Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 23:40:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin_Schwartz-AT-pseud.pseud
Subject: Re: M-INTRO: marxism-intro


On Wed, 29 Jan 1997 SLUG-AT-pseud.pseud wrote:

> Do Marxists believe that men and women in the labor force are
> exploited equally or one more than the other?

"Marxists" as a whole do not have a unified position on this or anything
else. 

What we have here is an empirical question. It depends in part on what we
mean by exploitation and its measure. Marx thought that workers in the
labor force are exploited insofar as they are forced by their
circumstances to produce value for capitalists. Value is measured for Marx
by the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce commodities.
Profits are surplus value, the value workers produce over and above what
is necessary to pay their wages, buy the raw materials, account for
depreciatiuon of equipment, and generally replace what is used up in
production.

So for Marx the question has to be framed: do women workers produce more
surplus value per capita than male workers. To answer this quiestion you
need a way to operationalize and test the hypothesis that they do. One
rough measure of this is to look at how much profit (the money expression
of surplus value) capitalists get by using women rather than men. You
might want to control for different kinds wof work done by each group, so
that you compared skiled women workers to skilled men workers and
unskilled to unskilled. A hint that women are more exploited is that women
are generally paid less than men for doing the same work. This is illegal,
but it's the rule outside public employment (which is a special case for
Marx, since government workers do not directly produce surplus value). 

If we don't like talking about value, we can just look at the profit/wages
ratio as a mesaure of exploitation.

I do not think the question is settled, but in classical Marxist terms the
answer is probably yes, women workers are more exploited on averaage


--Justin Schwartz




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