“I’m just a consumer” is a phrase I often heard on shop floors during my youth when I lived in Columbus and other places in the U.S. It’s worth noting managers and department heads shared those feelings.

I admit I can understand why, and there are at least four good reasons for such sentiments.

Spending that Paycheck

First, we buy the merchandise we need in the weekly grocery store with the income from our employment, then run to pay the rent or mortgage, utilities, car payment, and so on. Spending that paycheck reinforces that “I’m just a consumer” feeling. Writing these lines, I recall a coworker who often whined aloud how “it feels like I live for my car!” She wasn’t able to save for things she really wanted because the car, house, appliances, and so forth always needed repair and replacing.

There’s nothing new about that experience. The Manifesto written in the mid-1800s described how on payday we go running from one capitalist to another: “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, then he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/188/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

TaylorizingA second reason for everyone feeling powerless is industry’s eternal battle with itself to simplify every process by breaking it down into the smallest steps that can be done with the “slightest knack.” At one time or another we’ve all heard that disparaging line: “I didn’t hire you to think! I just need you to… mop that floor / deliver those packages / tighten those three bolts (on each piece that goes by on the assembly line every 27 seconds).”

That process took on the name of a certain Mr. Taylor who specialized in efficiency studies. Merriam Webster puts it this way: “Taylorism: a factory management system developed in the late 19th century to increase efficiency by evaluating every step in a manufacturing process and breaking down production into specialized repetitive tasks.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Taylorism

Decades before Mr. Taylor performed his research, the Manifesto had also described its impact on everyone’s lives.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Which is to say: to pay each employee as little as possible.

An upshot is that we’re discouraged from gaining an overall view of what goes on further along the assembly line. In turn, such a situation feeds into the stereotype that workers are not only educated but don’t need broader humanities education. At most they only “need” training for the new machine that will arrive soon to replace the present one.

(As an aside: This is why socialism signifies “worker’s control,” more than anything else such as nationalizing industry and land.)

Perverse Propaganda

This atomized view of the worker meshes with a third cultural aspect, which may be the most corrosive of all. All the millions of people who mine, smelt, mold, pack, ship, unpack, assemble, etc. are mere “hands.” On the other hand, the billionaires who enjoy a luxurious life at a Caribbean golf course is the “manufacturer.”

Reporting on industry or agriculture, news-speak calls the “producer” that person who in fact doesn’t work, compounding the confusion and blurring the class line. It’s likely this perverse practice in the press is intentional propaganda, since we confront it every day. The financial section names a farm owner as a producer, a factory owner as a manufacturer, who is “worth” so many million dollars. The transparent insinuation that the rest of us are “worthless.”

And financially speaking, we have little because we’re in debt.

·Forbes recently reported “More than one in four Americans (28%) have savings below $1,000.” (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/average-american-savings, May 2)

·“Seventy-seven percent of U.S. adults have at least one credit card” according to Bankrate (citing the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), while “the average American has 3.84 credit cards” (cited from Experian). (Credit card ownership and usage statistics https://www.bankrate.com/credit-cards/news/credit-card-ownership-usage-statistics, December 21, 2023)

I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

Making matters yet more mystifying is the fact that everyone is in debt. Debt is that force driving everybody to voluntarily work ghastly, grisly hours, days, weeks, months, years…

To this day I vividly recall my cynical train of thought in my last years in the United States when the eighties came to a close. In my family of four, the parent with higher income worked a full time job to pay the rent or mortgage, the other worked full time to pay for food, clothing, gasoline, utilities, and other essentials. That first parent moonlighted for “luxuries” like paying off the credit card from the last vacation and gifts for family, and that other partner worked weekends to pay for the childcare all the time absent from home while at the other three jobs!

I don’t doubt Freep readers empathize with that lifestyle, since its readership is socially aware. However, using debt slavery as a point of reference leads one into a blind alley in comprehending how debt works for a company, or even wealthy persons.

Launching a new enterprise requires preparation and tools, in other words an investment. So by its very nature companies are born into debt. Repaying that initial capital drives it to press for gains — that’s where the parallel with debt slavery ends.

Every new business owner quickly learns to pay themselves twice: once with the profits or dividends, which can fluctuate dramatically, so they also “hire” themselves as director or manager to have a regular income. That’s why the financial pages report the CEOs and other board members of big corporations haul in millions with their left hand and more tens of millions with their right.

But how that works out for debt slaves is a far cry from what it represents for corporations.

What Debt Really Means

The last of the four good reasons for feeling like “I’m just a customer” is the most perverse of them all.

When banks, big corporations, credit card companies, department stores, pawn shops and so forth report in red ink the millions and billions in their financial statements, it’s because huge segments of the population owe them — they’re the ones in charge! Debt for that segment of society implies the opposite of what it does to you and me: when we’re in hock, we’re slaves; when they’re in the red, they’re in the driver’s seat.

The manner in which you and I are debt slaves is the mirrored opposite of the relation a company has with its debt! To put it more elegantly: We should keep in mind that money is just paper, coin, or digits on a computer screen which, in the end, are no more than social conventions — which is why Marxists hold to their time-worn refrain: “capital is a social relationship.” Read for yourself the phrase “Capital is a collective product” at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm.

Always keep in mind that the government is of, by, and for the wealthy. They write the tax code so that companies can deduct from their taxes the interest paid on their loans — it’s a so-called “tax write off!” It’s true that you and I can use those same codes to deduct the interest on a mortgage or car, adding up to a few hundred dollars a year; but for them it’s millions and billions.

So What to Do about It?

You’ve taken a first step in reading this kind of essay to become aware of the problem. There’s more than an ounce of truth to the proverbial adage by psychologists: diagnosing the problem is half way to recovery.

With this knowledge we can value people, rather than tossing them aside for being “just hands.”

Comprehending the differentiated ways debt places rich and poor in opposite and opposing roles helps to appreciate that they aren’t evil persons, (at least not necessarily evil,) but rather that debt forces everyone to increase wealth, wealth which strives to grow at any cost.

We can pay no heed to propaganda that justifies inequity by the age old trick of blaming the victim.

This article and two more to follow flesh out the theory dealt with in The Columbus Worker:

What Impels Modern Society Toward Ever More Massive Waste

(April 13, 2024 https://cbus.work/home/theory/what-impels-modern-society)

And chapters 15 and 16 in a tome by István Mészáros called Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995, Monthly Review Press) are the background to that theoretical essay. I encourage you to read them for yourself!