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By Root 900 0

a Thneed factory in order to make money. His original investment paid out, and the profits he made were reinvested in his factory to bigger it and increase production in order to make more money, and so on indefinitely, or so he’d hope. There is nothing controversial here, or seemingly problematic. People own their businesses and run them how they see fit in order to make money, which everyone needs. They produce goods and/or services, sell them, and collect the money. Likewise, in so doing they provide the consumer with everything they need or want, even if they don’t know they need it or want it, like a fool Thneed. So where does that leave the rest of us? After all, we can’t all own a factory.

Well, beyond Thneeds, our food, shelter, clothing, medicine, health care, and every luxury or leisure item are produced by private individuals or corporations who own the means of production and from whom we must buy them. And you need to buy some of these things, unless you’re completely self-sufficient. But for those of us who aren’t or can’t be self-sufficient, we need to buy these things; we need them for survival, and we need money to do so. Where do we get money? Assuming we’re not independently wealthy, don’t own a factory, or have opulent and gracious parents or beneficiaries, we’ll get a job.

Luckily, jobs are as bountiful as factories. So we can knock on the Once-ler’s door and ask if he needs any more knitters, and hopefully he can look past his nepotism and hire an outsider. Or if you desire a more adventurous line of work, you could beg Morris McGurk to give you a role in his Circus McGurkus. I’m sure old Sneelock would welcome some help. Hopefully, someone is hiring. If they are and we’re lucky enough to get a job, we know the arrangement. We’ll sign a contract wherein we sell our labor power in the form of productive time to our employer, be it the Once-ler or McGurk. He will pay us a wage. Or maybe even a salary, which is just a wage without the possibility of overtime. We can then use this money to pay bills or buy whatever we needed or wanted the money for in the first place. So we’ll all become wage laborers, members of the working class, the proletariat. We’ll work for a paycheck, which means for the majority of our lives we’ll do what someone else tells us to in order to earn enough money to keep ourselves alive and hopefully happy or at least distracted, so we can go back to work and do it all again, day after day, week after week, year after year. Even if we’re thrilled to do the things demanded of us, say knitting Thneeds, we’re compelled to do so because we need the Once-ler’s money. And if we leave the factory we’ll need to find a new employer since we will still need money. So we can’t escape the fact that we will work for somebody else for the rest of our lives; capitalism is built on this relationship. You can’t have capitalism without wage laborers.

To a modern reader this situation looks normal, and maybe even natural or inevitable. For Marx it wasn’t so. Capitalism was a relatively new invention, and one that could and should be altered. According to Marx the economy and production itself should serve the interests of the people, not vice versa. At the root, it’s about human well-being and flourishing; that is, living well. People need to produce so that their needs are met. People need things and can produce things well and efficiently in groups, but production should be geared toward usability. We should make what we need so that we can all have a good quality of life. But in capitalism we don’t produce for need; we don’t make things because they are useful. Think Thneeds! Instead, things are produced simply to be sold, so that producers can accumulate more money, bigger their businesses, sell more, and so on. We don’t make things to satisfy real human needs—things are made to be sold, because wealth is what drives capitalism, not well-being. Production is dictated not by what people need but by what they can be sold.

Consider again the ridiculous Thneed. It is ridiculous; no one needs a fool