On Marx’s bicentennial, labor is still battling capital

KARL MARX turned 200 years old on Saturday (May 5), which is to say that anything he wrote and prophesied must have been debunked by modern economic thought. Or, rendered obsolete by updated takes on the global political economy. Just the vast collection of trailblazing ideas vested with the economic Nobel is enough to send Marx into obsolescence. It is also the age of Bitcoin and AI, remember, not the mills and the soot- blanketed factories of Marx’s time. Also, how can Marxist thought survive and remain relevant in the age of selfies? The recurrent themes of his thesis were collectives and solidarity. Communes and selfies? These two words are a universe apart and have no point of convergence.

Yet, as the remembrance of the bicentennial of his birth overlapped a bit with the May 1 celebration of our own Labor Day, we cannot help but say that his writings and thoughts are very relevent today. Marx was first to write about the class struggle that he said is inherent in a capitalist society—and that the gains of labor are sucked up, without fail and relentlessly, by capital.

And his well-argued proposition about the inherent inhumanity and exploitative conditions that would be always labor’s fate under a capitalist society.

To say that these issues Marx raised during his years of prodigious, 19th century writing on the political economy, have been rendered obsolete and marked as dated in the 21st century would be a bit of a stretch. Just a look at the headlines would lead to the sad admission that what Marx wrote in the 19th century remains valid, this one in particular: capital thrives and labor remains exploited.

The Labor Day top story was about the signing of an executive order (with more bark than bite) that banned contractualization, probably the most exploitative laborcapital arrangement in modern times. Every facet of contractual labor brings us back to Marx.

Contractual workers can only exist in the age of heedless, reckless and un-reined capitalism, which Marx said is the nature of capitalism – always exploitative and always taking advantage of the fruits of labor. The contractual workers have neither security of tenure nor the full compensation (wage and non-wage

obsolete Labor Code of the Philippines. Some work under a virtual serfmaster relationship, which Marxists decry as a feudal arrangement.

Under a contractual status, the scrap textile at those garments assembly plant (the scrap gets a second life as useful, functional rugs) is more valuable than labor. Because after being discarded after a less than six- month employment, the laid-off worker is nothing. Unless he gets into the next contractual and sub-human work.

Marx did not only write about the irreconcilable nature of capital and labor. The word praxis was an offshoot of Marxism, which means the translation of beliefs and words into action. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” wrote Marx.

The dominant role of the workers in shattering capitalism and all its vestiges via upending of governments led – or under the thumb – of the ruling capitalist class is the central theme of Marx’s call to change the world.

Where revolutions are not possible, there is always an option for labor under classical Marxist thought. They organize trade unions and similar groups to rattle and unsettle the capitalist class. The protests in some parts of the country that organized labor staged on May 1 to demonstrate the so-called evils of contractualization and what they deem as other unfair labor-capital arrangements were an adaption of the Marxist dictum.

While the triumphal march of society into a classless and stateless one as prophesied by Marx failed to come true after bloody experiments in Russia and China, and no single country right now can claim to be anchored on Marxist thoughts, the growing inequality – of capital sucking most of the gains of labor – demonstrates the validity and prescience of Marx’s thesis.

Last year, more than 80 percent of the global economic gains was vacuumed up by the Top 1 percent of the economic class, according to Oxfam.

In our country alone, an elite list of around 40 families, the top dollar billionaires, sucks up some 60 percent of economic gains, mostly on the back of labor. Rather, on the back of diminished labor. And with the institutions of the state, the apparatuses of government, mostly siding with the wealth-generators, instead of those who provide labor.

While governments can, via policies and radical legislation, rein in the reckless accumulation of the capitalists to improve the lot and the lives of the working class, there

of the powers that be to abandon that role – and leave everything to the workings of the market. Which means to say, abandoning the responsibility to put in place redistributionist policies to come to the assistance of exploited labor.

The working class, under that

believes are its rightful and just share in the economic order.

Hence the never-ending struggle, the never-ending contradictions. Hence, the validity of the thesis written by one born 200 years ago.