What does political-economy mean? It means that the wealth we create as workers is owned and controlled by our masters. The control is political. We create the economy. We create capital. The owners decide what to do with what we've created, once they've paid us wages for what we have agreed to sell our skills for and what they've agreed to buy them for. What is useful for the capitalists is to make money. Money is the measure of all things for them. Count it. It is a quantitative measure of what they have had us produce. Remember, they control what is produced by us. Capitalists and their spokespeople would prefer that workers didn't consciously realise these political facts about the economy, so, when speaking publicly, they usually just refer to "the economy". When they do, they turn a blind eye to "the political", the issue of who controls the wealth and why these people are having goods and services produced which maybe we, the producers, don't find useful. In short, we don't need a lot of goods and services which we produce. We just create them because we're told to. That's the political part of the economy. Jonathon Rowe, a shorter work time advocate, explains in his testimony before the U.S. government how insane this system which puts quantity before quality becomes--especially when measuring how healthy a society is: **********************************************************
That term “the economy”: what it means, in practice, is the Gross Domestic Product–a big statistical pot that includes all the money spent in a given period of time. If the pot is bigger than it was the previous quarter, or year, then you cheer. If it isn’t bigger, or bigger enough, then you call Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up here and ask him to do some explaining. The what of the economy makes no difference in these councils. It never seems to come up. The money in the big pot could be going to cancer treatments or casinos, violent video games or usurious credit-card rates. It could go toward the $9 billion or so that Americans spend on gas they burn while they sit in traffic, or the billion plus that goes to such drugs as Ritalin and Prozac that schools are stuffing into kids to keep them quiet in class. The money could be the $20 billion or so that Americans spend on divorce lawyers each year, or the $41 billion on pets, or the $5 billion on identity theft, or the billions more spent to repair property damage caused by environmental pollution. The money in the pot could betoken social and environmental breakdown–misery and distress of all kinds. It makes no difference. You don’t ask. All you want to know is the total amount, which is the GDP. So long as it is growing then everything is fine. ...How did we get to this strange pass, where up is down and down is up?
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Industrial Workers of the WorldOne Big Union for All |
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