Human energy and capitalist inefficiency (1978)

From the July 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines efficiency as “the ratio of useful work performed to the total energy expended” meaning the greater the amount of energy input required to produce a given output the less efficient the work. So efficiency is a measure enabling us to compare different ways of achieving something with a view to minimizing energy input (including labour) and maximizing output. Such a comparison can be made between capitalism and socialism which would demonstrate how vastly more efficient would be the latter social system in utilizing the mental and physical energies of people to satisfy social needs.

This however prompts the question: what are social needs? From a human standpoint the answer is obvious: adequate and decent shelter, food, social amenities. What does not appear to be obvious to many outraged and idealistic observers of the appalling toll of human misery is that the worldwide capitalist mode of production is not and cannot be directly geared to the satisfaction of social needs. Under capitalism, wealth is produced as commodities for sale on a market with a view to profit. The fulfilment of human needs is incidental and secondary to this basic motivation. To sell his commodities the capitalist has to find buyers and people can only buy as much as they can afford. Thus the working class are condemned to poverty and to a permanent insufficiency of purchasing power which cannot be redressed by income redistribution (redistribution of poverty) or inflationary policies of printing more money.

Such deprivation is quite unnecessary. For decades the world has technically been capable of producing a superabundance of wealth to satisfy all mankind’s needs. The gap between this accelerating potential and actual output has widened immensely during this time. Experts compute that the world can comfortably support a population many times its present level with existing technology and “known” resource reserves. Patrick Moyniham, ex US Ambassador to the UN, has stated that India alone could feed the world. Historically capitalism has during its brief existence developed the forces of production immensely on the one hand and on the other, has increasingly restrained their application with insurmountable economic barriers.

Since capitalism artificially restricts production we can directly attribute to it the widespread poverty and its effects. One such effect is malnutrition. The magnitude of this problem was illuminated by a UN Food and Agricultural Organisation report in 1974, which revealed that an estimated conservative figure of 460 million people suffered from severe malnutrition prior to 1972 and this number has rapidly increased since then. The consequences are pervasive and profound as Professor Jean Mayer explained:

The child of a malnourished mother is more likely to be born prematurely or small and is at greater risk of death or of permanent neurological and mental dysfunction. Brain development begins in utero and is complete at an early age (under two). Malnutrition during this period when neurons and neural connections are being formed may be the cause of mental retardation that cannot be remedied by later corrective measures. The long term consequences not only for the individual but also for the society and the economy need no elaboration. (Scientific American Sept. 1976).

Moreover, millions are killed or maimed by stress and appalling cost-effective work conditions generated by the commercial rat-race. The resultant wearing and tearing of the fabric of social existence necessitates costly social services. Thus capitalism deliberately vitiates the quality and potential of human labour-power which might otherwise be efficiently expended in the production of wealth. Capitalism is incapable of efficiently applying existing technology to produce even the sort of conditions and requirements favourable to the reproduction and development of efficient labour- power on a satisfactory scale. Instead it creates a vicious circle of poverty and incompetence — as the social scientist, the late Oscar Lewis wrote: “Once the culture of poverty has come into existence it tends to perpetuate itself”.

But not only is capitalism wasteful in stifling its prodigious productive potential: the way in which it organizes manpower within its productive apparatus is itself an inherently inefficient process. This is because it generates priorities which stem directly from the way in which it functions as a mode of production. From the standpoint of actually improving the material wellbeing of society these priorities are socially useless and the rifulfilment engages a considerable and growing proportion of productive effort. Thus capitalism has spawned a gigantic administrative- bureaucratic edifice which has mushroomed in size and complexity in response to the developing economic requirements of the profit machine.

Economists refer to this process as tertiarization. A nation’s occupational structure can be divided into three broad categories: Primary or extractive sector, secondary or manufacturing sector and tertiary or services sector. According to one theory, the Clark-Fisher thesis, tertiary employment increases relative to total employment chiefly at the expense of primary employment in the course of development. The tertiary sector, which is the most advanced economies is the largest, includes a huge proportion of jobs which would be eliminated in socialism such as those in advertising, finance, government and retailing industries. The Clark-Fisher thesis has the qualified support of research findings. The growing proportion of socially useless employment is yet another indictment of capitalism’s obsolescence.

But waste does not end there. In an article in the Economist (30/7/76) it was revealed that office equipment makers predicted that by 1980 annual spending on office machinery will reach $3 billion at 1974 prices or £300 outlay for each of the 10.5 million office workers in Britain . . . who are largely concerned with the mechanics of capitalist finance and commerce. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

World military expenditure at £122,000m in 1976 is equal to the entire income of the poorer half of mankind. Nearly 30 per cent. of worldwide aluminium production is allocated to military usage. Yet war, for which armaments production is a preparation, is merely an inevitable extension of the normal commercial rivalries inherent in capitalism. Such examples represent an enormous drain of human energy and resources in primary and secondary sectors into activities which are socially useless but essential to the maintenance of capitalism—energy and resources which is socialism could be constructively applied to the betterment of society.

Even when workers are available capitalism is incapable, because of its finite markets, of assimilating them into its productive apparatus and yet a considerable amount of energy is expended in their maintenance through the “welfare state” machine (not that this is done out of charitable concern). Millions of even skilled workers with years of costly training invested in them are not permitted to make use of their abilities because they are unemployable or pensioned. This is a grossly inefficient use of available labour power.

Even the wasteful framework of capitalism’s production priorities workers are inefficiently used in relation to the technology at their disposal. Underemployment, as this is called, and unemployment in the so-called third world is flickering between 25 and 30 per cent and still rising according to the New Internationalist May 1974. Another dimension of this problem is the phenomenon of square-pegs-in-round-holes — workers economically compelled to work in particular jobs when their inclinations and skills lie elsewhere. A worker will be industrious and efficient when his interest is in his work. The alienation, drudgery and lack of variety which workers confined within the straitjacket of a “job” experience generally under capitalism must contribute immensly towards inefficient work performance.

What more could be said of capitalism, its planned obsolescence, its status-conscious meretricious trash, its coals-to-Newcastle phenomena, its rotting mountains of unsaleable food? It is a panorama of stupendous waste, of wasted human endeavour. Less obvious examples of waste emerge from a shadowy background of interacting factors congruent with and expressive of property society. Such examples are legion but one will suffice.

In many parts of North West Europe the cultivated land is fragmented into a mass of patches so that one man’s “farm” could consist of a number of plots interspersed among other farmers’ holdings and separated by long distances. As a result the efficiency of movement between plots is seriously impaired. Chisholm in Rural Settlement and Land Use calculated that in Europe “one third or even one half of the agricultural land is fragmented and in need of consolidation” (p. 46). Even without altering land use patterns — although the size and shape of properties can prohibit the use of efficient mechanised techniques for example the subdivision of inherited properties amongst third world peasants into tiny plots — the total transformation of the agrarian landscape on the basis of common ownership is the obvious solution to facilitate the most efficient utilization of the land.

There are many reformist groups who concern themselves with the problem of waste but who in fact employ an extremely narrow definition of waste which they invest with a sense of horror-stricken incredulous alarm as if all this pollution and rape of the land is something new in capitalism. Theirs is a hypothetical world of scarce resources, of exploding populations, of mounting insurmountable pollution levels. Where they circumscribe their notion of waste to what they see as just the excesses of the social system, socialists see waste as something integral to and ineradicable within the framework of commodity production. The destiny of the world has not been pre-programmed. Given the necessary socialist consciousness coupled with the latent productive potentialities imprisoned within the structure of the capitalist economy, the exhilarating vision of an efficient world without waste or want can become a reality.

Robin Cox