| This question <723|723> overall <722|724> Dannymangum: <639|57>. |
| Question 775: Define and discuss the law of the absolute impoverishment of the working class. Does it apply today? |
| [723] Dannymangum: It's a Mad, Mad World. Annotations page 619 reads, “as capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low must grow worse.” This is precisely the law of absolute impoverishment of the working class. The working class is stranded in a never-ending cycle, the cycle of exploitation. The capitalist does not earn great profit through individual skill, but rather by exploiting the worker. As his desired wish for profits increase the heavier the exploitation that occurs between capitalist and laborer. Marx describes this phenomenon best when he states: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.” Simply stated: The richer the rich get through their exploitive ways, the more misery, heartache and poverty can be felt by the laborers who are exploited. |
| Unfortunately this disease persists today. There are countries that survive by selling their cheap labor to our capitalists. While these big business reap enormous profits the laborer struggle along living on just dollars or something less a day. But it is not just monetary loss that these laborers feel. In [2004fa:618] Bobcat states that many deal with “mental impoverishment (occurs) as a manager comes so bogged down in procedure that he loses his creativity. Spiritual impoverishment (occurs) where the cruelty of the capitalist causes men to be callous and rude.” |
| The law of absolute impoverishment is the malady that brings hardship into the world and it appears to be infecting globally with little hope for an imposed cure. |
| Hans: Don't workers nowadays live much better than workers 100 years ago? Is Marx right with his postulate of “absolute impoverishment”? |
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