From: "Kevin Carson" <kevin_carson-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: owned vs. free market
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:42:28 +0000


>From: John Anderson <panic-AT-semiosix.com>
>
>On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 20:06, Kevin Carson wrote:
> > Thomas Hodgskin (in "Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital") 
>argued
> > that the wages of labor would be sorted out among the workers themselves
> > according to their experience of disutility, intensity or 
>unpleasantness.
>
>And if you actually like your work, do you do it for free? Even though
>arguably you're likely to do a better job if you enjoy doing it?

Even relatively pleasurable work (and all productive work contains at least 
an element of pleasure, because we're beings who need to produce), contains 
a preponderance of toil or disutility.  The very fact that we need to 
receive food and other material resources in order to live, means that 
spending time in production without receving such benefits is in some sense 
an opportunity foregone.  And even in the case of pleasurable labor, the 
time during which the pleasure of work outweighs the disutility is a shorter 
period than that required to produce as much as you consume.

And unlike all other things that neoclassical economists call "disutility" 
(Marshall's "real cost" involved in the capitalist's "abstintion," for 
example), labor is the only thing that is a disutility in absolute terms.  
The "abstention" of the capitalist and landlord is only relative, i.e. given 
a set of alternatives (what he can expect as returns from alternative uses) 
in a specific social situation.  The disutility of labor is an absolute, in 
the unique sense that it is a positive expenditure of human effort and 
psychic energy.

> > Like the American individualist anarchists, he believed that the free 
>market
> > resulting from the elimination of usurer's and landlord's privilege, 
>etc.,
> > would result in labor receiving its full product.  But this product 
>would be
> > distributed between the laborers through the "voluntary higgling of the
> > market" (a phrase he took from Adam Smith).
>
>What exactly does "higgling" mean in this context? In any context for
>that matter?

When unequal exchange, caused by the state's intervention to enforce 
privilege, is eliminated, labor will receive its full product.  At that 
point, the only real contention in the labor market will be between workers 
over who works hardest or has the most unpleasant job, and is entitled to a 
larger share of their joint product.  This will be determined by the market, 
by the withdrawal of workers whose subjective sense of disutility is not 
compensated by the payment for their labor, and the entrance of those for 
whom payment is sufficient to compensate them.

>bye
>John
>
>

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