Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 22:58:13 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: 'The Doug Henwood Follow-on'


What is the value of labor power: the labor time required to reproduce
labor power or the actual use values required to reproduce labor in a a
determinate geo-historic situation or something else? Can the former
decline while the latter increases? What are the relations between the two?
What is relative and absolute surplus value: do they mark actual epochs in
the accumulation of capital; is Marx's distinction tenable; DO WE NEED A
SEMINAR ON THE DETERMINATION OF THE VALUE OF THE LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL
ECONOMY (We could report on works by Guglielmo Carchedi, Cyrus Bina and
others)?

K Jin wrote:

>Without meaning to be insulting for raising such an elementary point, the
>relevant question is the relationship of the wages paid in a specific
>country to average wages and incomes in that country.

Not an insult at all! I am thrilled that you would take the time to make so
many helpful preliminary comments towards  an understanding of wage
determination in the global economy. As I think over your post, let me pose
one very simple question: so what if the third world worker in the
transnational corporation is making more than the national average for
similarly skilled and arduous work in the semi-colonial country? Why is
this the relevant question, instead of value-theoretic  determination of
the relations of production between the global capitalist and the global
proletariat: a better than average paid slave is still a slave, especially
if she or he is providing ever more labor time gratis to his tnc boss.
Comrade, please don't pass off that bourgeois nonsense that workers, no
matter how exploited,  should measure their wage relative to their
semi-colonial brethren!

Moreover, is it nonsensical to say that capital has achieved a higher rate
of exploitation (s/c+v) by building  skills into plants (so to speak), thus
making these plants mobile enough to move away from the first world to
faraway semi-colonial locales, and then hiring labor power which is cheaper
and can be worked longer and more intensively? That is, is it incorrect to
say that this higher rate of exploitation is mainly the result of firms
being  able to depress  the wage below the "moral and historical" value of
labor power as it had been determined upward during the post wwII global
boom? From the perspective of capital, is this not accumulation via
absolute surplus value?

My simple point here is that tnc employment is not intended to and will not
bring third world wages anywhere near  the value of labor power in terms of
the use values which had come to be required for the reproduction of first
world labor power (though there are indeed exceptions to this in Southeast
Asia) while even increasing the labor time  workers now give gratis to
capital. The increase in labor time gratis is enabled by the skills built
into plants (so that productivity levels at constant intensity are even
approached in the third world)  and then really achieved through longer
days, more intensive work, and the maintainence of really low wages via
fascist labor regulations. To say nothing of the circumvention of
environmental regulations, which perhaps should be considered a part of the
improved moral and historical wage workers had won from capital in the
imperialist countries.

In all these ways--the increase in labor time gratis without regular and
continuous increases in the real wage, though intensity, actual labor time
and pollution increases-- it seems to me that we are dealing with absolute
surplus value, but of course I await further development of these basic
concepts.

If surplus value had been sufficient to retool the industrial structure in
the first world, then capital would not have needed to undermine the value
of labor power. Increased productivity could have made the production of
relative surplus value possible if there had been sufficient surplus value
for accumulation of better vintage fixed capital.  Instead the firms find
that the only way they can accumulate is by lowering the value of labor
power, whether this means finding ways to flee to where that value is lower
(though productivity is not higher) or beginning a full-scale, regressive
assault on the very workers whose  value of labor power had been determined
upward through struggle, however muted, during the post world war II boom
in the imperialist countries.

In either case, the value of labor power which capital had come to accept
during the accumulation which followed upon the massive devaluations
engendered by world war is now what capital attempts to undermine. We are
in a senile and vicious stage of accumulation. It follows therefore that we
have entered what is indeed a new epoch with great possibilities for social
change.

Rakesh




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