Raise the Hammer

First off, as someone who's known Don for a long time, as well as most of our town's notorious communists, I certainly wouldn't characterize him as one of them. I don't know exactly how he feels about the subject, but in years of activism I've never once heard him make an issue of it. Rather, he's fought hard for years for basic democratic and environmental justice. For those who don't think he's done anything since Red Hill, have you heard of CATCH? Publicizing transcripts of council meetings and under-reported staff studies hardly sounds like a diabolical communist plot to me. Red-baiting fail.

Since good ole' Karl has been brought up, though, I think it would be valuable for some of the people posting on here to actually crack open a copy of Das Kapital before spouting off about it. I'm not a Marxist, but his critiques make a lot of very valid points about why the type of arguments advanced by A Smith just never quite work out in real life. Capital is written largely in response to the work of scholars like John Locke, Adam Smith and others, and he's actually (comparatively) fond of Smith in a lot of ways (in comparison, he's none too fond of Thomas Malthus). It has nothing to do with communism, and everything to do with things like supply and demand.

The issue is not that workers are being paid $20 for creating $10 worth of "value" for a company, it's the other way around (take Temp Agencies for a blatant example). And when that "surplus value" gets taken as profit then reinvested as capital, it gets used to justify the ongoing ownership and control of the business, even if the initial investment was repaid years before. More profits and more capital don't mean more wages for workers - real wages haven't grown in Canada or America since the 1970s, despite an unbelievable blossoming of profits and productivity (the computer revolution, etc). It isn't that Marx is (just) against market competition, he's illustrating why capital itself distorts and destroys market competition.

For those who are actually interested, I highly reccomend David Harvey's online course "Reading Marx's Capital". It's long and painful (so is the book, believe me), but does it some actual justice without really getting much into communism and that whole can of worms. http://davidharvey.org/