The Ownership of Work

Karl Marx brought to collective attention the differences - some would say "disparity" - between the risks taken by the two classes in a capitalist system:  the labor class and the capital class.  As part of that discussion, he quite often used the term "owning the means of production".  This was one of the key ways that he separated the capital from labor - the capital class owned the factories and the machines that labor worked to keep running and producing their goods.

The risks of the two capitalist classes can sometimes run together.  For example, if the owned means of production produce something that falls out of favor, both the capital class and labor experience loss; the capital class now owning a valueless asset (a machine that makes something that nobody wants) and labor has a valueless skill (the ability to make things that nobody wants).

However, for the most part and as would be expected, since the industrial revolution the risk has slowly and steadily been diffused from capital to labor.  Capital has learned to "front load" returns such that their risk is largely paper losses.  By this I mean that planning obsolescence into the capitalist structure systematically shifts "real" risk (the risk of going hungry, homeless or broke) from the capital class to labor.

The problem is that it is very difficult to plan the obsolescence of people - "human obsolescence".  American society - often much to the chagrin of the capital class -  has created mechanisms to attempt to diffuse the risk of human obsolescence.  Systemic risk shifters such as the Workers Compensation Insurance system (1917) and the Retirement Income Security (1974) create pools of insurance to attempt to stem the risk of "human obsolescence". 

The real risk is the value of work.  The steady decline of real wages since the 1960's has at its causal roots, efforts from both the capital class to drive down labor costs (an insidiously name concept called "productivity") as well as from the labor class itself with people readily willing to take lower pay and less benefits for the same job to avoid personal financial disaster.

As a result, whereas Marx would have claimed that labor's ownership - not of the means of production, but the production itself; work - would be its advantage or at a minimum a field leveler, really turns out to be structured in a way that also benefits the capital class.  So, even though labor owns the production, you could make a reasonable argument for labor itself being so manipulated and so controlled by capital, that labor itself is "owned" by capital.