Title:
Bridging the Gap: From Exploitation and Alienation to Equity and Participation
Abstract:
One of Marxism’s defining hallmarks has always been to highlight the actually existing economic crisis characterizing employment relations between labor and capital rather than, as mainstream economists do, sound the alarm only when crisis hits the surplus value accumulated by capitalists. This presentation argues that, if surplus value is created by the exploitation of scarce human and natural resources, then labor faces the problem of not only being subordinate to its highest bidder, but of also being removed from control over its product, purpose, and therefore also the surplus extracted from it – a problem requiring a proposal for economic justice based on onerousness, duration, and intensity of labor that is more compatible with the higher aims of Marxism’s remunerative goal of “to each according to need” than with the norm of “from each according to contribution.” Implicit in this argument is a reorganization of productive relations where workers and consumers themselves and to the degree they are affected by an economic decision, instead of capitalists or managers, determine the means and ends to which their productive labor and the surplus it generates is directed to.
http://rethinkingmarxism.o
Chris Spannos has had two decades experience in media and also as a social justice activist and organizer. From 1998-2006 he participated in the Redeye collective, heard on Vancouver Co-op radio. In September 2006 he joined Z as full-time staff focusing on ZNet and ZCom web operations. Other media work during that period included helping out with Z Video productions, being the occasional light and sound tech for local theater works in Woods Hole, MA, and also, with others, hosting weekly local public screenings and discussion of political documentaries. Chris has worked as a multi-diagnosis social service worker, embroidery machine operator, cook, sailor, and bookstore clerk. He edited the volume Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century (AK Press, 2008). He has contributed chapters to books such as The Accumulation of Freedom (AK Press, 2012) and The End of the World as We Know It (AK Press, 2014), both edited by Deric Shannon. Chris founded People's Communication Inc., the parent organization for the websites The New Significance and NYT eXaminer (no longer active). He developed the latest incarnation of ZNet's web operations. From April 2014 to April 2015 Chris was Web Editor for teleSUR English in Quito, Ecuador, and host of teleSUR's online video show Imaginary Lines. Since June 2015 Chris has lived in Oxford, England, where he works as Digital Editor for New Internationalist.
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