By Eddie McCabe
A system as obscenely unequal as capitalism has to create and constantly promote certain myths. To morally justify a world where 12 individuals have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people combined, it’s necessary to make people believe all sorts of false truisms to support the status quo. One is the idea of the capitalist “wealth creator” whose hard graft is supposedly the driver of the whole economy, epitomised by such self-made billionaires as Steve Jobs of Apple.
No doubt Jobs was a talented individual with certain personal attributes that contributed to his success, but is it really the case that the iPhone, for example, that millions of people carry in their pockets, and the $200 billion dollar cash pile that the Apple company has amassed, are the results of Steve Jobs’ genius?
Public investment and labour
On the contrary, two other factors play an arguably more crucial role in the existence of the iPhone. One is the role of state innovation, i.e. government-led investment (for when it’s not profitable) in research and development that produced technology essential to the iPhone: the Internet, GPS, touch-screen display and lithium-ion batteries. In fact Apple Inc. itself benefitted from state funding when it was originally set up.
As for the cash pile, tax havens like Ireland – which the European Court of Justice exposed as facilitating Apple paying an effective corporate tax rate as low as 0.005% – can be thanked for that!
The other factor is the living labour that goes into manufacturing iPhones, which is done by workers – the real, actual wealth creators. This includes Apple employees like the designers in California, using particular skills and talents, as well the assembly line workers in Shenzhen using others. Between those you have miners in Mongolia extracting rare earth minerals that combine to make essential iPhone parts, its screen and circuitry. Workers in Japan, Korea and Switzerland make other parts.
Wealth under capitalism is made up of commodities – all the stuff that’s made to be used or exchanged. When it’s pointed out that workers, not capitalists, do all of the actual work that creates these commodities, it should be accepted as obvious. After all, if all workers stayed home tomorrow nothing would be produced. Whereas if all capitalists stayed home we’d hardly notice.
The myth of the risk taker
But, say the right-wingers, capitalists are the ‘risk takers’ – they put their money (capital) on the line by making investments, without which the economy would grind to a halt, there’d be no jobs and no new wealth. But is this true?
Let’s leave aside that the money they have to invest was acquired either through exploitation, extraction (rent), inheritance, loans, or outright theft – all forms of appropriation from the work of others (albeit by banks in the case of loans, or previous generations in the case of inheritance). If, for some reason, capitalists stopped investing their money there would be a simple solution: take it off them.
It would be far better to have wealth that can be invested under the control of the working-class majority, which could democratically plan how best to use it for the benefit of society, instead of some individual’s private bank account.
Indeed, as noted above, often when private investment isn’t forthcoming, public investment steps in. The problem under capitalism is that the benefits of that public investment often go to private companies. The algorithm that led to Google’s success, for instance, came from a grant from the US National Science Foundation. Google could have been a valuable public resource, instead of a megacorporation complicit in genocide and ecocide.
In fact, the big investors – the likes of the Dragons’ Den investors – while lauded as extraordinary business people are more akin to leeches. They usually only invest after all the risk has been taken by some little guy, and the product or service has already proven to be viable. Then they demand a major cut of the profits for relatively modest investments. Despite the nonsense they spout, they add no value.
As far a real risk in the capitalist economy is concerned, with nearly 3 million work-related deaths globally each year, and nearly 400 million injuries, workers take more of a risk than capitalists by showing up each day.
In short, society’s wealth comes from both nature and hard work by humans, but not the ones seen in Forbes magazine.
