Under capitalism, well-being is only available to a minority
The fact that in capitalism, the high pay offered to a minority of workers results in a majority of workers who struggle to get by is not merely accidental, it is a necessity of the capitalist system. In order to remunerate certain classes of workers better than others, the poor must become the beasts of burden of society; the country must be deserted for the city; small trades must agglomerate in the suburbs of large cities, and manufacture a thousand little things for next to nothing, so as to bring the goods of the greater industries within reach of buyers with small salaries. That bad cloth may be sold to ill-paid workers, garments are made by tailors who are satisfied with a starvation wage! Those in foreign lands are exploited by the West so that under the capitalist system, workers in a few privileged industries may obtain certain limited comforts of life.
The evil of the present system is therefore not that the ‘surplus value’ of production goes to the capitalist, thus narrowing the socialist conception and the general view of the capitalist system; the surplus value itself is but a consequence of deeper causes. The evil lies in the possibility of a surplus value existing, instead of a simple surplus not consumed by each generation; for, that a surplus value should exist people are compelled by hunger to sell their labour for a small part of what this labour produces, and still more so of what their labour is capable of producing.
But this evil will last as long as the means of production belong to the few. As long as the peopole are compelled to pay a heavy tribute to property holders for the right of cultivating land or putting machinery into action, and the owners of the land and the machines are free to produce whatever will bring them in the largest profits rather than the greatest amount of useful commodities. Well-being can only be temporarily guaranteed to a very few; it is only to be bought by the poverty of a large section of society. It is not sufficient to distribute the profits realized by a trade in equal parts, if at the same time thousands of other workers are exploited. It is a case of producing the greatest amount of goods necessary to the well-being of all, with the least possible waste of human energy.
This generalized aim cannot be the aim of a private owner; and this is why society as a whole, if it takes this view of production as its ideal, will be compelled to expropriate all that enhances well-being while producing wealth. It will have to take possession of land, factories, mines, means of communication, etc., and besides, it will have to study what products will promote general well-being, as well as the ways and means of an adequate production.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 8. Ways and means (p. 143).