In developed economies, themselves, we see how far we still are, necessarily, from that idea of “from each according to their ability” (often misrepresented by reformists and welfarists as “ability to pay”, i.e. higher taxes) in the fact that bourgeois, trades union consciousness still seeks to base collective bargaining (i.e. haggling over the price of labour-power, or how much workers are to be exploited) on the protection of differentials. The irony of that, of course, is that one consequence of the maintenance of such differentials between skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers is differences, then, in workers' household incomes, which, then, are intended to be ameliorated by the capitalist state, which sets up a whole bureaucratic apparatus of welfarism, draining resources for no other purpose than to administer this welfare, as alms, which, also, provides it with a mechanism of social control, which provides benefits to the poorer households, which would not have been required had their real wages been higher to begin with, and covers the cost of these benefits by raising taxes on better paid workers, which itself sets up a division and antagonism within the working-class itself, utilised, also, as a means of social control.
In other words, the trades unions insist on the pay differentials of their skilled workers being maintained, but, also, collectively demand that the capitalist state protect the living standards of their unskilled members via the welfare system, which it funds by taxes on the incomes of those better paid, skilled workers who, thereby, lose a considerable portion of the benefit of that pay differential, and all of which involves the unnecessary employment of large numbers of state bureaucrats to collect those taxes, keep records, and pay benefits, who could, otherwise, have been employed productively! The social democrats and reformist socialists justify this welfarism on the basis of the idea that it is redistributing income from “the rich”, but, as Marx and Engels showed, that is not possible. The relation between the revenues received by the owners of capital (real industrial capital, or fictitious capital) and workers is, ultimately, objectively determined, whether the revenues of workers take the form of actual money wages, or the social wage. In summary, it is determined by the value of labour-power, which is why capital always seeks to raise productivity so as to reduce that value of labour-power, i.e. to reduce the proportion of the working-day required as necessary labour to reproduce the worker. If due to market conditions, in the short run, workers' revenues (wages/social wage, i.e. relative wages) rise, and consequently, relative profits fall, this leads inexorably to a crisis of overproduction of capital, causing capital to first throw labour on to the streets, and secondly to engage in a technological revolution, which replaces labour with machines, which then results in relative wages falling.
The extension of this absurd concept of welfarism is the concept of so called specific types of poverty, such as fuel poverty, food poverty, housing poverty, child poverty, and so on, all of which, of course, provides the basis for a gaggle of middle-class people to be employed in campaigns, and quangos resting upon the need to deal with each, rather than a recognition that they are all simply a manifestation, not of some specific poverty, but of poverty itself, or more correctly, a lack of income! If we take someone with an income of £500 a week who spends £300 a week eating well, £150 on the cost of shelter and £40 on other things, leaving them with £10 to cover energy, whilst their fuel bill is £20, they would be in “fuel poverty”. However, they could have spent less on food, and so paid their fuel bill.
Likewise, they may have six kids so that the £300 food bill is a minimum required, whilst they must, also, now, spend the £40 they spent on themselves on their kids, leaving them, in “fuel poverty”, and probably “child poverty” too. Yet, in both cases, the “poverty” was a consequence of particular choices of how to spend their income – food in the first case, six kids in the second. However, if the household income is only £300 a week, they may spend, say, only the minimum amount of £100 on food, have no kids, spend the minimum £150 on shelter, and a minimum £40 on other necessities, still leaving them in “fuel poverty”, or they could pay the fuel bill, and spend less on food, then being in “food poverty”.
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