As part of its civilising mission, therefore, capital is led to produce ever new types of use value, to develop science, to explore the world for new types of use value, new ways of using use values, and, thereby, to expand the market, as it continually revolutionises production, and produces commodities on an expanding scale, so that it repeatedly comes up against the limits of capitalist production, in the form of an overproduction of commodities, overproduction in the capitalist sense that, even though these commodities become ever cheaper, there comes a point where they cannot be sold at prices that produce profits. As it widens the scope of the market, the commodities sold to workers, also in order to develop the use value of their labour, expand out of the provision of purely material commodities into the provision of services, of education, art and culture. These provide the workers with the tools not only to raise their horizons, but also to begin to recognise their own specific class interests, to become a class not just in itself, but also for itself. It provides the working-class with the tools required to become the ruling-class. As Marx says, in the programme he produced for the First International.
“The combination of paid productive labour, mental education bodily exercise and polytechnic training, will raise the working class far above the level of the higher and middle classes.”
In its infant stage, capitalism, in seeking to win market share, on the basis of cheap prices, also seeks to cut corners, to use cheap tricks, such as adulteration of food and so on. And, in its dealings with workers, in the workplace, it sought to utilise similar methods to reduce costs, to cut wages, to minimise conditions. Such methods continue to be the hallmark of the small capitalist that can only survive against the competition of big capital by using such methods. Big capital too, in periods of more fierce competition, and when the supply of labour is plentiful, may also resort to such methods. But, as Engels describes, largely, by the second half of the 19th century, the larger capitals had found such methods to be both unnecessary and self-defeating.
“Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites.”
(Engels – The Condition of The Working Class in England)
And, the introduction of welfare states was simply the logical extension of this process, and of the civilising mission of capital, as, now, workers had no choice about having to spend a portion of their wages on education for their children, on healthcare and so on, because although the Truck System of the individual employers had been banned, now the capitalist state introduced the biggest truck system of all, in the form of welfare states, by which all workers had a part of their wages deducted in taxes and social insurance, to cover the provision of these services. Now a large part of the workers wages was paid in truck, in the shape of the social wage. Now the workers had no control over the nature of the services provided to them, as part of the social wage, by the biggest monopolist of all, the capitalist state. Unlike when the workers provided for themselves, through their own cooperative schools, labour colleges, and trades union and friendly society provision of health and social care, and insurance for unemployment, sickness and old age, the capitalist state could, now, dictate how much they would pay by law, and could determine the quantity and quality and content of provision, to meet the needs of capital rather than labour. It was what Marx feared from such state provision when he said in relation to state involvement in education,
“"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfilment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (and one should not take refuge in the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a "state of the future"; we have seen how matters stand in this respect) the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Or as Engels set out opposing demands for a welfare state in Germany,
“These points demand that the following should be taken over by the state: (1) the bar, (2) medical services, (3) pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc., etc., and later the demand is advanced that workers’ insurance become a state concern. Can all this be entrusted to Mr. von Caprivi? And is it compatible with the rejection of all state socialism, as stated above?”
(Critique of the Erfurt Programme)
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