In 1978 unemployment was high with 1.6 million workers unemployed. The Tories used the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi to produce a poster design depicting a snaking dole queue outside of an unemployment office. Above it was the slogan “Labour isn’t Working”.
This slogan, was of course, a misnomer. It should have read “Capitalism is working”. High levels of unemployment is precisely what capitalism creates due to the anarchy of commodity production and exchange for profit. Capitalism is cyclical with periods of boom, crises, depression, and upturn. In a depression there is a high rate of bankruptcy and unemployment.
As Marx wrote:“…capitalist production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, overtrade, crisis and stagnation” (‘Wages, Price and Profit’ in Selected Works Volume 1, p. 440).
Neither Labour nor the Tories can do anything about periodic high levels of unemployment.
Falling out of love with capitalism
Saatchi and Saatchi went on to become one of the largest advertising companies in the world with 114 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 workers.
Maurice Saatchi no longer has the same enthusiasm about capitalism as he did in his younger days. In an article in the i newspaper, “Thatcher changed my mind on capitalism” (23rd December 2024) he said that he had changed his mind and that “Big companies may be as bad as big government”. What had changed was the dominance of the top five banks whose involvement in all financial transactions was 80 per cent.
Until then Saatchi had a romantic attachment to free market capitalism believing it was “assort of perpetual referendum”. In which “every day, hundreds of people cast their votes for the thousands of products and services on offer, and from the competition to win their votes better products and services arise”.
Saatchi now believes that this free-market model led to giant global cartels “beyond the reach of national governments”. And he admits: “I had no idea that the unintended consequence of globalisation was a world with a huge imbalance of power between the individual customer and the giant corporation”. And he concludes: “Perhaps Marx was right: “After years of internecine conflict among capitalism, there will be fewer and fewer capitalists controlling vaster and vaster empires”
The Myth of the Market
Baron Saatchi has a shallow understanding of the market. We need only to consider the labour market. As a buyer of other people’s labour power, Saatchi enters the market as a capitalist with economic power. He and his class own the means of production as private property although, of course, in a rational world advertising would not exist. As George Orwell described advertising, it is nothing more than “the rattling of a stick inside a bucket of swill” (“Keep the Aspidistra Flying”). In a world without commodities, there is nothing to sell and nothing to advertise.
Why cannot workers just produce what they need or take what they and their families need to live on. The answer is the existence of the capitalist state paid for from the taxation of the capitalist class. The private ownership of land, raw resources, factories, transport and communication and distribution points protected by the machinery of government, including the armed forces, gives the majority of society no other option but to join the labour market to sell their labour power or ability to work in exchange for a wage or a salary. This also includes the three million so-called self-employed.
The labour market represents a site of class exploitation. Capitalists buy the workers’ ability to work and obtain what Marx called “surplus value”. Workers create all the social wealth in society. Workers produce more in value than the wages and salaries they receive. Class exploitation it is called. The wage or salary buys a subsistence existence receiving second best, or in the case of housing, nothing at all. Saatchi and his class live off the unearned income of rent, interest and profit. They have economic power and the working class does not.
The World of Billionaires
And the capitalist class does very well out of capitalism as a search in Wikipedia of Maurice Saatchi’s wealth attests. He lives at Old Hall, a mock Tudor castle in Staplefield, West Sussex. The property includes 60 acres of parkland, 10 acres of flowers, trees, and lakes, and a conservatory for semi-tropical plants. The Saatchi brothers take position 822 on the Forbes Rich List, estimated to be worth £144 million ($194 million).
What of the world’s billionaires?
As of April 2024, there were 2,781 billionaires in the world, which is a record number. Their combined wealth is $14.2 trillion, which is also a record. The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk buys politician to represent his interest, foremost in his interest is buying labour power from abroad and reducing his tax burden
According to Oxfam, in their pamphlet “Survival of the Richest”, the richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population.
Of course, not all capitalists are billionaires. A capitalist is someone who lives off the unearned income of rent, interest and profit. They buy labour power. They have interests peculiar to the owning class; usually around regulations associated with their business and the burden of tax they have to pay to their capitalist state. This is the world of the capitalist class whose interests are diametrically opposed to the world’s working class. The interest of the working class is to replace capitalism with socialism; replace the profit system with the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all of society.
Marx on the Accumulation, Concentration and Centralization of Capital
In his falling out of love with the way in which capitalism has developed, Saatchi misquotes Marx about fewer and fewer capitalists owning vast corporations like Musk and his “Hi-Tech bros” in Silicon Valley.
Saatchi appears to be quoting Marx from the final section of the first volume of “Capital”. We do not believe Saatchi has read Marx’s “Capital” and the misquote comes from another secondary source. Beware quoting from second hand sources; particularly with quotations associated with Marx. Read the original.
Marx’s comments on accumulation, concentration and centralisation of capital is found in the penultimate chapter of “Capital; “; that is chapter 32 “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”
Capitalists are under pressure of competition from other capitalists. Capitalists have to ensure they make a profit from their workers otherwise they could see sales drop; profits decline and their business vulnerable to bankruptcy and takeover.
Capitalists have to try to increase the intensity and extent of exploitation of their workers. Capitalists have to invest capital in new machinery, to move plant elsewhere in the world where there are less regulations and cheaper workers to employ.
More importantly capitalists have to ensure that their capital investments receive a profitable return. Capitalists are governed by the imperative:
“…to accumulate, is to conquer the word of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist” (Capital volume 1, Ch. XXIV, p. 592)
And
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets…Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake…” (Capital Volume 1, Ch XXIV, p. 595).
Under capitalism, accumulation of capital leads to the concentration and centralisation of capital in which “one capitalist kills many”. This was Saatchi’s disillusion with capitalism. Larger and more successful capitalists grow in size and economic power through investing profits or
obtaining credit from financial institutions or from shareholders in the stock market. And capital accumulation also leads to the centralisation of capital where smaller companies either fail to compete and die or are absorbed into larger companies.
Marx wrote of centralisation:
“Centralisation may result from a mere change in the distribution of capitals already existing” (“Capital” Volume 1, Ch. XXV, p.627).
And of the credit system:
“…a new force comes into play – the credit system which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capital” (Capital volume 1, Ch XXV. P. 626).
The so-called “one percent”, have, in the 21st century accumulated vast wealth to create even more wealth from the exploitation of the working class. The capitalist’s objective in this historical tendency is to maximise profits, increase his power to exploit workers, and to accumulate capital to survive in an intensely competitive world.
Saatchi only concentrates on the capitalist class, which is understandable since this is the class to which he belongs. But Marx’s historical tendency continues with the development of the working class. This is what he wrote:
“…, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common
means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form”.
He goes on to say:
“That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime”.
Concluding:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated”.
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/ch28.htm)
The historical tendency is towards socialism not for capitalism to last forever.
A Socialist Conclusion
It is important to note that Marx uses the word “historical tendency” to describe this process of capital accumulation. Marx was quite clear that socialism had to be established democratically and politically by the working class. The establishment of socialism involved human agency.
A splintered and fractured working class cannot establish socialism. Nor a class who are drugged with nationalist and patriotic fervour. Socialism had to be a global social system. Revolutionary action by a socialist majority was the political force necessary to end the profit system and establish production solely and directly for social and individual use.
Marx was no economic or technological determinist. Marx held no such view. He attacked earlier materialists for holding the belief that human events are predetermined along a rigid track of history. In the “Third Theses on Feuerbach” he stated:
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated” (1845 MEGA I/5, pp 533-5).
And concluded in the “Eleventh Thesis”:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it” (ibid).
Marx gave to the working class a science of society, social systems and social relationships in order for them to change their circumstances through conscious political action. Not that they could change history any way they liked. Circumstances constrained action. Revolution had to be through a Socialist political party and through the capture of the machinery of government. And revolution had to be the political action of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.
More specifically, of history Marx wrote:
History does nothing; it “does nor possess immense riches”, it “does not fight battles”. It is men, real living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving –as if it were an individual person-its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends (“The Holy Family”, 1845 MEGA I/3, p.265).
Not the writings of an economic determinist. So, what of the economic factor? In capitalism, production plays its decisive role primarily through the exploitation of the working class that arises from human labour power being a commodity. In capitalism the dominant factor is the class relationship to the means of production to which all other social relationships have to ultimately defer. What moves and changes history is the class struggle.
Yet the political is always embedded in the economic because class exploitation can only ever take place where the exploiting class enjoy the support of the machinery of government to protect the institution of private property ownership and class exploitation. The class struggle is always a political struggle. And its absence in Maurice Saatchi’s article is evidence of this. Capitalists are the last people to tell the working class that they are exploited!
