Haines:
That the worker is paid less than the value he
creates offers the possibility of exploitation, but the exploitation
is not actual until the surplus value in the commodity is actualized
privately in the market place.
my comment:
I disagree. The worker is being exploited whether the poor capitalist realizes
his profit or not. That, according to Marx, is the uniqueness of labor
power. Why? Because the worker will not appreciate the full brunt of his
labor in capitalist relations; that the capitalist doesn't profit doesn't
negate that neither had the worker.
Haines:
Let me speculate. I think we have to distinguish the fact of economic
exploitation from a subjective feeling of being exploited. It seems
the two are related, but are not the same or reduce to the same thing.
The former comes into our explanation of the capitalist system, and
the latter bears on the issue of revolution.
I've had jobs where I've had the feeling I was overpaid (only one job)
and some where I felt underpaid. What is important here is the
presumption of a norm of fair wages.
my comment:
You mock Marxism here. The exploitation of labor is an objective thing. All
workers can readily agree with Marx on this matter. Even the opportunist labor
hacks cry that "we produce and service this and that ..... we demand our fair
share" which they'll never get. You persist in ranking your presumptions
as actual relations. That is your error.
Haines:
What, then, is the connection between subjective feeling of what is a
proper wage and a scientific understanding that the system is
exploitive? I think this is a good question because more often than
not the folks I have worked with did not go around grumbling about
being exploited. They would like to make more, and are bitter about
the incompetents holding higher positions, but on the whole were not
bitter about prevailing wages. You might disagree with this
assessment, but it has been my experience.
my comment:
The difference is Imperialism. My father was a waiter and my mother a teacher
and we were raised in Spanish Harlem. We weren't the poorest of folks in fact
[subjectively speaking] we were quite "blessed" my mother would say. But they
really have now only debt and that which their wages converted to use value.
And my father can't remember much. Not even their house is worth enough to
make selling gainful.
That a master can make a slave feel better off ...... well, you know the
rest. Unless you engage in small business, the capitalist owns your labor
power for the time of that "social contract", a law dictated by the capitalist
class. My point remains in the manipulation of the kid story.
Haines:
But taking my estimate of the situation as being correct for the sake
or argument, why would people then be inclined to overturn the system,
as distinct from, say, joining a union because it increases wages 10%
and brings some benefits. People know quite well that they are
producing profits for the owner, but if they subjectively feel their
wages reflect the norm for their kind of work and effort, they don't
seem to resent that.
my comment:
I suppose that you enjoy playing the devils advocate. You understand that we
live better off in America usa because the rest of the world suffers. It is
the resistance of the fighters of the world that pushes Imperialism to engage
in the production of arms which the working classes pay for. No longer does
capital invest their own gains in their speculative endeavors .... it is all
"other people's money". Even the past struggles of the no longer better paid
workers compelled capital to employ computers and robotics to production to
achieve their intent of depreciating the significance of labor yet, not so for
the cost of their subsistence. We become further impoverished.
Haines:
So what connection do I see between subjective ire and objective
exploitation? a) I see the individual as an emergent process and
therefore having needs that don't reduce to near subsistence. These
needs are not biological (or include adequate preparation for the
job), but needs as a developing human being that transcend
subsistence. b) I see the individual as a social being whose nature
includes social needs and capacities that transcend subsistence. In
short, wages are fair as far as the labor market is concerned and as
regards the worker as an individual, but quite unfair in terms of his
development as a social being.
my comment:
I wonder if you'll include these revelations in your Marxist glossary. The
development of the social being in capitalism involves money which translates
as wages to the proletariat. Did not your presumptions and emerging
probability apriori deductions prepare you for the atrocities facing the
working class now? Including the GM, FORD BOEING etc. We don't even have a
viable steel industry. And witness what is happening to the transport workers
everywhere. It is not good dreaming the good life while failing to
perceive the logical conclusion to the decay of Imperialism?
Haines:
Unfortunately, people can resign themselves to underdevelopment. In
the local Pratt and Whitney plant, a lot of workers drive in on their
motorcycles completely stoned and don't care a hoot about the IAM.
They are paid relatively well for subsistence (the IAM has done a good
job), but their human development they consider irrelevant. Also, some
people acquire the illusion of self-development from things like
religion. Some people discover their humanity outside of work, such as
in their family or neighborhood bar. But these sources of relief are
not a real adequate or long-term solution to the problem of
exploitation on the job.
my comment:
Now I ask you: WHY do you believe that people become this way? I used to
organize for IAM as a machinist. Answer: Because workers realize that their
privilege standard of living is the result of death and destruction and it
haunts them whether they regress to denial or not. One can not help
witnessing that our society is corrupt and rotten to the bone and that our
ethics and morality as a great and just people has gone caputz. This
subjective condition itself is oppressing. Enough to commit suicide. So
people find consolation in religion..... the opium where all is good and
forgiving.
Haines:
So far I've looked at the subjective side, offering comments that I'm
sure you find disagreeable. But what of the objective side of
exploitation? I've no doubt that with a little help, people are quite
able to understand their exploitation in objective terms, but the
problem is that this understanding does not really impact much on the
subjective determination to do something about it. Briefly, its value,
I think, is to help define proper courses of action rather than be the
impetus behind action.
my comment:
Disagreements work both ways. The objective is the decay of people's standard
of living (physically and mentally) and they will eventually respond. New
immigrant labor conscious of Imperialist horrors and the young workers entering
the labor market will not live the good old ways of their diminishing
counterparts. Rebellion is foreseeable. Imperialism can do as Europe and
concede to a revolutionary movement and survive another day, or resort to
fascism.
The american working class, in general, is not as class conscious as the
European or even the Mexican working class, for that matter, so fascism may be
next on the agenda and Obama out.
These words of mine here are merely my reflections of life under capitalism
guided by a doctrine which I have freely adopted. We all are influenced by one
idea or another, for "all type of thinking without exception is stamped with a
brand of a class".
f580
--- On Sat, 3/6/10, Haines Brown KB1GRM ET1 <bro...@historicalmaterialism.info>
wrote:
From: Haines Brown KB1GRM ET1 <bro...@historicalmaterialism.info>
Subject: Re: [MLL] Let us begin
To: "For the reaffirmation of Marxism-Leninism"
<marxist-leninist-list@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Date: Saturday, March 6, 2010, 9:28 AM
On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 11:14:25PM -0800, frankenstein580 wrote:
>
> Haines;
>
> Unfortunately, there's a lot of complications here. The sad fact is
> that scientists really have no idea what causation is (or to be more
> accurate, there's a wide range of views that are incompatible and no
> one of them do people generally find acceptable).
>
> my comment:
>
> It's not so much the "fact" that is "sad" but more the scientists
> who you are acquainted with since Causation and cause are concepts
> quite simply defined and explained and understood by society
> everywhere! Remember that by even your own admittance we are
> living in a materialist thinking world.
What I think you are pointing out is that causation is intuitively
obvious, but only problematic with the scientists I happen to have
encountered. If so, I agree. But there are two issues here: what does
the intuition imply and what's wrong with the scientists I've
encountered?
There's no question that we have an intuitive knowledge of causation.
What is meant by this? I suppose that it is not unlike the Humean
notion: some proximate events have a relation in which one entails
another.
This is a fact that we frequently observe. The problem comes with its
explanation. Why should one event entail another and how? Most
scientists don't worry about this because their intuitive knowledge of
causality is operational for them. But there are scientists of a more
philosophical bent or philosophers of science who ask themselves why
and how one event can entail another, and they really don't know. They
are not just a handful of troublemakers with whom I happen to be
acquainted, but _all_ of them in the sense that no one can agree and
their hypotheses are largely incompatible. This is one of the major
problems today in the philosophy of science.
A further and obvious question: so what? If the concept is
operational, why complicate things? The reason, I believe, is that
science consists of explanation, and it does not suffice that we can
accurately describe the world, but we need also explain it. The reason
is that while description support wise choices and adaption,
constructive action and control require an explanation of what is
being acted on. This applies as well to Marxism: Marx did not just
describe the dynamics of capitalism, but tried to explain it.
> Haines:
>
> This has led me to shift the basis of explanation from causal
> "necessity" to a noncausal relation of processes that enabling
> rather than imposing or determining.
>
> my comment:
>
> Did you make up the word "noncausal" because I couldn't find it in
> any dictionary, collegiate or otherwise? But I will guess that it
> means without cause. So, I gather that you prefer the non causal
> process because it enables you to explain things that would
> otherwise impose on you to determine its cause. And then you go
> on to charge the great scientist Darwin with complicity in this
> absurdity!
No, you are making things unnecessarily complicated. The word
non-causal (probably needs a hyphen) is not a word in the dictionary,
but a conjunction of two words in frequent use, the meaning of which
is intuitively obvious (or I'm missing your point). Philosophers of
science discuss a number of relationships into which things can enter.
For example, many social scientists speak of a functional relation.
For the mind-body problem, there is a relation called supervenience. I
don't happen to think much of either, but the point is that it is
broadly assumed there can be or there are relationships that are not
causal, ie, are non-causal.
In a Newtonian (mechanistic) world, it is simple to infer that one
event causes another in the sense that it necessitates it. The more
recent recognition that this necessity is probabilistic does not
really change the basic idea, although it makes an explanation of
causality even more challenging. But in Darwinism, we encounter a
radically different situation in which an evolutionary outcome is not
reducible to the properties of some initial state, but is in some way
novel. Explanatory relationships not "causal" in the ordinary sense of
the world. The reason why Marx and so many others, especially today,
look back to Darwin as hinting at an altogether different conception
of processes in that it addresses what we today call emergent
phenomena.
Emergent phenomena are the concern of the human sciences, but also
many processes in the natural sciences, and not just biology, but also
physics. These are sometimes called the historical sciences. An
example is cosmology and meteorology, such as a tropical storm.
In emergent phenomena, while an outcome depends on an initial state,
it is only probabilistically determined by it. So a reductionist
explanation obviously won't suffice. My sense is that folks who seek
explanation in the historical sciences look to the presence of some
factor that goes beyond a description of the observables present in an
initial state of the system. In the human sciences, this traditionally
was human creativity explained by the fact that humans are chips off
the divine block. In light of today's thoroughgoing materialism
(spoken usually of as "ontological monism"), however, this is not
acceptable, for the mind is seen not as ontologically different from
matter, but as an emergent level of matter having its own distinctive
properties, and not essentially (ontologically) any different than the
rest of matter.
To explain emergence is one of the great challenges facing current
science. The literature on what is called the mind-body problem is
enormous (incidentally, it is a lot more accessible and interesting
than the old analytic philosophical approach). It is the concern of
open-system thermodynamics and comes into quantum mechanics. A popular
approach is to simply throw into the soup a factor that is random or
chaotic, and this is what Darwin did. However, I personally don't find
this to be really a solution, and my sense is that most others don't
think so either. I suppose the reason is that its presumption supports
a description of emergent processes without really explaining them,
but I know some would disagree with this.
My remark you quote above does not solve the problem either, but only
aimed to classify the relation between an initial state and an
emergent outcome in terms other than mechanical or unequivocal
determinism. In Aristotelian terms, the initial state as a sufficient
but not necessary condition, but it goes beyond Aristotle in that
outcomes are constrained by the empirical specifics of that initial
situation. My comment really was not at all adventurous, and it only
said that we can't represent the relation of base or initial state and
the emergent level in terms of causality in the Humean sense, but
instead as one that enables. I believe everyone, almost without
exception today, would agree with this cautious point because it is
descriptive, not explanatory.
> Haianes:
>
> This approach is also discussed in the natural sciences, and is
> understood as drawing upon the Darwinian paradigm, but it is much
> less discussed in the social sciences. From this standpoint,
> "explanation" is limited to a modest role. It can explain why
> something is possible, why it is likely and what drives it, but not
> why an empirically specific outcome is necessary (again, Darwinian
> evolution is a good example).
>
>
> my comment:
>
> "an empirically specific outcome" like everything else, can be
> Determined [please forgive me] with time..... "for everything is
> knowable" and we would not be condemned to hell for eating of the
> tree of knowledge. Why certain outcomes in a process are necessary
> can be opened to all types of philosophical interpretations since
> everyone is entitled to an opinion, but most people, especially the
> proletariat, prefer order in their understanding of nature, despite
> the contradictions, and would not put up with aprioritic [yes, I
> made the word up] ramblings.
>
> Scientists understand and KNOW, [the concept has been substantiated]
> why phenomena in nature is necessary. Do you understand why
> anything is necessary? I'm confident that you'll write back and
> claim that you do!
No, I think you are raising or at least mixing in a different issue
here.
To an extent I'd agree that everything is in principle knowable and
that our knowledge has been cumulative. But I can't just say this
without qualification. One point is that nature is inexhaustible and
so our knowledge, no matter how long we are around and pursue it, will
never be complete. Lenin made this point. The second qualification is
that this knowledge is always a function of mind and as a result is
one sided (Peirce). Knowledge cannot be a reflection of reality, but
is a creation of mind, and so is only an analog that can correspond in
some way with the actual world. Here Lenin is more problematic, for
some of his statements have been understood as a reflection theory of
truth. If he really did have such a theory, he was clearly wrong, in
the eyes of Marxists and non-Marxists alike for at least for the past
half-century. Please don't jump on me for this remark, and let us
merely say we disagree.
You bring up an important point, which is the link between explanation
and determination. I think there is probably wide agreement that
explanation arises from necessity of some kind, and the issue is just
what is meant by those terms.
Just to illustrate, one foundation of modern science, which
incidentally originated from a Platonic mysticism, is that the world
is coherent, in the sense that knowledge of one thing is relevant to
and throws some light upon other things. It is useful to know here
that European feudalism was very technologically oriented, curious,
and accumulated significant knowledge about the world (in part thanks
to Jews and Moslems in Iberia), but it was crippled by its assumption
that the coherence of the world was an effect of god's will or plan,
not something about the world itself. In any case, the notion of
coherence (today, an ontological monism) is fundamental to science and
it implies that things have some kind of necessary relation.
However, what is meant by this term "necessary"? In a Newtonian world,
it is an unequivocal determinism in the Laplacean sense that knowledge
of one thing can be reduced to knowledge of other things.
Unfortunately, this represents an infinite regress and today it is
seen as an exception (pertains to absolutely closed systems). Today we
see that determinism can be probabilistic, and either does not apply
or applies in only a very loose sense to emergent processes for which
a reductionist explanation does not work by definition.
However, I believe your second paragraph is simply wrong, at least as
I understand it. Scientists have no idea why things are necessary
(what justifies the assumption that the world is coherent). Kant's
answer, although it has permeated the social sciences, it not really
satisfactory. Scientists know that things are "necessary" (using the
word very broadly to include emergent phenomena that are not
unequivocally determinant), but (like causality) cannot explain it. It
is an a priori assumption that makes science possible.
Now you ask, rhetorically, if I think I understand why things are
necessary. Well, my concern is for emergent phenomena, and so I'd have
to stretch the word so far that it is almost useless. What I was
getting at in context was to impose a limitation on explanation that
might or might not be acceptable to scientists. That is, I find matter
to have to capacity to produce outcomes that are not entirely
predictable and therefore are not knowable in advance or can be
entirely explained. A simple and rather obvious example is the work of
an artist. You might predict the style and occasion, the materials
that will be used, the theme, but you sure can't predict the empirical
specifics of the result. If you could it wouldn't be creative, it
wouldn't be art.
I haven't brought this up so far, but it is my opinion, and I don't
think it unreasonable or unconventional, that the predictability of an
outcome is a function of the closure of the process we seek to
explain. An absolutely closed process is unequivocally deterministic;
a partially open process has a probabilistic outcome; a completely
open process is unintelligible. What I do is to see somewhat open
processes as universal and an absolutely closed (the ideal laboratory)
or open process as hypothetical limiting cases.
So, in answer to your question, can I explain why things are
necessary, part of the answer is that it depends on what is meant by
necessary. For example, can we represent one thing as enabling another
as a necessary relation? If so, the question is, can I explain
emergence? The simple answer is, yes. Now understand that there is no
generally acceptable answer to this question. Some (like Jaegon Kim at
one point) seem to reify functional properties; others feed on
Prigogine and inject a bit of chaos. I don't think much of these
solutions, and most others don't either. My saying yes to your
question might seem arrogant on my part, but keep in mind that trying
to explain the relation of things is my occupation and intent, and I
feel I have an answer that might be right and seems better than other
answers. No claim to TRUTH here.
As I've already mentioned in previous posts, I seek to define
"process" in terms of the ontological presumptions that are justified
because thy make intentional action possible. I argue the now
uncontentious position that all things are open processes. This means
I must substitute for causal relations of events a non-causal relation
of processes in which outcomes are constrained rather than
unequivocally predictable. This implies that explanation is always
partial and never complete or absolute. Given all this, I'd answer,
yes, to your question, not because I have all the answers, but because
I've tried to put together an explanatory hypothesis that addresses
the contradictions of prior thinking, is sensitive to the current
state of science and the philosophy of science, and most importantly
is supportive of working-class struggle.
To what extent this deepens Marx or contradicts him is, in my view, a
secondary issue, for my concern is working-class liberation, not
justifying Marx. I'm sure you disagree with some or all of this, but
so be it. I've described "where I'm coming from" and see no reason to
be apologetic for it.
> my comment:
>
> Do you mean the non-causual "terms of current science"? Do current
> scientist now believe that there is no cause for current effects
> because some so called philosophers can't understand the necessity
> in it?
I hope my comments above shed some light on your question. You reduce
the agreed-upon notion that the world is coherent (ontological monism)
to a specific kind of relation of things, a Newtonian unequivocal
determination. As I indicated above, there are possibly other kinds of
coherence and other kinds of necessary relation. My example above of
the artist you might dismiss as peculiar to art, but is not social
action also creative and therefore only partially predictable? It
seems to me we can define what makes revolution possible and
necessary, but we sure can't predict when it will happen and just what
it will be specifically like. To make what is now a point of
consensus, we discuss such things in probabilistic terms, not just
because of ignorance, but also because the world itself is
probabilistic (necessarily consists of open processes). The limitation
I would impose on explanation does not at all imply its opposite, that
things can't be explained in a way needed to support constructive
action. It addresses possibility and necessity and supports some
prediction of probable outcomes, but cannot predict empirically
specific outcomes.
> Haines:
>
> This statement could be true, and for the moment let us assume that
> it is true. So what is one to do? Stick with Feuerbach and remain
> out of touch with current knowledge? Abandon Feuerbach and make sure
> current knowledge serves working-class liberation? I have chosen the
> latter path. Have you
>
> my comment:
>
> ...
>
> Lenin agrees with Feuerbach on this the question of causality. And
> I would certainly adopt the materialist approach of understanding
> the necessary cause and necessary effects of social phenomena in our
> relations with capital so that we may correctly an in accord with
> the objective and subjective conditions tackle the CAUSE for the
> emancipation of labor so that we may attain the EFFECT that we
> NEED. You say that you wouldn't.
You miss the point of my remark. I picked Feuerback, but I could as
well have picked, say, Ricardo. My point was that non-Marxist
scientists of the past have views we have transcended today, and that
we should admit their limitations and develop our outlook in terms of
the best knowledge of today (i.e., draw upon the best understanding of
Marx today and be responsive to the ideological function of much of
what is held true today).
I repeat an earlier point. Feurbach's inversion of the relation of
idea and matter, which Marx and Lenin agree with, has not been an
issue for a century. We no longer have to combat objective idealism,
at least not in the natural sciences, and so we gain little by
insisting on the word materialism. Nearly everybody is a materialist
in some sense today. What is important today are the implications of
this ontological monism.
As for the word cause, it is obviously useful in daily speech. It is
quite reasonable to ask what caused the recent financial crisis and to
identify factors that contributed to it. In our minds, to explain the
crisis we isolate the economy as a closed system in order to identity
those factors that seem, intuitively, to be contributory. But a factor
analysis has a number of problems (I'll not belabor the point). The
main thing is that when it comes to revolution, it has not yet
happened, and so we can't explain a coming revolution. All we can do
is identify factors that seem to move toward making it more possible
and necessary (in the sense that only revolution will solve
working-class problems). These factors don't "cause" the emancipation
of labor because the effect (emancipation) has not happened yet, and
also because it is the working class that will do it, not "factors".
All we can say is that they contribute to or are necessary conditions
for that emancipation. In other words, there is no such thing as a
cause that has no actual effect. I don't think we disagree, and all
that is needed is some clarification of words.
> Haines:
>
> I did not say "instant" value, but "potential" value. Your example
> looses me. I hire a kid to go to the store. If the kid accepts my
> nickel, he is obliged to go there. This is a fair exchange (in
> principle, anyway, a zero-sum game), and no new value is created,
> but merely an exchange of comparable values.
>
>
> my comment:
>
> There is no new value created, it is true, to the candy bar, but the
> kid would have had to cross the street, wait his turn at the
> counter, get slapped by a bully, and 15 minutes later returned to
> you with the candy bar. You paid him a nickel but the boy now feels
> he's entitled to a dollar..... the same price as the candy bar.
> You call the nickel an exchange of comparable values because the boy
> had agree prior to it. Like minimum wage is an exchange of
> comparable value to you, perhaps. That the kid had calculated that
> a nickel for his time was a fair exchange he now realizes that he
> was wrong and that you manipulated him to believe that it was.
I think you are changing the example in a way I did not understand to
be your original intent. You bring in contingencies that alter the
initial contract for exchange of comparable values. This is always the
case, but I was discussing the issue in terms of classical and Marxist
economics, which always presumes ceteris paribus. Some of the
contingencies might have worked in favor of the kid, such as a
neighbor offering to drive him to the candy store. Contingencies can
work both ways. They can alter the equivalency of the values that were
exchanged.
I was speaking of wages, the sale of labor time, as the exchange of
equivalent values because the purchase of labor time takes place in
the labor market. Contingencies certainly can affect that exchange. If
there's a labor contract and inflation occurs, the worker finds
himself getting less than he had initially agreed upon. But to
understand a closed system, we always preclude outside interventions
(ceteris paribus), although they are always present in fact and so our
predictions are always probabilistic. However, I can't leave things
like this because it might imply I'm being self-contradictory. What I
argued above and elsewhere is that the closed laboratory model of
positivism does not really explain anything without presuming a
reification of universal laws. I took your example of the candy bar as
presuming a closed system and I responded in like terms, but now you
clearly are talking about an open system and telling me that in an
open system, it turns out that after the fact the kid and owner did
not really exchange equivalent values. Of course you are right, but
the two situations, as I took them, are quite different.
Bringing in the minimum wage only obscures things more, for that's
another contingency. Ricardo and to some extent Marx had a scientific
grasp of the economy in terms of a closed system. Yet Marx otherwise
also presumes open systems. The only way this is not
self-contradictory is to inject a ceteris paribus clause (which puts
in doubt the reality of the laws one infers) or an admission that
predictions are only approximate (which politically is not useful).
However, since neither are viewed today as adequate explanations, the
trend has to presume systems are open right at the start, and if open,
it implies that the human agent is part of the system understudy. For
example, the influential work of Roy Bhaskar (warning: _not_ a good
read). But this kind of critical Marxism leaves me cold because, while
it recovers the creative individual, tends to underplay structural
determinations and class.
To clear up your last sentence or two, when the nickel was paid it was
a fair exchange under the conditions at the time, but subsequent
contingencies come in that make it no longer a fair exchange. When the
exchange actually took place, neither party was being exploited,
fooled or misled in terms that existed at that moment. That
contingencies came in to alter that equivalency of value does not mean
the kid was fooled, but that something intervened to change the
equation. If the owner knew in advance the kid would have a lot more
problems carrying out his task than the kid realized, now we can speak
of the kid having been misled or exploited.
The real underling issue behind all these complications is that in a
closed market, without contingencies, only equivalent values are
exchanged. This is clearly Marx's position. He insisted that
exploitation depends on a unity of the sphere's of production and
exchange (hence the "secret" of the commodity), rather than just
either by itself. That the worker is paid less than the value he
creates offers the possibility of exploitation, but the exploitation
is not actual until the surplus value in the commodity is actualized
privately in the market place. In contrast, in a socialist economy,
where the worker also creates surplus value, we don't think of him as
being exploited. The is because that the surplus value is appropriated
and actualized by the social whole _and_ we represent the worker as a
social being (the "and" is important here, but often overlooked).
Except for situations such as sweat labor, a labor market in which
there is little available labor or too much of it, etc., there is no
exploitation in the sphere of production itself, which is before
surplus value is actualized. I believe all this is just standard
Marxism.
> Haianes:
>
> generally, one is paid a fair wage in terms of the labor market. The
> surplus value that your labor creates and which is actualized by the
> market sale of the commodity you create, is constrained by the
> regime of private property. To get at the heart of the matter, the
> whole affair is quite fair in regard to you as an individual worker,
> but quite unfair in regard you as a social being.
>
>
> my comment:
>
> Well, sir, you would make a bad communist. The very opposite of
> your remark is why we're all fighting capitalism. Even if the
> capitalist were to pay us well for our subsistence, we would still
> be exploited. But that is not the case anymore for mostly
> everyone.... besides being exploited at the work place..... [that is
> if you subscribe to Marx theory of surplus value] we are exploited
> by the landlord, the consumer markets, and the speculators.
> Trillions of our tax money go to the speculators and now the
> governments are cutting away at our resources to make up for the
> debt. It is unfair to us as a social being as it is unfair to us
> as an individual worker.
Please note that I contrasted capitalism with socialism and did not
mention communism, where conceivably there might be no wages or
markets. But this is point has no bearing on the point you raise.
Let me speculate. I think we have to distinguish the fact of economic
exploitation from a subjective feeling of being exploited. It seems
the two are related, but are not the same or reduce to the same thing.
The former comes into our explanation of the capitalist system, and
the latter bears on the issue of revolution.
I've had jobs where I've had the feeling I was overpaid (only one job)
and some where I felt underpaid. What is important here is the
presumption of a norm of fair wages. I had a job a few years in which
I worked on missile radar proximity fuses, and felt I was underpaid
because of my prior training and because I believed that other
companies were payng more for equivalent work. I did not change jobs
because it was then difficult to get a job and because of inertia.
Note that my subjective feeling was based on my presumed knowledge of
the labor market. I also once worked in a communist society ;-) in
which I was poorly paid, but that was irrelevant: it was as a
submarine sailor (old diesel boats; the culture of the nuke navy is
entirely different).
What, then, is the connection between subjective feeling of what is a
proper wage and a scientific understanding that the system is
exploitive? I think this is a good question because more often than
not the folks I have worked with did not go around grumbling about
being exploited. They would like to make more, and are bitter about
the incompetents holding higher positions, but on the whole were not
bitter about prevailing wages. You might disagree with this
assessment, but it has been my experience.
But taking my estimate of the situation as being correct for the sake
or argument, why would people then be inclined to overturn the system,
as distinct from, say, joining a union because it increases wages 10%
and brings some benefits. People know quite well that they are
producing profits for the owner, but if they subjectively feel their
wages reflect the norm for their kind of work and effort, they don't
seem to resent that. I suppose because it is because the capitalist
has the "good fortune" of owning the works, and profit naturally comes
to them as a result. (I can hear you gnashing your teeth over this,
and perhaps its worth raising these points for debate, but in the
present context it may be a different issue).
So what connection do I see between subjective ire and objective
exploitation? a) I see the individual as an emergent process and
therefore having needs that don't reduce to near subsistence. These
needs are not biological (or include adequate preparation for the
job), but needs as a developing human being that transcend
subsistence. b) I see the individual as a social being whose nature
includes social needs and capacities that transcend subsistence. In
short, wages are fair as far as the labor market is concerned and as
regards the worker as an individual, but quite unfair in terms of his
development as a social being.
Unfortunately, people can resign themselves to underdevelopment. In
the local Pratt and Whitney plant, a lot of workers drive in on their
motorcycles completely stoned and don't care a hoot about the IAM.
They are paid relatively well for subsistence (the IAM has done a good
job), but their human development they consider irrelevant. Also, some
people acquire the illusion of self-development from things like
religion. Some people discover their humanity outside of work, such as
in their family or neighborhood bar. But these sources of relief are
not a real adequate or long-term solution to the problem of
exploitation on the job.
Assuming there's some truth in these informal comments (which may
obviously not be the case), it seems to me that very much part of a
revolutionary struggle is to encourage a recovery or development of
oneself as an emergent human being who is not just subsisting. In the
labor movement, this is sometimes referred to as "dignity". You may
not get a better contract, the the struggle for it makes you more
human. In a mass demonstration, one becomes a social agent, more than
just an individual. Broadly, what is needed is mass struggle that is
rational in that it probably will pay off because to some extent it
already has paid off at least in little ways. What this suggests is
that mass struggle has a positive feedback that can quickly result in
a take off to self-sustained growth, and we shouldn't be too
pessimistic just because it is not much is happening at this moment.
So far I've looked at the subjective side, offering comments that I'm
sure you find disagreeable. But what of the objective side of
exploitation? I've no doubt that with a little help, people are quite
able to understand their exploitation in objective terms, but the
problem is that this understanding does not really impact much on the
subjective determination to do something about it. Briefly, its value,
I think, is to help define proper courses of action rather than be the
impetus behind action.
Now, please understand that I've been speculating out loud and make no
claim that these remarks are the TRUTH. Also, my replies are taking up
too much time, and so I'll have to respond to smaller chunks of your
objections to my points.
Haines
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