“So, Have You Added Value to the Company Today?”

A fallacious question formulated to privilege capital over labor.

This is an actual question posed to me by a senior vice president at Charles Schwab Client Services, a number of years ago.

Having bounced around different broker-dealer, investment banking and private equity firms over the years as an administrative assistant, I have heard the word “value” wielded quite frequently — not really ever knowing what exactly is referred to. All that I could gather was that in the world of investing, all agendas, all actions or strategies were judged based on the impact they had on a company’s share price at any given moment.

Such a narrowly defined goal reflects a securities issuer philosophy that fixates on “shareholder value”. After years of watching publicly traded companies cut corners, compensation, and, ultimately, headcount — all in the name of shoring up their share prices, the unspoken meaning of value began to manifest itself.

When an investment industry type talks about value, he’s referring to the following question: “How much will I (or my client) get for selling shares of this company?”

Of course, no one would dare pose such a money-grubbing question; not while in polite company, at least. However, after what the middle- and working classes has endured since 2008 — the chronic unemployment, siphoned 401k’s, underwater mortgages, bankrupting healthcare — all the while as leaders of the financial services industry have reaped grain silos of good fortune, it’s well past time to pull the mask off the merchants of economic mayhem. Cut through all the fancy financial double-talk.

What that SVP was asking me all those years ago amounted to whether I was willing to dilute the value of my salary (going that extra mile) in service of Schwab’s share price. Perhaps someday far down the road, I would be rewarded with the privilege of keeping my job or, if I was ultra fortunate, a promotion with a less-than-commensurate pay raise. There was no hazy expectation about the urgency of adding value to the company, however. It illustrated a kind of privileged thinking among the captains of capital.

If you consider what Abraham Lincoln said about the capital-labor relationship almost 160 years ago, how could you overlook the pretense of the executive management class?

In an address to a session of Congress about the then-raging Civil War, Lincoln’s train of thought switches tracks momentarily:

It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor…. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.

As a critique of capitalist discourse, Lincoln spells out the unspoken assumption that only the accumulation counts not the sacrifice that produced the accumulation. For this assumption to take root and dominate requires general amnesia or forgetting on the part of both labor and capital. It enables capital’s act of pretending that labor’s existence depends on capital giving it a job to do (hence, the fatuous “job creators” euphemism). Politely, Lincoln asserts that capital has the relationship ass-backward.

“Capital is only the fruit of labor,” not the soil or the branch that supported capital’s production. It “could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” First come, first served is a maxim that informs Lincoln’s view about labor’s inherent privilege.

The question about adding value to an already bursting repository of capital smacks of delusional entitlement when sifted by Abraham Lincoln’s brief analysis of labor-capital relations. The only plausible response to such an inquiry would be to spell out the myriad assumptions that comprise it while at the same moment suppressing the memory of labor’s contribution to accumulation.

Given how far the middle class of this country has fallen behind on wage growth, class solidarity must be reimagined and reconfigured to include the organizing efforts of both middle - and working classes as mutual beneficiaries. As important to the act of forgetting the role of labor in capital accumulation, it has been crucial to reinforce class distinctions from which petty rivalries prevent middle- and working classes from recognizing their common interests (job security, safety, and living wages) as attainable gains.