File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0112, message 129


From: Jan Reise <janreise-AT-yahoo.de>
Subject: Re: AUT: marx question
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 18:18:31 +0100


Paul Bowman wrote

> 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.

I agree with all that, but insist it is not enough. The capitalist can never 
be sure how much "the product of that proletarian's productive power" will 
actually be because that is determined by class struggle at its most atomical 
level. 

And I think it's extremely important to keep that in mind, because otherwise 
one risks to reify value and surplus value into something "economical" 
removed from struggle and simultaneously reify class struggle into something 
"political", removed from social production.

Jan

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