Actually, “It’s the System, Stupid”
by Rick Wolff

At the capitalist system’s core lies its central conflict. On one side, corporate boards of directors pursue ever more surplus extracted from productive workers. On the other side, workers seek ever more wages and benefits and better working conditions that reduce the surplus available to employers. Perpetual class conflict results between capitalists and workers over the size of that surplus. The conflict’s form varies from hidden to open and from mild to violent.

Boards of directors continually find ways to reduce wages. Yet they complain when consumers whose wages fall cannot then buy all the commodities that capitalists need to sell to them. Indeed, insufficient consumption often contributes to causing or worsening a recession. The contradiction here is one that many capitalists seem unable to see, let alone trace to the class structure of capitalist production and its resulting conflict.

Workers continually seek to improve their incomes, benefits, and job conditions. Yet they confront employers who respond by outsourcing jobs to cheaper or more subservient workers or by eliminating jobs through automation, even at the cost of jeopardizing commodity sales to workers, leading to or worsening recessions. The contradiction here — workers who achieve gains risk losing their jobs — underlies another of capitalism’s systemic conflicts. As discussed further below, were workers to become their own collective boards of directors, they would not likely reduce wages or outsource jobs. Workers appropriating their own surpluses would accompany automation with serious job retraining and transitional support to displaced workers — rarely done when capitalist boards of directors automate.

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