(The following article is from the December 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Zoltan Zigedy, from http://www.mltoday.com

This sure is some recovery! The first week in November brought remarkable results for an economy widely held to be on the mend. Earnings of corporations are on the rise, the stock market is perking up, and the Administration is claiming credit for pulling the economy back from the brink and setting it well on the course to health.

     But in the other world, the world outside of Wall Street, gated communities, and the political elite, the news is catastrophic, pushing the misery index dramatically higher.

     The rate of exploitation [of U.S. workers], as measured by output per hour of labour has increased by 9.6% in the third quarter of this year, more than four times its average growth over the last 25 years. This increase comes on the heels of a 6.9% rise in the second quarter.

     Put simply, these numbers mean that for every worker engaged in some form of productive activity, on average, he or she produced almost 10% more in the third quarter of this year over the same quarter last year. Intuitively, this means that the capitalist system has squeezed another dollar in value from workers who produced ten dollars in value last year. Or, put another way, for every hour of labour, workers were forced to do 10% more productive work.

     Some might respond that it doesn't follow that workers necessarily worked harder for these productivity gains. That may well be true in some cases, but we have other Labour Department data that bear on this matter. We also know that total employment is on the decline. In addition, the Labour Department reports that the hours worked were down again for the ninth straight quarter. Combine that fact with a 4% rise in output, and it's pretty clear that workers were squeezed harder.

     Capitalist apologists would be quick to point out - and they always do - that other factors may contribute to productivity increases besides worker effort such as technological innovations and investment in more efficient equipment and techniques. This response evaporates in the face of the dramatic decline in investment brought on by the broad economic crisis.

     Of course it would be possible that workers worked harder because they wanted to make more money, producing more because they wanted to earn a commensurately larger compensation. This, however, is belied by the fact that unit labour costs were down 5.2% in the third quarter: every unit of value produced earned the workers 5.2% less than it did in the third quarter of 2008.

     We have then a stubborn fact: workers worked a lot harder most of this year than they did last year with a smaller share of the value produced.

     This stubborn fact goes unacknowledged and unexplained. It will not be discussed on the Sunday morning talk shows. The media - from The New York Times to the organs of the labour movement - will pass over this fact, often hailing it as a harbinger of recovery. Academic and working economists assign it no special place, no event of great consequence.

     It is only in the Marxist tradition that this fact occupies a central role and is properly explained. In fact, it is the fundamental notion in the political economy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, exposing the primary mechanism of profit generation in the capitalist mode of production. In the end, they argued, increases in the rate of profit come from workers getting a smaller portion of the product of their labour. They labelled this measure the rate of exploitation. From the Marxist perspective, the capitalist class intensifies exploitation - raises its rate - to restore or increase the rate of profit. Indeed, this is axiomatic in the Marxist system.

     While mainstream economists strain to explain the rise in profits and the stock market in the face of climbing unemployment and slack consumption, they refuse to attend to the role of labour exploitation in this development.

     In our time, this sharp increase in labour exploitation signals two disturbing truths:

1. The relative strength and privilege of capital. Monopoly capital wields sufficient power, unrestrained by the organs of popular sovereignty - the government, to extract dramatically more effort from the working class.

2. The relative weakness of labour. The labour movement lacks sufficient strength, determination, or government influence to at the very least retain a proportionate share of the product of its efforts.

     Thus, the burden of the capitalist recovery - profits and stock equity values  is borne squarely by the working class.

     (In Part 2 of this article, to appear in our next issue, the author examines the impact of rising unemployment on U.S. working people.)