I took this picture of a worker on his lunch break at the docks during my vacation. He asked me to take his picture and we had a short discussion - he had moved to work on the docks from Louisiana after finding a job on Indeed.com. He was eating dry Ramen for lunch. The job was willing to fly him out but does not provide housing and starting wage is $15/hr. A quick google search showed that there are very few rooms available in Newport and that they are going for around $1,000/month. The work is hard manual labor requiring lifting up to 100 lbs. during seafood processing. The listing on Indeed.com does not show any included healthcare.
This conversation reminded me of a famous Marx quote from Capital:
Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him.
The brutal reality is that the working class are trading their blood to survive in this economy and the capitalist class is being enriched by this trade. The capitalist class are extending their own lives at the cost of shortening the lives of the working class. This is not just speculation, this can easily be seen from some basic statistics. In March, 2020, The New York Times released an article titled How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts.
The study by Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, shows how over the last three decades, deaths from despair among people without a four year college degree have sky rocketed, especially for those under 50. From the article:
Many of the problems afflicting the working class span racial groups, and Case and Deaton emphasize that these problems aren’t merely financial. Life for many middle- and low-income Americans can lack structure, status and meaning. People don’t always know what days or hours they will be working the following week. They often don’t officially work for the company where they spend their days, which robs them of the pride that comes from being part of a shared enterprise.
And it is not just deaths of despair. There is a huge disparity in other deaths as well - capital sucks the life out of the working class.
An MIT study done in 2016 showed there is a huge mortality gap between rich and poor.
More precisely, the study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.
It continues:
“When we think about income inequality in the United States, we think that low-income Americans can’t afford to purchase the same homes, live in the same neighborhoods, and buy the same goods and services as higher-income Americans,” says Michael Stepner, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics. “But the fact that they can on average expect to have 10 or 15 fewer years of life really demonstrates the level of inequality we’ve had in the United States.”
The capitalists not only extract money from the labor of others, they also extract the life - the very blood of the working class is feeding their lifestyles and extending their lifespan. This was shown during the COVID pandemic when the poor died at twice the rate of the rich. The Pandemic Report by the Poor People’s Campaign described this disparity:
During the pandemic, people living in poorer counties died at nearly two times the rate of people who lived in richer counties: After grouping counties by median household income into ten groups with equal population size (deciles), the report shows that death rates in the highest income group are half the death rates in the lowest income group.
In a country without a universal healthcare system, it is the rich that benefit most of the for-profit privatized healthcare that is available. The poor cannot afford to take time off or to pay their medical bills. The ownership class does not trade their labor for money because their capital produces profit from the labor of others. These profits can then be used to improve their own material conditions - to live in better houses, eat better, and provide healthcare for themselves and their families. All things which the working class cannot afford. At the end of 2021, only 32% of US households could afford a 400$ emergency. According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, “The monthly child poverty rate increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent in January 2022.” This represents an increase of 3.7 million children since the Democrats allowed the Child Tax Credit to expire.
This same MIT study cited above also shows the impact of racial capitalism.
Counties with the highest death rates are poorer than counties with lower death rates, and have higher percentages of people of color.
It is not a coincidence that the poorest counties also have higher proportions of people of color and higher death rates from COVID. It is the economic system of capitalism which has resulted in this outcome. Capitalism was built on black slavery and indigenous genocide. While class, race, and gender all play a part, class is the primary indicator of mortality under capitalism.
Professor Adolph Reed, Jr. has done an excellent job of describing this in his article The Trouble with Disparity.
In other words, every time racial disparity is invoked as the lens through which to see American inequality, the overwhelming role played by the increased inequality in the American class system is made invisible. And this is, of course, true on the right as well as the left—think of all the conservative commentators defending the police by invoking the spectre of black-on-black murder. And then think of the widespread agreement among criminologists that the Gini coefficient “predicts murder rates better than any other variable.” Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point. If you want to distinguish between the left and the right, the relevant question is not what they think about race; it’s what they think when race is taken out of the equation.
The driving factor is the class divide. Those who own the means of production and those who are forced to sell their labor to live.
Who are the working class? As Engels described in The Principles of Communism:
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.
Little has changed in this matter of class relations from the 19th century to the 21st century today. The working class are still forced to sell their labor power and sacrifice their bodies in exchange for the subsistence to live.
The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
As Marx described in Capital:
Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
The capitalists are indeed a class of vampires, sucking the life from the working class with no sympathy or compassion for their plight. As the stock market crashes and the US economy plummets toward another recession or worse, the bourgeois politicians in Congress send billions to the Military Industrial Complex to fund neo Nazi battalions in Ukraine and spend their time on a probe into January 6, they are ignoring the real plights of the working class and the ongoing pandemic. Medicare for all and a Green New Deal will never see the light of day. Student loan debt forgiveness was tossed on the trash heap. The class war continues and the ruling class are winning.
The only solution is a complete transformation of the capitalist system through a socialist revolution. The working class can only be emancipated through an abolition of the system of private ownership which enables capital to suck the life out of the working class. The working class must unite in order to save themselves and humanity.