This guy [a campaigning Barack Obama on TV] wants to tell me we’re living in a community? Don’t make me laugh. I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.

                                                 Brad Pitt as hit man Jackie Cogan in the film Killing Them Softly

I did a Google search for the phrase “What is the obligation of society toward business?” and all that came up was results such as ‘what do corporations owe society’ and what is the responsibility of business to society?’. Nothing about what we might ‘owe’ business as ordinary citizens. The “social responsibility” results I did find of course also raise important questions and debates for another time perhaps, but I found nothing going the other way as to what society, namely all the working classes of society, owe to businesses of all types. Ah, no, a on the fourth pages of my search something did come up and that was “What the social classes owe each other” by the famous anti-socialist Ludwig Von Mises. But that was all I found in four pages. Since I could anticipate what Mises will say about what the working classes owe the higher classes—that we have to be good and appreciate all that business provides for us, and that the owners of business large and small indeed have the final say in how anything shall go—I’m going to leave him aside for awhile and say my own piece about him, but I promise to discuss his take on it later.

I think that society is indeed obligate to supply businesses of all types a profit, on scales large and small, and that this is indeed a sorry state of affairs. Almost all persons in the world seeking employment would not be employed if there is no possibility of their employer (and the business ownership) earning a profit at the very least in the long run. No businesses provide jobs or are “job creators” unless they can make a profit. Profit is the life’s blood of our socioeconomic system. Capitalism is based on making a profit. No profits no businesses, at least as we know them now. We have all experienced economic recession and depressions which occur because profits, for a time, cannot be made. Since most working people in the world (when they can find work, anyway) are employees and not employers, and therefore their income does not come from profits, it is the obligation of most people to make business a profit. In fact, from our first day of school we are trained to do so, as we become literate and numerate, and as we learn to become obedient to authority, endure boredom, follow instructions, work continuously, diligently, etc. This is because almost all people (in the U.S. and the world) are going to work for somebody and have to become employable. Employable means productive and productive means profitable to employ. True we can learn good skills in school but much of this is to train us for becoming good employees and managers. Very few of us will go on to become business owners, ‘self-made millionaires’, or even members of the capital-owning class. Of course, the young student’s zip code has a lot to do with his or her life chances. Most of us become workers of varying degrees of success, and often hard work and intelligence—inborn, developed, or both—have very little to do with that degree of success. Zip code does more so.

If this is all so, then most of us exist to make business, present and future, a profit. Profit makes the world go ‘round. Therefore, a large part of the world’s people are here in order to be used for the sake of something else. They are a means to an end, and this is why I think this is a very sad state of affairs. This is why I think that it is true that the working classes of society, no, all of society is obligated to produce profits. It is our primary reason for existence and all the rest is secondary, tertiary, etc. As Marx would have put it, economic production (based on profit and accumulation) is the “structure” (foundation) and all the rest of society’s culture and institutions are the “superstructure” (that built up from the foundation). Most of us live for an elite minority and ultimately have no real control over our livelihood because we do not own the means to continually sustain it. So we sell ourselves, rent ourselves out. It’s the way it is. But will it always be that way? I seriously doubt it, although I can’t prove it, of course. I do know that in the developed countries, life has become better for the common people, although it was far better in the recent past. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”. People, when they become conscience of their power, can change things in their favor. One day in the future it may well be that the fact that most of us make profits for an elite minority[1] of wealth holders, year after year, century after century, will be looked upon as an uncivilized, primitive state of affairs, much as we now look back on the Middle Ages, another age of rulers and ruled, classes who worked and that elite minority benefitting the most from that work.

Many of you might ask: “How can it be that all of society is geared toward making a profit? Does not government do a lot of things on a non-profit basis, and what about non-profit institutions?” The answer is that yes, many things, mostly from government, are done without an eye to profit. But even these economic activities rely on taxes from individuals and businesses and as we know, businesses hire individuals because there is a possibility of at least a long run…profit. Again, profit maximization is the structure on which our society is based. The same is true of stalwart non-profit institutions such as Doctors Without Borders or Habitat for Humanity—they exist within a system of donations derived from incomes and profits, as well as a lot of dedication and hard work.

Well, you may ask, “What about things such churches, or the fact that many people do things for their own pleasure, enlightenment, and development?” Leaving aside that many churches are indeed corrupt, money-making operations, or often supporting belligerent policies of their native governments, it is true that spirituality and belief can exist or be pursued outside the drive for profit by individuals and corporations. The point is that many exceptions, including the small business owner who is a devotee to a particular skill or craft and just needs to make a comfortable income, can surely be held up as counter examples. Others include mastering a musical instrument, which for almost all who do so never means big money. Still, the overall, overarching, drive for profit is the most powerful social force of all under capitalism. As the late economist Robert Heilbroner puts it in his The Logic and Nature of the Capitalism[2]…

 The attribute of wealth [capital] that distinguishes it from prestige goods[e.g., luxury goods that confer prestige] is that its possession confers on its owners the ability to direct and mobilize the activities of society, although it does not necessarily also confer the repute or authority of distinction [emphasis added] (p. 45, 1985).

It is not the prestige goods that which most socialists have the biggest problem when it comes to great wealth, but the social power inherent in it. This distinguishes our struggle from the many accusations of jealousy made by mud-slinging right-wing critics of socialism and puts it squarely as a struggle for social justice and emancipation.

Must we always live in a society that is “just a business” and instead, live in one whose “profit’, its driving force, is fulfilling employment for employment’s sake, individual and social development, and of course economic development and abundance to be shared democratically by all? That new system, that next phase, that next age, is socialism, but not as we have ever understood the word before.

[1] No, I do not mean the owner of the corner bakery. I am taking about a much larger scale, the so-called One Percent, who, if memory serves, own about 45 percent of the wealth in the United States. Even worse, the top ten percent of wealth holders control 75 percent of our national wealth (mybudget360.com).

[2] In retrospect, I owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Heilbroner’s Logic and Nature of Capitalism for many of the ideas in this post.