Look carefully at this chart. What does it say? It says that Americans aren’t paid what they’re worth — their incomes have flatlined for half a century, but their productivity, which is roughly the profit that they earn for capitalists, has skyrocketed. American economists call it “the productivity-wage gap.” Marx, laughing, understanding all the above much better, would simply have called it exploitation.

And yet exploitation in America seems to have become a way of life. Let’s define it, first, a little more finely: “to use another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit.” Now. Who’s exploited in America? The better question is: who isn’t? 80% percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 70% can’t raise $1000 for an emergency, kids perform “active shooter drills”, abuse is rife in industry after industry, sick people crowdfund basic medicines, really sick people have to choose between chemotherapy and paying their mortgage, students pay higher interest rates than hedge funds — the very ones who looted their parents’ mortgages and savings. “To use another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit.” Isn’t that what all those things really are? Exploitation isn’t the exception in America — it’s the rule.

How did it come to be that way? Until I wrote the paragraph above, maybe you didn’t see those things as “exploitation”, really. And yet they are almost perfect examples. So exploitation is so routine, so normal in America that it’s an everyday, commonplace affair — which people are quite invisible to. And that is because capitalism’s foundational belief, which it has been long taught, maybe even indoctrinated, into Americans, is that if we each exploit everyone that we can, beginning with ourselves, as ruthlessly and mercilessly as possible, then everyone will be better off, not just the capitalists. (Because the strong will survive — and even the weak will benefit, by becoming a little more selfish, tough, independent, and less of a burden upon the strong.)

Americans came to believe, a little zealously, perhaps a little childishly, in this utopian promise — they laboured harder and harder every year, straining and sweating, at the work capitalism set before them, in the hope that by working long and hard enough at exploiting themselves, and everyone else, maybe all the riches capitalists seemed to have amassed would rain down on them, too. (I know, it sounds strange if you’re not American.)

And yet, if we take a long, hard look at America — precisely the opposite seems to have happened . Because anything gained through exploitation is essentially taken from others, a zero-sum game is being played, and so American life never seems to really go anywhere but plunge downwards — shrinking middle class, vanishing savings, falling longevity — for most. The prole has not ended up a glittering capitalist — in fact, he has ended up broke and desperate. Capitalism played a clever trick on him. It did not trickle fortune downwards. Instead, it shoved exploitation downwards, and he performed it, so that wealth could gush upwards.

Let’s begin with the example of Amazon. Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man. And yet the immense wealth that he enjoys isn’t created by him alone — but by Amazon employees. So let’s think about them. Bezos earns billions. The managers under him, probably millions. Those under them, hundreds of thousands. And at the bottom of the food chain are the vast majority of Amazon employees, struggling to eke out a living.

Do you see what’s really happening here? Exploitation is trickling down — so that wealth can trickle up. The person at the bottom has contributed in a very real, and very significant way, to the billions that Bezos has amassed. (No, the idea that anyone can deliver groceries does not mean that what they isn’t worth anything — how else would Bezos be worth billions)? Only they are barely paid enough to subsist upon. Instead, the surplus value of their labour, just as Marx predicted, is taken, and redistributed upwards — first to their managers, and then their managers, and so on. And the job of most of those managers — after all, apparently algorithms do the “work” — is therefore to maximize profits, and minimize costs. But wages are costs, too, as are benefits — and thus, the work that is really being done is to manage exploitation, which is how you end up with one epic billionaire, and thousands of people at the poverty line.

But that story’s true across the economy. Predatory capitalism made “work” largely the the execution and perfection of exploitation. Instead of labour being the expression of the human possibility (like, say, discovering antibiotics, building a healthcare system, making it affordable to get an education), it became the predation upon human vulnerability (like, say, fine-tuning the algorithm for maximum revenue, with horrific clickbait videos, looting pension funds, overcharging students for debt, hiking up drug prices thousands of percent, and so on.) Hence, exploitation trickled downwards, from capitalist, to underling, to prole.

Let me explain what I mean by that, though — because it’s not as simple as “the average person is being exploited!”, but something a little more subtle. The average American is being exploited, sure, in exactly the sense above — his income from labour has stagnated for half a century now, while the income from capital has exploded, showering astonishing fortunes on the tiny few who are genuine capitalists, Bezos, Buffett, Gates. But he must also exploit, in turn, if he wishes to survive.

Consider the average American job now — a good one, a professional one, a managerial one, the few that are left. What does the “work” really consist of? It isn’t about creating things of genuine value, improving people’s lives, and expanding anyone’s possibilities, really. It is about maximizing profits, and minimizing costs. Relentlessly. Every day, week, quarter. Finding new and “innovative” and “creative” ways to do it. All these buzzwords essentially boil down to one act: maximizing capital income, at the expense of labour income.

Perhaps you doubt me. Let’s think about. You’re a low-level manager at some corporation, pick one, it doesn’t really matter. Is your job — ever — to find ways to give people higher salaries, better benefits, to share the wealth? Of course not. It can’t be. The chart above tells us that much very clearly — how else could incomes stagnate while “productivity”, which is to say, profit, booms? Your job is essentially to make the chart above happen — and keep happening. If you can ensure that wages stagnate, but profits boom — at any cost, really, polluting that river, eviscerating that town, poisoning that norm, flouting that law — then you will have a job. Your own income might rise a little. Maybe one day you’ll be promoted to CEO, receive some shares, and become a real capitalist — that’s the fantasy, anyways. The price of survival is therefore exploitation — because anything less than such a job, really, is to risk ruin in today’s America.

So what is really happening now in the American economy is that to rise up the ladder of prosperity, you must find ever more innovative, clever, and creative ways to exploit people. As employees, as consumers, as producers. That is, to constantly skim off more and more of the cream in prosperity’s pot for the capitalists — and leave ever less and less for anyone else.

Now here’s the funny — or tragic — part, depending on how you see it. While the average American can only now really survive through exploitation, he is being exploited at the very same time. It’s not as if Jeff Bezos is saying to that low-level Amazon manager who’s scheduling brutal, inhumane shifts at the warehouse — “Dude! Great job! Now I’m going to pay you what your productivity is worth!” Quite the opposite. That low-level manager, has the cream skimmed off the very work that he does, too. There he is, working around the clock, essentially managing exploitation — minimizing costs and maximizing income for capital — and yet his boss is doing just the same thing, to him. And so on, all the way up the food chain. Isn’t that ironic? Weird? Bizarre? A little gruesome?

So now perhaps you see what I mean by “exploitation trickling down.” Americans are trapped by the pincers of capitalism. They can barely survive at all without becoming exploitative. But they are exploited in turn, by the very systems which make little exploiters of them — corporations, stock markets, hedge funds, investment banks, and so forth, all the institutions which make predatory capitalism hunger and lurch. Predatory capitalism has Americans right where it wants them: if they don’t exploit themselves and everyone else, they might not survive — but if they do exploit themselves and others, they get exploited the very moment they perform even the work of exploitation. Marx would have laughed, astonished — because this is a kind of fractal effect of capitalism gone haywire.

Capitalism promised Americans that if they just worked hard and long enough — which means if they exploited themselves and everyone else enough — then one day they would join the ranks of the bourgeoisie one day. Americans happily consented to that bargain — only to discover that, just as with most things in which life which seem to be true, that it was a Faustian one. The average American is poorer than his grandparents, not richer — broke, impoverished, and desperate. He or she lives right at the edge of ruin, every single, day, one perpetual misstep, one illness, unpaid bill, or emergency away from disaster. Which means true ruin — homelessness, bankruptcy, healthcare that no one can afford, and so on. Capitalism’s promise that if you exploit yourself, and everyone else, fortune will shower down on you turned out to be a con game. What really trickled downwards was exploitation, not riches.

And that explains why exploitation seems to be a way of life in America now — something so routine, everyday, so commonplace, that it’s as invisible to Americans as the air that they breathe. Hence, kids perform “active shooter drills”, people crowdfunding basic medicine, elderly people who’ve had their pensions looted by private equity funds, abuse of power is rife in every kind of institution — an endless and grim list of predatory acts.

Abuse has been culturally normalized in America because exploitation is an act of survival. When you must exploit yourself, and everyone else around you, simply to earn your daily bread, then it’s hardly a surprise that a society of such people seems totally unfazed by gruesome and weird things like kids being mowed down at schools and people dying without insulin. Hence, Americans seem to have gotten so used to exploitation that they only ever really see the most extreme examples of it anymore — someone famous abuses a woman horrifically, another school shooting happened today, and so on. But what they don’t see is that pervasive exploitation is a commonplace, everyday event, an economic necessity, the very price of subsistence — and that transformed it into a way of life. Exploitation became an American norm thanks to capitalism as the solution to everything.

Americans might not “love” it like Romeo loved Juliet — but they’re wedded to it in the sense that they still cherish the promise capitalism made, even now, of showering them with riches if they work a little harder every year, at the work of maximizing the riches of capitalists, but never really caring much for anything else, like their democracy, their laws, their society, their norms, or themselves. But why would that dream — make capitalists richer, and you’ll get rich too!! — ever come true? Yet its logic is still deeply suffused throughout American society.

(Hence, if you look closely, you’ll see an even weirder and more gruesome thing. Americans — at least many of them — celebrate exploitation. Let’s go back to that definition. “To use another’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit.” Doesn’t this accord perfectly with the values of ruthlessness, cleverness, cruelty, toughness? Hence, American institutions select for just this trait, and its corresponding values, first — and empathy, courage, grace, and wisdom last — if you can show ruthlessness, cleverness, cruelty, toughness, individualism, then you might get that job, that admission letter, that promotion. But if you don’t — pffft — forget it. You’re weak. Good luck at that interview, killer — nice guys finish last.)

Exploitation has trickled down. Now society is organized in great ladders of predation. I prey on you. He prey on me. She preys on us. And another one preys on me, him, and her. Wealth trickles up. Exploitation trickles down — each of is using the next person down’s vulnerability for their own benefit. But the benefits we earn from those vulnerabilities are in turn, extracted from us, by the very next person up. Until, at the very top of this great chain sits the capitalist, who is not vulnerable in any way, and therefore, extracts “rents”, or benefits, from all the people below him, who are in turn, funneling all they have extracted upwards to him.

Do you see how bizarre a thing this is — this model of fractal exploitation? It says something like this. To survive, I must exploit you — and be exploited in turn. Nobody is receiving a fair share of the work they do — and nobody much is doing work of real value to begin with. We are just doing the work of skimming off more and more of the cream for capitalists, and leaving less for everyone else, until the pot is empty.

But if that is all an economy is, then soon enough, a culture and a society becomes a predatory one, too. A place where people think it is perfectly normal, acceptable, and justifiable — worthy and desirable, even — to use another’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit. That is how America became a place where everyone, more or less — young, old, poor, ill, frail, middle class — is now at best neglected and abandoned, when they are not viciously abused and systemically shortchanged. Except the capitalists who sit at the top of these towering chains. Chains of people using each other’s vulnerabilities for their own benefits, only to have those very benefits skimmed off by the next person up, and so on, in infinite regress — until the capitalists receive the vast, enormous gains of these titanic systems of exploitation, which have come to control, dominate, more or less, all of what America once used to be.

So if you ask me, the question “does America have a future?” depends a very great deal on whether Americans begin to understand the above — and build a society based on genuine freedom. Freedom from exploitation — and having to exploit, too. Genuine freedom, which begins there, is called dignity.

Umair

September 2018