 yw'r parwys i'r ailfio sy'n eraill. Yn y fflayddau cyd-dynai sy'n gwneud yng Nghymru, mae Mark yn ymrydau'r ychydig yn gyffredig am rhai bod aeth yn bwysig i chi'n ffordd fi'r ymlaen yn hyn gyda'r parwys. Hwyl料 yn ei kn sang theatre maen nhw'n gobeithio'u cyd-dynai i fy nghymru i fynd i gyd, ac yn y ddechrau fy nghymru o gael cyd-dynai, mae Mark yn ydydd y mynd i ddechrau sy'n wneud ymryd am y ddiogel, csnwch, Everything that they can out of the working class in order to maximise their profits. While Smarks uses the examples of his day, I'm going to be using more contemporary examples to show how this takes place right now in all of the jobs that we work in. I think by doing this we can see how this tax is very much a relevant tool that we really need to unveil the con that capitalism has over workers with the exploitation of them and what they produce. Yn ymlaen i'r fforddau, yw ymlaen i'r fforddau? Mwaf i'r fforddau yw'r drifon wedi'u fforddau a'r bysio o'r llyfr yn cael eu cynhyrch, ac mae'n meddwl i'r fforddau o'r fforddau yn cael eu llyfr yn cael ei fforddau. Mae'r fforddau yn y fforddau i'r fforddau, yn y rhaid, yn ymlaen i'r fforddau, yn y gweithio gyda'r ystod o'i ddweud yn cyd-dweud o'r gilydd o'r gweithio. ac, dwi'n golygu, mae'r ffwrdd o'r ffordd yn ddechrau, a hynny'n gweithio'r cwestiwn. Rwy'n credu'r cymaint i'r cysylltu'r cysylltu. Rwy'n credu y cysylltu'r Cymru yw'r cysylltu'r cysylltu'r cympas. Yw'r cymaint cymaint cymaint cymaint cymaint cymaint. Rydym eithaf ymddir, gyda'r cymaint cymaint ar gyfer y cymaint cymaint efo'r cymaint. Yr gweithio'r cysylltu ar gyflwyno cymaint cysylltu'r cymaint is the exchange value of the commodities produced, so this means that the capitalist has no interest in producing something that is needed in society but they're only going to produce and invest in something that's going to provide them with further profit at the end of that. However, it's not just the sale of goods or the circulation of capitalism within the market that adds value to products, they don't gain more value by being bought cheap and sold on high. This would just be the kind of same as buying something cheaply, getting a little bit of money and by the time you've reinvested it someone else has sold theirs on a little higher. So I guess it's like if we buy the book today, if I buy the book understanding Marx's capital for £10 and then I'm over here in the corner trying to sell it to someone at £15, they're not going to agree to do that. Nothing's changed about that book when they can still go and buy it at the back for £10. So I have to do something to this product in order to sell it on a higher value and this is the kind of key to how more profit is driven like what do capitalists do to their products to increase their value. So value is created in the process of production but only realised through the method of exchange and it's an expression of the socially necessary labour time involved in production. But the value of a product only being realised through exchange makes circulation necessary, these two things go hand in hand but it isn't the thing that adds the value. So where do profits come from then if they're not coming through buying it at one price and just simply selling it on another it has to come from somewhere. Otherwise no one would end up with any more money than they started with to begin with. And the answer is that the capitalist must be able to buy a commodity that produces value that creates additional value through its consumption or through its sale. And this is the sort of secret of capitalism if you like, the special commodity that produces more value than is required to sustain it. And the answer to this is labour power. Labour power is the thing that adds value and allows capitalists to draw a profit from the sale of goods. And understanding this is what made Marx's books such a breakthrough compared to other economists over the time before him. So labour power of course is the only thing that a worker has to sell, it's the only commodity that they have available to them without having bought something previously. And generally workers are contracted for a certain number of hours that they have to work within a day or a week or such and they're paid a wage for that time. However what they're producing this time, what they're able to do in the time that they're at work isn't directly equatable to the wages that they earn. So the boss doesn't buy the labour of the worker, what they buy is the capacity for work that the worker has. And it's the purchase of the worker's capacity to work, the labour power that transforms the owner of money into a capitalist because they're able to add this value to their products. So how does that work though? We need to look a little bit more in detail at this. So they gain profit from this by extracting surplus value which is created by the worker's work in a given period of time, so the working day or the working week. So we need to understand surplus value and to understand how this is where profit comes from. And also we need to understand how is a worker able to work for a certain amount of time and not realise that loads of what they produce is being sold on and they're not being remunerated for it. Why does it not cause outrage amongst the working class? So of course surplus value is literally the unpaid labour of the worker and it's extracted by maximising the use of their labour power and in selling the products that are produced in that time for as much as possible. So understanding this is of course as I've said key to understanding where profits come from but also it helps us understand how wages are determined and why these wages aren't equivalent to the output of what is produced by a worker. And again this helps us to further understand the exploitation of the working class, what that really means and I'll come onto that in a minute. So generally surplus value is gained through the prolongation of the working day beyond what is required to reproduce the value of that labour. So working longer than is needed to produce things that can be sold on by the capitalist to recover their costs of view as the worker. For example a factory worker can be hired to work eight hours a day but by I don't know 11 o'clock or midday they could have already produced enough things that the capitalist can sell on. By selling those things they've realised enough money back to be able to pay off the workers wage and all the other things that they must cover. So then the rest of that day they're producing commodities still that the capitalist is going to sell on and all of that additional money that comes in is where the surplus value from the surplus labour of the worker. They're able to turn a profit, they're making back more than they would have spent on the worker themselves. But this has to be able to kind of have covered the cost of not just the worker but also the cost of maintaining the working class as a whole. So therefore we can say that the unpaid labour of the worker is the source of profit. So what is the worker paid then? Technically as I've said they're not forced to sell your labour, you don't have to go out and get a job and if you do get a job you're welcome to hand in your notice and leave that job. However if you don't choose to work where are you going to earn any money to buy food, to put shelter over your head to do anything within your life. So actually workers have to, they have no other option but to sell the only commodity they have, their labour power, their capacity to work. And as I said the wages have to cover your cost of living, everything that you need to survive but not just that. Also the upkeep of the continual refreshing of the working class if you will, like little ants you've got to continue growing them otherwise you're going to have no workers to work in your factories or any other business. So it has to cover everything from food, housing, clothes but also healthcare and education in order to have educated workers to go on and continue to work in your workplace. So Marks isn't talking about wages covering the upkeep of an individual but the class as a whole. So if we look at how wages are determined more closely, wages are just the price of a commodity with the commodity here being the labour power of the worker. And they sell it to the capitalist at the kind of current going rate what it's worth generally. And of course that fluctuates from epoch to epoch country to country workplace to workplace. And if I've got time I have some figures that show the disparity between that. So as with all commodities the price kind of vacillates above and below the value of the actual labour power depending on supply and demand. So when there is an abundance of workers but for you jobs the capitalist can make the workers compete against each other for those jobs and wages can be pushed down. However when the economy is booming and there's a large demand for workers the wages can be pushed up by this demand. And that's kind of tied in with the fact that as well workers are in unions and with a strong union you can win more reforms united together fighting for that. And so what we see is a constant struggle on the part of the working class for higher wages and on the part of the capitalist for higher profits. And we see this is the class struggle. So as I've said workers aren't paid for their actual labour what they produce in that time or their actual work. They sell their capacity to work and this is for a certain set amount of time. But what we see by creating a kind of confusion between labour power and actual labour what you actually produce. Capitalism sort of covers overall hides in a way the exploitation that is taking place over the worker. And people believe that they're working a fair day, fair day's work for a fair day's wage and things but in actual fact this is completely false. The worker is not considering that surplus labour that they are doing because they do labour. After that point at which they've covered the costs of their own existence and the fact-tuned things. And so the capitalist can extract a lot more from the workers without workers getting angry and starting to question the system to a large extent. So another Marx quote at a young capital. He writes all labour appears as paid labour but this is not true. So the capitalist is able to extract surplus value from that unpaid labour time and this is where profit comes from, this is why exploitation takes place. And in fact recently we've seen even further tricks I suppose where capitalists are pulling the wool over the eyes of their workers and I want to use Tata Steel as an example for this. Over the past year or so we've seen the struggle over pensions within Tata Steel where it's like if you don't all take a cut in your wages or in your pensions then we're not going to be able to keep you all on. We can't possibly keep you on thank you. So workers are kind of coerced into taking certain cuts in order to save their business or save their jobs when in actual fact Tata Steel turned a profit of £74m this year. So it's not like they're particularly short on cash, it's just where they're choosing to take that cut from. So I suppose this kind of trickery is one method by which exploitation is used to extract as much surplus value from the worker as possible. But there are many many more. One such, well the main sort of way is that capitalists are constantly striving for higher production as has been mentioned a little bit already. Higher productivity means that commodities can be produced that have less labour time, sort of crystallise within them as was mentioned in the previous talks. So it can be sold more cheaply under cutting competition and competition drives this constantly. So most commonly capitalists extract the further surplus value by elongating the working day, making it longer so they have more time for workers to produce things that can then be sold on. Or shortening the amount of time needed for a worker to produce a commodity and this can be done through advanced technology buying and machinery which I think Adam will cover in his next session. So more modern methods I suppose would include firing staff that aren't deemed to be productive as you would like them to be, lowering pay. One method that I'm a teacher so sorry there's going to be a lot of teacher talk here about my experience. But one method that you started to use in teaching is that rather than higher, particularly in further education, rather than higher a qualified teacher to teacher lesson, the lessons split in half. So the qualified teacher who costs more works for the first part of the lesson and then incomes at the second part and unqualified member of staff. So the qualified staff isn't paid for as many hours, the unqualified member is paid far less money than the qualified person and they just do the assessment part because you don't need a qualification to assess that apparently. So you can see how these methods completely are undercutting the worker like devaluing professionals as well in some ways. But there's more. You can also see how zero hour contracts are used as another method of exploitation. People working in very precarious conditions and I'll go into a few examples for this in a minute. But another method, overtime, many companies demand that you take on overtime, sometimes paid, sometimes not paid. Unpaid overtime is a huge crisis right now and some stats on that in a minute as well. In particular in the kind of social sector or the caring professions, things like this where people will do that extra work regardless because they kind of have to. So workers produce all value in society but they receive only a fraction of what they produce back in their wages. And the class struggle is a struggle over this surplus. So the length of the working day is reduced to class struggle between the capitalist wanting that extra time and the worker wanting to work only as long as they absolutely have to. So I do think it's quite a nice way of putting it that the class struggle is a struggle over time essentially. This inherent and constant drive for profits means that regardless of the capitalist morals they have to constantly exploit their working day as much as possible. Even if you have a business owner who's caring and wants to take care of the workers, wants to give you as many breaks as they can, that's not always possible because they're constantly competing for profits. And therefore they don't have the option of being kind or moral if you want to call it that. And every single capitalist regardless of their morality has to take place in this race to the bottom. It's a case of exploit others or lose your share of the market, lose your profits and lose your ability to live off surplus value, returning you to the status of a worker rather than a capitalist. It's a question of exploit or be exploited to some extent. There are some limits to what the capitalist can do though. Of course the working day can't be so long but it literally kills workers. They still need workers at the end of the day but it also is limited by how much a worker can put up with, how long the day can be, how tough the conditions are before they start to banter. Together we start to demand better conditions, strikes and such. Oh, as I said the conditions of this vary and so there's kind of a vast difference between the length of the working day in particular all around the world with Mexico generally the average working week is 10 hours longer than it is in the UK. But these figures are kind of hard to work with because of course that doesn't take account of the fact that some people are working three hours a week on zero contracts and some are working 50, 60 hours a week. But that huge variation does exist and in the past workers, sorry capitalists, workers don't exploit themselves. Capitalists have exploited the worker in the length of working day further by introducing the shift system so that their constant capital and machinery etc is constantly being used to its fullest extent. But we also see them cutting brakes reducing lunchtime and I think everyone's probably quite aware of the fact that the eight hour day is being roaded constantly, thank you. I think Amazon, if we take a look at Amazon is a really good example of how they road brakes and things like this. I have a friend who's a manager in Amazon and she is mandated by her hire managers to prevent brakes running over so she has to be really strict with them. You're disciplined if you're a minute over your break but on top of that, we're social people, as you're walking about doing your job you chat to workers. In Amazon, so they're like the packers and posters, I don't know what to call them. They aren't even allowed to communicate as they walk from place to place because this is seen to be something that would reduce your productivity, your capacity to work, you're going to be distracted, you're not going to be as productive and then again they can be disciplined for this. You can see the workers really squeezing every minute of the working day out of the worker and workers now are expected to work all days of the week. Weekend jobs aren't just like every now and then, it's something that happens in many, many workplaces and you're expected to work a day at the weekend in addition to your working week. Bank holiday wages are being eroded, we're no longer paid in many jobs that kind of additional remuneration that you would expect for working on a day that should be a holiday. And furthermore, there's late night shopping and overnight deliveries means that kind of normal structure of a working day doesn't exist either. So these are all methods that capitalists use that extract the most amount of surplus value possible from their workers' labour power that they have bought. And I think you can imagine it kind of like when you go to an oil you can eat buffet, like you've paid your money, you've paid your money for that food in that hour that you have in there just as a capitalist has paid for a worker's capacity to work. You're going to eat as much as you can at the buffet. They want to extract as much as they can out of the worker in the time that they have paid for. And I'd say teaching is one of the worst affected professions from this. Teachers are technically contracted to around 37 hours per week but in actual fact most teachers work, I think it's 56 generally in high school and over 60 in primary schools. And rather than paying teachers overtime, the government and academy bosses kind of rely on the good nature of staff in these businesses to complete that work. And it's not just the good nature of workers either though, it's not just like particularly caring people going work in these things but you're threatened with your job if you don't do this mandatory basically unpaid overtime. So that kind of threat of work and wanting to help out people is a very effective method of extracting a lot of surplus value from teachers. And of course it's a problem because who is it that suffers if you don't do this unmandatory overtime? Of course it's the children or it's the people that you take care of if you're working in social work, something like this. It's a very difficult situation and capitalists are able to exploit this very well. And it's not just teaching that this is in, obviously there's many sectors, many jobs that are like this. And the capitalists achieve this kind of horrible form of exploitation further by making other workers redundant and not replacing them in their jobs. So other workers are expected to pick up additional jobs as part of like additional tight little jobs and things as part of their role. And gradually your job role just increases and increases increases to the point where you're doing a job that really three people should be doing. So the capitalists is saving a huge amount of money not paying your wages and extracting further surplus value. So back to teaching. In teaching we've seen quite a lot of this in like the cutting of support staff. The cutting of teaching assistance, we had three in the school of a thousand last year. They cut special educational needs support and they've been demonstrations and marches against that recently because it's put onto the workers of staff who are already in that workplace to kind of deal with this. And of course once you're stretched to your limit there's nothing more you can do. And it's just another money saving method. So I don't think over time of course I'm probably sure that if I asked everyone in here they'd say they are expected to do some amount of unpaid overtime at some point. But workers are also expected to pick up additional hours. The home office is really bad for this. So the home office purposely don't hire enough staff to cover the number of shifts that they have. And they kind of put a lot of pressure on the workers already there to pick up an additional couple of hours per week. And this is another way to undercut the worker to extract further surplus value because of course if you only have a few workers working for you you don't have to pay as much national insurance. You don't have to pay additional holiday pay. You may not have to pay additional thick pay for those workers. So they can kind of, if they can keep it within the workers that they already have and just eek out the working day for those workers they can extract further surplus value. So we also see unpaid overtime as quite a big crisis. And this isn't something that is just like what you know that you're doing. I think if you look at small businesses, people who work in bars, these kinds of places, often you're not, you know, you've only paid a half hour to clean the cafe at the end of the day, let's say. And you know and they know that you aren't going to clean a whole building in half an hour. And therefore, okay, therefore you end up working a little bit of overtime, a little bit here and there that really adds up. And the TUC have some startling statistics on this. They estimate that on average, and I think it's probably a lot more than this for some people, but on average the worker will put in over eight hours of unpaid overtime per week, which results in profits of 34 billion pounds per year. So even though you might feel like 15 minutes here, half an hour there, it's really adding up to a huge amount of profit, this surplus value that the capitalists are able to extract. And it's a massive contradiction of capitalism because whilst this is going on, there are 2.3 million workers unemployed wanting to do jobs and they're unable to do so. And I think this contradiction is important to look at to understand the wastefulness of capitalism that benefits no one but the capitalists. So to come into zero hour contracts, another method of maximising profit, all work benefits can be avoided in further education. This is particularly awful. So because the terms in schools run to between six and eight weeks, it's not long enough for you to need to be offered a permanent contract. So they can keep workers on short term contracts. They don't have to pay them holiday pay because they can say, oh well we only hired you for four weeks or eight weeks. So will renew your contract if you come back after Christmas or if you come back after the February half term. And this puts the worker in a very difficult position. You can't apply for housing or a mortgage or something like that because you don't have a long term job, you don't have any set hours. And this is the same with all zero hours contracts of course. Problem with budgeting effectively. And you can scarcely apply for a new job to get yourself out of that situation because asking for time off it might be easier to replace you with a different worker than give you the time off to attend an interview or something like this. And I think we've seen as well the crisis of casual contracts and casual work. I think in the past if you think back to like 1930s Depression America and those very common images of lines of workers queuing up for jobs. That hasn't gone away, that still exists today but rather than standing outside you text your boss now in the post office to get a shift in the morning. You have to be up first and send your text in and your boss will reply to you whether or not you've got a job that day. So they have a constant pool of workers available on zero hours contracts if they don't need to pay any and work benefits for. And we can see I think that this is a huge problem. It shows and highlights massively the inefficiencies of capitalism and how wasteful it is. It's wasting not just products that would have been sold on the market but aren't going to be because their prices isn't right and they're going to lose money on them. But also it wastes the potential of workers, those unemployed workers that aren't in work. Also the kind of potential of people, the minds, the things that we could be inventing and creating. So lives are wasted because of this and it's all for the drive for additional profit. So in addition to the pain of these methods the fact that workers are being exploited in surplus value dragged out from them in any way possible. We can see the negative effect of this exploitation on workers in a kind of modern way today. So during Marx's time you may have seen workers like mangled or dying or severely injured in factories. Today what we're seeing is a crisis in mental health because of the pressures put on workers in all of their jobs for the overtime, the stress of precarious work, the kind of problems with a lack of staff in your department say for teachers. If you have three days off sick a year, the whole year at any point, you'll be dragged into an after work meeting and this pressure is put on you to be in work because otherwise you're going to be put to a disciplinary, you're going to be put on an attendance report, you're going to have to go before the board of goodness, all adding additional stress to you to stay in work so that they don't have to pay for cover and lose profits. I work in an academy so it's particularly bad. But on top of this I think lots of workers feel the pressure of taking a day off sick because they know that their bosses are not going to lose profit and they're not going to hire an additional worker to cover you for that day. So if you do take a day off sick all of this pressure is put on you because you know your colleagues are going to be covering for you. They pick up that extra time and they pick up those extra jobs. So this is adding to this crisis, this mental health crisis that we're seeing in work because of the drive for extracting as much surplus value as possible. I'm stressed now I can't afford 40% of work related illnesses and I think that shows the extent to which today profits are placed massively as always over the workers wellbeing and health and it shows how extensive exploitation is and with all of these different methods I'm sure there are many more that people are aware they can contribute as well. So the working gate can only be reduced to the necessary work time if we do away with the drive for profits. That's the thing that's stopping us being able to reduce the working day because this is the need to extract surplus value. This is needed in order to reinvest and it also comes down to this quote I think that Marx has used that I'll just start to end with now. He says, only the abolition of the capitalist form of production would permit the reduction of the working day to the necessary labour time, just that time needed to produce the things that we need rather than all of the additional time that's used literally for capitalists to be able to live off of workers instead of having to work for themselves. So it's only by threatening the profits of capitalists that workers can win reforms or measures if you like to reduce their working day to what is necessary. It's that fight that is constant but they're never ever going to win a completely fair and non-exploitative day under capitalism because capitalism is driven by profit. It is the driving force of everything that's happening with regard to our work and our wages. So we have to overthrow capitalism, we have to overthrow the drive for profit and it's only by doing this that we can free ourselves from the tyranny of the wages that don't remunerate us for the work that we carry out and that are used in a way, sorry I've lost my way now. They free themselves from the tyranny of wages that don't remunerate them for the work that they complete or from the exploitation of the capitalist completely insatiable drive for profit. I'll leave it there for now.