"They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes on them,
the present system simultaneously engenders *the material conditions* and
*the social forms* necessary for an economic reconstruction of society.
Instead of the *conservative* motto: 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's
work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the *revolutionary*
watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!'" Karl Marx, Value, Price and
Profit
_____________________________________________________
As Michael, Doug and others have mentioned the economy of high wages in
downloads and previous posts, I wanted to suggest another twist.
Otto Bauer, William J Blake and other Marxists have argued that because
capital by its very nature only pays for labor power, not labor, it
confronts an economic limit to the mechanization process: there may be a
specifically Marxian reason for Doug's criticism of the Rifkin/Aronowitz
total automation fantasies, which neither they nor their critics have
considered.
Ricardo reasoned that a machine, to be introduced, must cost less than the
workers it is designed to replace. But Marx had different system of
calculation: A machine replaces labor power power but labor power is than
than value it creates. The machine's money value represents all the labor
in its production, in no matter what proportion it represented wages and
surplus value. Hence the real economy of a machine is the difference
between its value and only the labor-power it replaces, not the total value
added by labor. Dead labor is less, then, than the living labor it
replaces. Since the difference is computed as between the cost of the
machinery and merely of the labor power it replaces, it follows that where
labor power costs little it may not pay to buy any machinery. (Note for
example GM's reversion to more labor intensive technique in its plants in
the newly industrializing world.)
Low wages can indeed become regressive from the point of view the
development of social knowledge, embodied in fixed capital, as a direct
force of production. A Marxist would argue, in addition, that the answer to
this is not really higher wages but the abolition of wage labor itself (the
costing of labor in terms of labor power). It's bourgeois economics or what
Jerry Levy would call (accurately) petty bourgeois empiricism to only point
out the obvious: the higher the "labor cost" in any country, the more
likely the utilization of machinery.
Doug--along with the authors of the inanely titled *Judas Economy*--has
suggested in previous posts that low wages may account for the low
capital/output ratio in the US. However, only if surplus value or the
wage form is abolished can the labor basis for replacing machinery be
greatly augmented and the advances in mechanization correspond fully to the
full technical knowledge of humankind: as Marx, Korsch and Mattick have put
it, the proletarian revolution would be the greatest of productive forces
by destroying capitalist relations of production.
This fundamental, earth-shattering and revolutionary insight can only be
gained on the *strict basis* of Marx's basic value-theoretic concepts.
Though Mattick's argument is broader (and perhaps different) than mine, I
shall quote him:
"For Marx, the development of fixed capital indicated 'to what degree
general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to
what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life it have
come under the general control of the general intellect and been
transformed in accordance with it.' [Grundrisse]. Yet this side of the
development of the productive frorces, and its immense acceleration through
the capitalist relations of production, always remain subordinated to the
value relationships between necessary and surplus labor and to their
changes as determined by the accumulation of capital. Technological and
scientific development by itself, as the determiner of the conditions of
social existence, may have validity for a future society, but it has no
independent meaning with regard to the capitalist system. It is for this
reason, according to Marx, that the forces of production cannot be reduced
to a matter of technological development, for they embody as well the
social activities released by their class determined course. Just as it is
not science and technology but capital that represents the productive
forces and their historical boundaries in modern society, *the proletarian
revolution would be the greatest of productive forces by destroying the
capitalist relations of production.* History is the history of class
struggle, not technology."
Marxism: last refuge of the bourgeoisie? (ME Sharpe, 1983;p. 102, my emphasis)
Best,
Rakesh
Otto Bauer ideas are related in Rosdolosky's *Making of Marx's Capital* (I
don't have my copy with me); William J Blake closes his chapter on relative
surplus value in Marxian Economic Theory and Its Criticism (1939) with this
idea (as usual, I have drawn almost verbatim from him).
