Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 22:18:19 -0400
From: jonathan flanders <72763.2240-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Get back in the kitchen and rattle them pots & pans!


>> Another serious point. The janitor is out sick, so the lathe operator
has to sweep up the filings around his or her machine. In doing so, has he
or she relinquished the status of productive worker?<< 

I was a lathe operator at one time. The company I worked for was too cheap
to hire laborers to sweep, so we cleaned up after ourselves. If we didn't
we could not have continued "turning" out the parts. So my answer on this
is yes, and I think Marx answered affirmatively as well on this point.

>>And trickier still: the lathe operator, let us say, produces a finished,
ready-to-sell product. Is the person who passes along the line picking up
these products to take them to wherever they will be packaged and shipped a
productive worker?<<

Yes again. Parts piling up next to the lathe are quite useless to anyone.


>>And lurking behind *this* question, in turn, is the question whether we
Marxists have been guilty all along of fetishising, metaphysicalizing,
the notion of a commodity as somehow a *thing*,a material product shaped by
humans sitting at machines.

Away with all economism!

Jim Blaut<<

So is a commodity something a "thing" becomes, temporarily, if it
successfully enters the realm of circulation? Is the battered 1983 Buick I
drive a commodity? I think the answer is no, unless I try to foist the
"thing" on some trusting soul, right?

 Or are you trying to say that a commodity emerges from a complex web of
productive interaction far broader that that three eighths of an inch 
steel ribbon peeling off an hydraulic valve spinning on a lathe?


Jon Flanders


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