Marxian

Capitalism is Homogeneity

We live in a capitalist world, a world of commodity production for sale and profit, in which competition is the dominant economic driving force. To understand where this driving force is taking us, we must extrapolate capitalism in the raw, so to speak, freed from the extraneous influences of by-gone eras. Of course, such a society, where all relationships are commodity relationships, is nowhere observable. The United States comes close, but even here, many impurities remain and the process of distillation is far from complete. This means that any consideration of a pure capitalism must, of necessity, be consideration of an abstract entity, but one to which our current world is tending.

Once we have acknowledged this tendency towards an ever-purer form of capitalism, we can then return from the abstract to the concrete world of today in an effort to explain events.

In an abstract capitalist society, everyone in the globalised wage labour force is equal. You might well ask how can this possibly be the case, when capitalism thrives on difference and creates extremes of wealth and deprivation? Yet even in the impure, concrete capitalism of today, the differentials between workers are being worn down. The political Left might be keen to expose relative difference – within nations, e.g. the poorest 20% getting poorer and the richest 20% getting richer, and between nations, e.g. the starving children of Africa and the obesity crisis in the West. (Note that the ethics behind the desire to expose relative difference serve to underpin reforms to extinguish difference. In this sense, unless you subscribe to an absolute system of ethics, the ethics are subordinate to the economic forces driving us towards a purer capitalism). However, even extreme relative differences pale into insignificance, in world historical terms, when compared to the trend towards homogeneity amongst wageworkers. Corporations locate and relocate around the world, almost at will, in search of the lowest labour costs. Components for products are made in various countries and assembled in others. Chinese manufactured Disney toys are sold in America to European tourists and McDonald’s sell burgers in Beijing! Increasingly, workers carry out the same work across the globe and workers need similar skills as a result. They need to communicate with each other across the world and technology facilitates this, whilst telephonists in Glasgow and Bombay compete for the same call centre jobs.

It is the trend towards homogeneity that is dominant one, not the relative differences that open up between workers. Consider this in world historical terms when only a generation or two ago, regional dialects within countries were a barrier to communication. Now there are three primary languages for global communication, Chinese, English and Spanish. What the railway and the broadcast media did to iron out differences within nineteenth and twentieth century nations, air travel, the internet and satellite television are doing today on a global scale.

The tendency towards homogeneity amongst wageworkers across the world is most startlingly apparent where cultural trends are concerned. Take the wageworkers’ uniform, for example, of jeans, trainers and T-shirt. People sharing a satellite television popular culture consume branded fast food in ubiquitous outlets worldwide. In Britain, we all shop at the same limited number of stores, buying food from one of four chains of supermarkets. High streets and shopping malls look the same irrespective of location. The numbers of international students are booming. We travel anywhere, flying more often, diminishing the differences between the places we visit.

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