Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 12:47:38 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Info Revolution


In message <l03020901affdff5c7156-AT-[130.244.77.88]>, Hugh Rodwell <m-
14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> writes
>There's been a lot of toing and froing about whether domestic labour and
>cultural labour can be regarded as productive or not, and if so, whether it
>really matters.
>
>1 Domestic labour

...
>
>First, if the necessary costs of production aren't covered, the production
>doesn't get done, the commodity isn't produced or is not up to standard.
>With respect to labour-power this means people (the owners and bearers of
>labour-power) die or can't perform the labour required of them. This is a
>limit on the desire of capitalists to dispense with all workers of course,
>the limit being the necessity to keep alive and keep reproducing a
>sufficient supply of labour power to produce the profit necessary for
>maintaining the capitalists at the standard to which they are accustomed.

Marx mooted a family wage. ie that the raising of the next generation of
workers and the daily reproduction of the wage labourer would be
represented in the wage, meaning that the costs of maintaining a family
would be an ordinary part of the value of labour power. Historically
that family wage was something that arose out of a profound social
conflict and legal intervention into the family (to exclude women and
children from the workforce, make schooling compulsory and so on). In
recent years in Britain and the US the family wage has been undermined
(witness the growth of 'work-rich' families struggling to maintain
living standards).

>
>Second, it doesn't matter how you twist or turn with the technicalities of
>price, value, the labour process etc, these basics have got to be covered.
>However indirect the passing of value to the producers of labour-power, it
>has to get done. However tortuous the mechanisms of price, institution,
>etc, those who add value to the commodity labour-power in the capitalist
>mode of production *must* receive the minimal cost of maintaining their own
>labour-power, or they will not be able to continue their work.

This is a confusion of use-value and exchange value, surely. Domestic
work contributes to the use-value of the commodity labour power - but
since no exchange relationship exists between man and wife that work
will never be reckoned in exchange value.

This distinction might seem pedantic but it does have serious
consequences. The most profound is that domestic work in capitalist
societies remains privatised, isolating domestic workers from wider
society. Arising out of that, there is no inherent tendency to raise
productivity in the sphere of domestic work - despite some trivial
labour saving devices, this remains a world of drudgery. Finally, the
persistence of this unsocialised and unrewarded work is the material
basis of women's oppression, excluding them from equal status in
society.
>
>Which all means that under capitalism, health and education workers (say)
>involved in the production of labour-power (variable capital), are
>productive of value, even if the non-capitalist organization of some of
>this (public sector schools and health services) leads to distortions in
>the calculation of pricing and costing etc. These "services" are not the
>same as the services of the private servants Marx discusses in Theories of
>Surplus Value. For those who can't bring themselves to acknowledge these
>producers of commodities as productive workers, there's always the
>semi-cop-out of calling them "service workers".

Yes, health workers (say) are not the same as servants. But there is a
confusion here between what capitalism as a whole does through the state
and the way that individual capitalists (the ordinary existence of
capital) purchase labour-power. Employees in Britain's National Health
Service do not produce a commodity labour power, they produce a use-
value 'health'. Since they do not charge members of the public for their
service, it never becomes a commodity and hence its 'value' is never
represented in the value of the commodity labour power. The situation is
of course quite different in the US, where rising health costs are a
direct consideration for individual employers. In Britain, the state
takes on the burden of providing health care (inadequately) because of
the shortsighted behaviour of British capitalists, who would happily
work their employees into an early grave. Britain's National Health
Service might be a social necessity for capitalist reproduction, but it
is not a source of surplus value, but rather a drain on profits (as they
never tire of telling us).

>
>Remember all the time that our present imperialist stage of the capitalist
>mode of production is so thoroughly socialized and planned behind the backs
>of the actors in it and the relations of production, that this kind of
>socialization of the production of the commodity labour-power under
>capitalist appearances is the "natural" development. The Thatcherite model
>of back to private production for everything is destructive of the social
>need for skilled, healthy labour-power.
>
The only conditions under which the production of the commodity labour
power could be socialised in a capitalist society would be wholly
barbaric, since they would imply the end of the labourers' formal
freedom to dispose of that commodity. Such conditions were close in the
apartheid organisation of labour in barracks, or under slavery in the
plantation system in the US.


-- 
James Heartfield


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