lauderdale Paradox directly (indeed, the
reference to it as a “paradox” may have originated with him), arguing that it was
“exceedingly impressive at first glance,” but was based on false distinctions. For
Menger, it was important to reject both the use value/exchange value and wealth/value
distinctions. Wealth was based on exchange, which was now seen as rooted in
subjective utilities. Replying to both Lauderdale and Proudhon, he insisted that the
deliberate production of scarcity in nature was beneficial (to capital). Indeed, standing
Lauderdale on his head, he contended that it would make sense to encourage “a long
continued diminution of abundantly available (non-economic) goods [(e.g., air, water,
natural landscapes) since this] must finally make them scarce in some degree — and
thus components of wealth, which is thereby increased.” In the same vein, Menger
claimed that mineral water could conceivably be turned eventually into an economic
good due to its scarcity. What Lauderdale presented as a paradox or even a curse — the
promotion of private riches through the destruction of public wealth — Menger, one of
the precursors of neoliberalism in economics, saw as an end in itself.

This attempt to remove the paradox of wealth from economics led to scathing
indictments by Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, and Frederick Soddy, along with
others within the underworld of economics. In his best-selling work, Progress and
Poverty (1879), George strongly stressed the importance of retaining a socialconcept of
wealth:

Many things are commonly spoken of as wealth which in taking account of

collective or general wealth cannot be considered as wealth at all. Such things
have an exchange value…insomuch as they represent as between individuals, or
between sets of individuals, the power of obtaining wealth; but they are not truly
wealth [from a social standpoint], inasmuch as their increase or decrease does
not affect the sum of wealth. Such are bonds, mortgages, promissory notes, bank
bills, or other stipulations for the transfer of wealth. Such are slaves, whose
value represents merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of
another class. Such are lands, or other natural opportunities, the value of which
is but the result of the acknowledgement in favor of certain persons of an
 exclusive right to their use, and which represents merely the power thus given to
the owners to demand a share of the wealth produced by those who use
them….By enactment of the sovereign political power debts might be canceled,
slaves emancipated, and land resumed as the common property of the whole
people, without the aggregate wealth being diminished by the value of a pinch of
snuff, for what some would lose others would gain.

Carefully examining the changing definitions of wealth in economics, George roundly

condemned Say, Mill, and the Austrian school of economics for obliterating the notion
of use value and defining wealth entirely in terms of exchange value. Produced wealth,
he argued, was essentially the result of “exertion impressed on matter,” and was to be
associated with producible use values. Value came from labor. Like Marx, he drew upon
the basic tenets of Greek materialism (most famously extolled by Epicurus and
Lucretius), arguing that nothing can be created merely by labor; “nothing can come out
of nothing.”

Other economic dissidents also challenged the narrow orthodox economic approach to
wealth. Veblen contended that the main thrust of capitalist economics under the regime
of absentee ownership was the seizure of public wealth for private benefit. Calling this
the “American plan” because it had “been worked out more consistently and more
extensively” in the United States “than elsewhere,” he referred, in Lauderdale-like
terms, to it as “a settled practice of converting all public wealth to private gain on a plan
of legalised seizure” — marked especially by “the seizure of the fertile soil and its
conversion to private gain.” The same rapacious system had its formative stages in the
United States in slavery and in “the debauchery and manslaughter entailed on the Indian
population of the country.”

Soddy, the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, was an important forerunner of
ecological economics. He was an admirer of Marx — arguing that it was a common
error to think that Marx saw the source of all wealth as human labor. Marx, Soddy
noted, had followed Petty and the classical tradition in seeing labor as the father of
wealth, the earth as the mother. The bounty of nature was part of “the general wealth” of
the world. Reviving the Lauderdale Paradox, in his critique of mainstream economics,
Soddy pointed out that the confusion enters even into the attempt of the earlier
[classical] economists to define…“wealth,” though the modern [neoclassical] economist
seems to be far too wary a bird to define even that. Thus we find that wealth consists, let
us say, of the enabling requisites of life, or something equally unequivocal and
acceptable, but, if it is to be had in unlimited abundance, like sunshine or oxygen or
water, then it is not any longer wealth in the economic sense, though without either of
these requisites life would be impossible.

In this, Soddy wrote, “the economist, ignorant of the scientific laws of life, has not
arrived at any conception of wealth,” nor given any thought to the costs to nature and
society, given the degradation of the environment. Turning to Mill’s contorted treatment
of the Lauderdale Paradox, Soddy referred to the “curious inversions” of those who,
based on making market exchange the sole criterion of value/wealth, thought that the
creation of scarcity with respect to food, fuel, air, etc. made humanity richer. The result
was that “the economist has effectually impaled himself upon the horns of a very
awkward dilemma.”

Despite the devastating criticisms arising from the underworld of economics, however,
the dominant neoclassical tradition moved steadily away from any concept of
social/public wealth, excluding the whole question of social (and natural) costs —
within its main body of analysis. Thus, as ecological economist K. William Kapp
explained in his landmark Social Costs of Private Enterprise in 1950, despite the
introduction of an important analogue to the orthodox tradition with the publication of
Pigou’s Economics of Welfare, it remained true that the “analysis of social costs is
carried on not within the main body of value and price theory but as a separate system
of so-called welfare economics.” Kapp traced the raising of the whole problem of social
wealth/social costs to none other than Lauderdale, while viewing Marx as one of the
most devastating critics of capitalism’s robbing of the earth.

The Return of the Lauderdale Paradox

Today Lauderdale’s paradox is even more significant than it was when originally
formulated in the early nineteenth century. Water scarcities, air pollution, world hunger,
growing fuel shortages, and the warming of the earth are now dominant global realities.
Moreover, attempts within the system to expand private riches by exploiting these
scarcities, such as the worldwide drive to privatize water, are ever-present. Hence,
leading ecological economist Herman Daly has spoken of “The Return of the
Lauderdale Paradox” — this time with a vengeance.

The ecological contradictions of received economics are most evident in its inability to
respond to the planetary environmental crisis. This is manifested both in repeated
failures to apprehend the extent of the danger facing us, and in the narrow accumulation
strategies offered to solve it. The first of these can be seen in the astonishing naiveté of
leading orthodox economists — even those specializing in environmental issues —
arising from a distorted accounting that measures exchange values but largely excludes
use values, i.e., issues of nature and public wealth. Thus, Nordhaus was quoted in
Science magazine in 1991 as saying: “Agriculture, the part of the economy that is
sensitive to climate change, accounts for just 3% of national output. That means there is
no way to get a very large effect on the U.S. economy” just through the failure of
agriculture. In this view, the failure of agriculture in the United States would have little
impact on the economy as a whole! Obviously, this is not a contradiction of nature, but
of the capitalist economy — associated with its inability to take into account material
realities. Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman presented the same myopic view in his
book Small Is Stupid (1995), claiming that “even if the net output of [U.S.] agriculture
fell by 50 per cent by the end of the next century this is only a 1.5 per cent cut in GNP.”
This view led him to conclude elsewhere that global warming under business as usual
would have a “negligible” effect on world output. Likewise, Thomas Schelling, winner
of the Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, wrote
in Foreign Affairs in 1997 that “Agriculture [in the developed world] is practically the
only sector of the economy affected by climate, and it contributes only a small
percentage — three percent in the United States — of national income. If agricultural
productivity were drastically reduced by climate change, the cost of living would rise by
one or two percent, and at a time when per capita income will likely have doubled.”

The underlying assumption here — that agriculture is the only part of the economy that
is sensitive to climate change — is obviously false. What is truly extraordinary in such
views, however, is that the blinders of these leading neoclassical economists effectively
prevent even a ray of common sense from getting through. GDP measurements become
everything, despite the fact that such measurements are concerned only with economic
value added, and not with the entire realm of material existence. There is no
understanding here of production as a system, involving nature (and humanity), outside
of national income accounting. Even then, the views stated are astonishingly naïve —
failing to realize that a decrease by half of agricultural production would necessarily
have an extraordinary impact on the price of food! Today, with a “tsunami of hunger
sweeping the world,” and at least one billion people worldwide lacking secure access to
food, these statements of only a decade ago by leading mainstream environmental
economists seem criminal in their ignorance.

The same distorted accounting, pointing to “modest projected impacts” on the economy
from global warming, led Nordhaus in 1993 to classify climate change as a “second-tier
issue,” and to suggest that “the conclusion that arises from most economic studies is to
impose modest restraints, pack up our tools, and concentrate on more pressing
problems.” Although he acknowledged that scientists were worried about the pending
environmental catastrophe associated with current trends, the views of most economists
were more “sanguine.”

None of this should surprise us. Capitalism’s general orientation with respect to public
welfare, as is well known, is a kind of trickle-down economics, in which resources and
human labor are exploited intensively to generate immeasurable affluence at the top of
society. This is justified by the false promise that some of this affluence will eventually
trickle down to those below. In a similar way, the ecological promises of the system
could be called “trickle-down ecology.” We are told that, by allowing unrestrained
accumulation, the environment will be improved through ever-greater efficiency — a
kind of secondary effect. The fact that the system’s celebrated efficiency is of a very
restricted, destructive kind is hardly mentioned.

A peculiarity of capitalism, brought out by the Lauderdale Paradox, is that it feeds on

scarcity. Hence, nothing is more dangerous to capitalism as a system than abundance.
Waste and destruction are therefore rational for the system. Although it is often
supposed that increasing environmental costs will restrict economic growth, the fact is
that such costs continue to be externalized under capitalism on nature (and society) as a
whole. This perversely provides new prospects for private profits through the selective
commodification of parts of nature (public wealth).
All of this points to the fact that there is no real feedback mechanism, as commonly
supposed, from rising ecological costs to economic crisis, that can be counted on to
check capitalism’s destruction of the biospheric conditions of civilization and life itself.
By the perverse logic of the system, whole new industries and markets aimed at
profiting on planetary destruction, such as the waste management industry and carbon
trading, are being opened up. These new markets are justified as offering partial, ad hoc
“solutions” to the problems generated non-stop by capital’s laws of motion.

In fact, the growth of natural scarcity is seen as a golden opportunity in which to further
privatize the world’s commons. This tragedy of the privatization of the commons only
accelerates the destruction of the natural environment, while enlarging the system that
weighs upon it. This is best illustrated by the rapid privatization of fresh water, which is
now seen as a new mega-market for global accumulation. The drying up and
contamination of freshwater diminishes public wealth, creating investment opportunities
for capital, while profits made from selling increasingly scarce water are recorded as
contributions to income and riches. It is not surprising, therefore, that the UN
Commission on Sustainable Development proposed, at a 1998 conference in Paris, that
governments should turn to “large multinational corporations” in addressing issues of
water scarcity, establishing “open markets” in water rights. Gérard Mestrallet, CEO of
the global water giant Suez, has openly pronounced: “Water is an efficient product. It is
a product which normally would be free, and our job is to sell it. But it is a product
which is absolutely necessary for life.” He further remarked: “Where else [other than in
the monopolization of increasingly scarce water resources for private gain] can you find
a business that’s totally international, where the prices and volumes, unlike steel, rarely
go down?”

Not only water offers new opportunities for profiting on scarcity. This is also the case
with respect to fuel and food. Growing fuel shortages, as world oil demand has outrun
supply — with peak oil approaching — has led to increases in the prices of fossil fuels
and energy in general, and to a global shift in agriculture from food crops to fuel crops.
This has generated a boom in the agrofuel market (expedited by governments on the
grounds of “national security” concerns). The result has been greater food scarcities,
inducing an upward spiral in food prices and the spiking of world hunger. Speculators
have seen this as an opportunity for getting richer quicker through the monopolization
of land and primary commodity resources.

Similar issues arise with respect to carbon-trading schemes, ostensibly aimed at

promoting profits while reducing carbon emissions. Such schemes continue to be
advanced despite the fact that experiments in this respect thus far have been a failure —
in reducing emissions. Here, the expansion of capital trumps actual public interest in
protecting the vital conditions of life. At all times, ruling-class circles actively work to
prevent radical structural change in this as in other areas, since any substantial
transformation in social-environmental relations would mean challenging the treadmill
of production itself, and launching an ecological-cultural revolution.
Indeed, from the standpoint of capital accumulation, global warming and desertification
are blessings in disguise, increasing the prospects of expanding private riches. We are
thus driven back to Lauderdale’s question: “What opinion,” he asked, “would be
entertained of the understanding of a man, who, as the means of increasing the wealth
of…a country should propose to create a scarcity of water, the abundance of which was
deservedly considered one of the greatest blessings incident to the community? It is
certain, however, that such a projector would, by this means, succeed in increasing the
mass of individual riches.”

Numerous ecological critics have, of course, tried to address the contradictions

associated with the devaluation of nature by designing new green accounting systems
that would include losses of “natural capital.” Although such attempts are important in
bringing out the irrationality of the system, they run into the harsh reality that the
current system of national accounts does accurately reflect capitalist realities of the non-
valuation/undervaluation of natural agents (including human labor power itself). To
alter this, it is necessary to transcend the system. The dominant form of valuation, in our
age of global ecological crisis, is a true reflection of capitalism’s mode of social and
environmental degradation — causing it to profit on the destruction the planet.

In Marx’s critique, value was conceived of as an alienated form of wealth. Real wealth
came from nature and labor power and was associated with the fulfillment of genuine
human needs. Indeed, “it would be wrong,” Marx wrote, “to say that labour which
produces use-values is the only source of the wealth produced by it, that is of material
wealth….Use-value always comprises a natural element….Labour is a natural condition
of human existence, a condition of material interchange [metabolism] between man and
nature.” From this standpoint, Lauderdale’s paradox was not a mere enigma of
economic analysis, but rather the supreme contradiction of a system that, as Marx
stressed, developed only by “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all
wealth — the soil and the worker.”