Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:38:40 +0000
From: Paul Bowman <paulbowman-AT-totalise.co.uk>
Subject: RE: AUT: marx question


>===== Original Message From mike posner <idlehandsdistro-AT-yahoo.com> ====>Hello
>Just joined this list today.  My question is what does
>marx mean when he says that the capitalist buys labor
>power, as opposed to labor?  It's been baffling me for
>a while and I haven't found anyone that could explain
>it....

Labour, as an input to the capitalist production process, is a commodity. Like 
any other commodity it has a cost which is based on the amount of "socially 
necessary" (see Chris' notes on the distinction between specific and abstract) 
labour time it took to produce or - in the simplified case of a daily wage - 
to reproduce. That (schematically) is the sum of the value of the food, drink 
and heating, etc. taken to reproduce the proletarian for another days work.

As productivity in the production of these "inputs" increases, the total value 
of the labour commodity decreases. Consider in times past nearly all our 
ancestors spent nearly all of their productive activity in food production for 
subsistence. Today less than a 20th of the population in metropolitan states 
are engaged in food production. If there were nothing in our society except 
for food production and consumption, then the value of these hypothetical 
proletarians would be a 20th of the working day of the agricultural workers.

When the capitalist hires labour s/he pays the value of the labour - i.e. the 
cost of reproducing that labour for the next day. If that cost is only, in 
abstract terms, the equivalent of an hours social productive activity - that 
is what is payed. However what s/he gets is the actual days work done i.e. the 
product of our power to produce labour values (whether embodied in physical 
commodities or less tangible services), perhaps the equivalent of 7.5 hours of 
socially necessary labour. S/he pays the cost of the proletarian as commodity, 
but gets the product of that proletarian's productive power. This mismatch is 
the source of surplus value.

It's the difference between labour as product and labour as producer, our 
ability through increased productivity to increase product above subsistence, 
eventually to the potential for abundance - a situation where a quantitative 
difference actually effects a qualitative change, one that makes possible the 
end of compulsion in production entirely - i.e. communism (which is not simply 
the result of the common ownership of the means of production - that's 
socialism which, without communism, is contradictory and doomed to failure). 
But that potential for abundance cannot be realised within capitalist social 
relations which artificially maintain the experience of scarcity and marginal 
existence, long after the forces of production (social productivity) have 
overcome material scarcity.



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