I'm a Terrible Capitalist - Quilting and Marxism

I'm a sociologist, so the central features of Karl Marx's ideas about capitalism and society are woven into my perspective on the world. "The history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles..." and all that. Social scientists continue to disagree about the extent to which Marx was correct in his theories, but I have always found parts of his ideas to be compelling and reflective of my experiences.

For example, I have had a lot of jobs. I started working as early as I was legally able (15) and often pieced together multiple part time jobs throughout my adulthood. In each, Marx's characterization of tensions between hourly wage workers and the owners of the means of production has resonated with me. While I didn't always know the owners of the businesses I worked within, I always felt their presence through the rules/procedures they created and the managers they chose. Even more apparent to me was that this tension between workers and owners created a real bind for the middle managers. Middle managers have to do the dirty work of capitalism by enforcing the will of the owners, but do not benefit as much as the owners do from this system. Having been a middle manager on occasion, I can attest that this position sucks.

Other Marxist concepts also resonated with me, especially his description of the different forms of alienation. Basically, the process by which some people own companies and other people keep those companies running through their labors leads to a sense of disconnection, or alienation. According to Marx, there are four forms of alienation.

• The first form of alienation is that workers, who make the products and perform the services, feel disconnected from those products and services. Whereas under earlier economic models, producers would imbue their products with a piece of their selves, under capitalism, workers feel distant from their products.
•  The second form of alienation is that workers feel disconnected from one another, even as they are reliant on each other for the production process. Instead of feeling interdependent, we end up feeling at odds with suppliers, customers, co-creators. 
• The third form of disconnection is alienation from the process of production. Workers just do their piece of the process and do not feel responsible for the whole, which also means they lose the sense of satisfaction from the production process. In many ways, the worker becomes a cog in the large machinery of production.  
• And, ultimately, these forms of alienation lead to the greatest form of alienation -- disconnection from our sense of being human and part of society, or as he calls it our "species being." For Marx, the process of creating was so central to our humanity that he believed these forms of alienation were the cause of great suffering.
  

Scene from Modern Times (1936), which illustrates alienation.

Now, back to quilting...

I have always loved the creative process. I make things for people I love and I make things for people to buy. When I am creating for my business, I definitely have a different relationship to my products than when I do it for gifting. I don't feel as connected to the final product if I plan to sell it. I try to get the best deals possible on supplies, even if it means making choices based on finances not art. I don't feel connected to other makers. I see them as competition instead of helpers and friends. I don't feel as satisfied as when I am able to make quilts as gifts. And sometimes I feel a bit like a robot when I have no emotional connection to the products or their recipients. Although you probably can't tell the difference between business and love quilts from the final products, these experiences seem to provide some support for Marx's ideas.

Quilt made to sell.

Quilt made for someone I love.

Even given the reduced emotional connection, I love being able to make a bit of money from my passion. One of my five year goals is to become a better business person when it comes to quilting. I have done several things to market my business, but the most significant change I've made is to seriously consider how I price items.

I used to price items by asking myself how much I thought people would pay for my work. While this line of thinking is consistent with the view that the value of an item comes from how much others are willing to pay, it severely under-priced by labor. Roughly calculating, during this period of my business, I paid myself around $4/hour. Sometimes less. Once I realized that this model didn't work, I decided to calculate based supplies + hours and gave myself a rate of $8/hour. After a few years of experience and investment in my skills, I gave myself a raise to $10/hour, which is my current rate.

This exercise of thinking about labor costs as part of the valuation of my products made another Marxist idea clearer in my mind. One of the motivating orientations for those who own the means of production is to extract as much "surplus value" as they can from their production process. Surplus value is the profit made once all costs are paid. Extracting maximum surplus values requires cutting costs of supplies, but more importantly, keeping wages as low as possible.

Once I split out labor costs and surplus value, I was shocked by my own reaction to the surplus value. My relationship to the dollars that I get from wages feels different from my relationship to the dollars I get from surplus value. Wage dollars feel like any other job. I use that money to pay bills and occasionally treat myself.

Surplus value dollars feel like I won the lottery! This is money that comes from just doing what I do. It's like standing in one of those cash grab boxes and trying to capture as many flying dollars as possible. It's exhilarating. Initially, I had to fight the urge to run out and blow it immediately. I now keep all of my surplus value money in a separate bank account and plan to use it to reinvest in the business, especially through new equipment and better supplies. This is how one grows wealth.

This is also how the wealthy get wealthier. Surplus value. When I only had experience as a wage worker, I assumed that the big conflict between workers and owners was that workers did all the work and owners got paid to basically do nothing. This deprives workers of a sense of accomplishment and creates alienation. I still think that's true, most of the time. But what is even more central is that workers do all the work and owners capitalize on surplus value to build up their own wealth. Meanwhile, workers are mostly just trying to get by and have little to no means for capturing or capitalizing on surplus value.

The main conflict in capitalism is that the owners of the means of production get rich at the economic, psychological, and physical detriment of workers. I have book-known this since my first sociological theory class twenty years ago. But, it took starting a quilting business for me to really understand this on a visceral level.

As it turns out, I'm not a very good capitalist. I still struggle to price things at a rate that even covers my $10/hour wage, let alone a price that provides surplus value. Currently I am a business of one, so the conflict between the owner of the means of production (me) and the worker (also me) is moot. Expansion of this business, and the creation of real surplus value, likely requires moving beyond this arrangement. But I'm not ready for that. Yet.