[PEN-L:253] Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Max, Do you have Eileen Appelbaum's email address by any chance? Thanks in anticipation! Kind regards Martin Watts Department of Economics University of Newcastle New South Wales 2308 Australia Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office:(61) 2 4921-5069 (Phone) Office:(61) 2 4921-6919 (Fax) Home: (61) 2 4982-9611 (Phone/Fax/Modem) Home: (61) 2 4982-9158 (Phone)
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Can we have some real-life identifier here? Anthony D'Costa
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
To whom..., Mr. Lear writes: "Bill Gates in fact sells little, individualized, non-scalable factories (Excel, Word, etc.) for producing knowledge that are made out of software. Once in the hands of the end-user, they must then exert considerable effort to create new information." These are not factories, but conduits. All the functions of these common programs were done before, but in a more inefficient manner. The programmers at Microsoft (NOT Gates) and other software companies have allowed the bureuacracy to become more efficient, thus getting out of its own way faster. Software distributes knowledge and organizes it, rather than producing it for the most part. I think the importance of this distinction lies in the fact that we still measure economic success in availability of creature comforts, and information is not a creature comfort to the majority of workers. peace
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Rakesh, Strict labor-value adherence once again led you to the brink of absurdity on Saturday. The limit on mechanization is physics, not surplus value. Clearly, clearly, clearly, if a series of solar powered robots could be created to fulfill the needs of a group of people, they would no longer have to work. it is equally clear that it is possible to invent such robots under capitalism and it is equally clear that those robots would sell like hotcakes. Since the capitalist who made the robots wouldn't give atinker's damn about anyone but hiumself, he would be deaf to the pledings of his capitalist comrades that their economy was coming unhinged. At the end, he would probably be accepting barter instead of money, since values would go cock-eyed, but people would have their robots. peace
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Reflecting again on this question and in the light of Alfred Sohn- Rethel's Geistige und koerperliche Arbeit (1970 -- the English translation is unfortunately deficient), and his Warenform und Denkform (1971, untranslated, as far as I know) with its remarkable 1936 critique of the Frankfurt School, Statt einer Einleitung: Expose zur Theorie der funktionalen Vergesellschaftung, Ein Brief an Theodor W. Adorno (this was Sohn-Rethel's doctoral dissertation, and was also remarkable for being published at all in Germany in 1936) -- it occurs to me that (and perhaps this is all just restating the obvious): 1.The commodity is literally a prefiguring [embodiment] of need-satisfaction. It therefore presupposes the existence of an objective correlative (a consumer) with an unsatisfied need. 2.In capitalist commodity-production the commodity capital produces is labour-power, whose use-value is the capacity to valorise capital [an evidence of the hypertrophy of commodity-production and the exhaustion of capitalism's historical mission is the coexistence of historically-unprecedented pools of pauperised, landless proletarians in the reserve army -- 1.5 bn at least -- with the overaccumulation of capital in the metropoles and a high-waged workforce of no more than 200 million worldwide, required to produce the mass of relative surplus-value needed to valorise it]. 3.The capitalist labour-process is therefore a moment of the [rigorous] exclusion of Nature (matter) since commodities cannot be realised except as values, ie shorn of phenomenal [material] form. The content is value, the form is matter. 4.The capitalist mode of production therefore requires as its 'adequate' science a mode of nature-objectification, without which valorisation is literally impossible and even unthinkable. 5.Capitalism thus calls into existence Nature as object-realm, in order to exclude it by knowing it [the task of philosophy began with the first true price-forming markets, presumably in Periclean Athens. But Zeno and Aristarchus could not become Newton and Galileo until proto-capitalism already launched the process of self-expaning value production]. 6.Once Nature is known [objectified, thru the historical working-out of bourgeois science] the space between need and satiation must collapse, both phenomenologically-speaking, and in value terms. The commodity cannot by definition be the bearer of a prefigured need-satisfaction if it already embodies/is the other it prefigures. Equally, the exclusion of Nature collapses/is inverted once Nature qua object is totalised by production, which is the long-run tendency of science even though this totalising arrives perversely through the mystificatory processes of detail labour and reductive science. In the full development of the social division of labour, Nature itself is captured and above all the nature of humans. 7.Thus value as the object of production (ie its self-expansion) points irretrievably beyond its origins to its self-effacement, and its work is completed when the social divison of labour is totalised, a historical state which self-expanding value prefigures in its own totalised nature. Thus the ultimate fate of capitalism is written all over its fate: to be extinguished in its own development, out of which will also be extinguished the phenomenological [and physiological!] distinction between needs and satisfactions. 8. The true object of production is humankind itself, and just as humankind is imprisoned within the reifications of bourgeois science, so will it be emancipated when that science loses all objectivity and becomes the moment of self-creation. Mark
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Why is the theft of alien labor time a miserable foundation for creation of wealth? One reading of this *Grundrisse* passage is the one I offered: while the utilization of machinery has indeed been inspired by the need for relative surplus value (and for this no one had a greater appreciation than Marx, as Schumpeter underlined), Marx was arguing that the mechanization process would grow more irregular and the rate of the utilization of machinery diminish. The introduction of machine comes to cost more than the wages of the workers it can replace, though the machine would enable an economy in the actual expenditure of social labor time. A system based on the theft of alien labor time, i.e., the payment of labor only for the value of its labor power, has become a miserable basis for the development of wealth and the general intellect. The destruction of capitalist relations of production is sine qua non of human progress. The capitalist accounts in terms of his costs, not in terms of the actual expenditure of labor or in the social or environmental effects of his decisions. This is why one can only be sickened to see that *Fundamentals of Corporate Finance* seems to have become the best-seller among undergrads today. Even the formation of even fixed capital, as the embodiment of social knowledge as a direct force of production, is not the driving force of capitalism; that was the point of the Mattick passage. The development of science and technology could be the basic impetus of post-capitalist society however. If Adorno said in his masterful critique of Veblen that it is not men's souls but the law of value which regulates bourgeois society, Mattick reminded us that value relations determine and limit the course of scientific and technological development. I agree that more highly skilled labor tends not be paid above its value, and is subject to what Carchedi has theorized as a dequalification process. After a discussion of the reproduction schemes (which I am still thinking about, especially in the form James Galbraith has given them in his theory of capital goods), Mark concludes: So the idea that the CMP is inimical to science because it is based on labour-time commensuration is surely wrong. I did not argue that the commensuration of labor time is the limit to mechanization; again, the labor basis of calculation for replacing machinery is limited because capital by its very nature only pays for labor power. This limit, discussed by Bauer, Blake, Rosdolsky, is based on the distinction between labor and labor-power; I don't see what labor time commensuration has to do with this specific argument. I agree that this is more 1929 than 1949. Best, Rakesh
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
For once I disagree with Rakesh: Mattick fell into productivist error,
which Marx defintiely did not (and I remember the strong terms in
which Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who knew Mattick, criticised him for this).
Better to read the Grundrisse than Wages, Prices and Profit, and then
to put Mattick's quote in context, and the context is indeed 'the
abolition of the wages system', ie, the supercession of labour-
time as 'the miserable measure' of value. But that means to end
value itself AND THEREFORE THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
PRODUCTION- CONSUMPTION which the capitalist labour-process
CONSTITUTES.
This is the core of Marx's thought in the whole Grundrisse, and
therefore the whole of Marx! So the value-critique of the
composition of capital APPLIES ONLY WITHIN CAPITALISM
and provides no yardstick for SOCIALIST appropriation of nature
WITHIN WHICH BY DEFINITION there can be no distinction
between production-consumption ('consumptive production, productive
consumption') and THEREFORE no such THING as 'fixed capital',
which is EXACTLY not more or less than the middle term between
society and nature, the thing which CONSTITUTES
the space dividing production from consumption, within which the
labour-process is sited.
As for low wages, low capital/output ratios, it is simply senseless to
look at the US economy in isolation and if even Marx in his day was not so
constrained, why must we be? It is pure fetishism not merely of the
nation-state instance/level but of 'the economy' as a reified form of
labour-time allocations. In any case, as we have just been discussing,
US wages are NOT low in PPP terms.
And why are low wages socially regressive in themselves? They are only low
relative to the costs of labour in other sectors. The model Rakesh gives is
low-pay workers in the South producing consumer goods; science-based, capital-
goods industries with high-value labour-power is located in the metropoles.
If per contra the low wages were being paid to scientists or workers in
producer-goods industries, the effect would be to increase the profitability
of investment in fixed plant.
If however wages are relatively higher in knowledge-based sectors, or in capital-
equipment sectors, it must be because the cost of reproduction of labour-
power in those sectors is disproportionately high, ie, because capital
in those sectors has a relatively high OC or because the unproductive
(in marxian value terms) labour deployed in universities, research facilities
etc, does not produce a flow of innovations sufficient to lower the value of
its own inputs directly or of the outputs of consumer good sectors (Branch 2)
which might indirectly lower the value of labour-power in unproductive sectors.
Ending wage-labour would not, on this reading, free up new sources of
productivity or hidden sci-tech resources. There is a strict conection
between value-composition and technical-composition of capital. It is
not a matter of inter-sectoral value relations betwen Branch I and Branch
II alone. Each provides the other's inputs in any case. More fundamentally,
it is a matter of the productivity of science itself. I believe that what
I have said here answers the charge the capitalism is fundamentally inimical
to science; it is only inefficient at the margins, where misapplication of
capital or conflict between (imperial) relations and (scientific-technical)
forces of production produce cycles of slow-growth, with perhaps some
positive feedbacks. In that situation, 'socialist planning' as we have
known it, might indeed be an 'answer' to chronic cyclical depressions,
but would be unable to liberate qualitiatively new productive forces.
That is the precise history of Soviet planning, from its early heroic
Leontieff days to its shameful end.
So the idea that the CMP is inimical to science because it is based on
labour-time commensuration is surely wrong. On the contrary, the essence
of the matter is that classical(Galilean) physics (cf Koyre, Cassirer,
Sohn-Rethel) arose as the adequate knowledge-base of laisser-faire
capitalism, capable of objectifying process within machinery and
forming the substrate of the capitalist labour-process. Before the
labour process could be constutited as a space whose poles were production
and consumption, it was first necessray to constitute Kantian space-time
as an external continuum within which human intersubjectivity could be
fixated.
The breakdown of the Newtonian synthesis exactly coincides with the rise
of monopoly capitalism in which process production gradually reduces
the worker to the status of bystander, as Marx predicted in Grundrisse
(the quote is a long one, and in it Marx makes the point that the totalising
quality of science, which is what capital seeks to implement, nevertheless
took place in an opposite form, thru detail labour):
In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct
reality in this respect as
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
William S. Lear wrote: And how, exactly, is the marginal cost of info-production zero? I can understand how this might be very small, for certain "info". But even replicating electronic messages carries a cost that is non-zero (ever try to administer a busy, high-speed network or a mail server? Ever try to add a new node?). What sort of "info" do you have in mind here? 'The marginal cost of information is effectively zero'. Perelman, M, Class Warfare in the Information Age p88. I agree that effectively zero isn't exactly zero, if you want to quibble. But the marginal cost of MS Works is the few cents a CD costs. Netscape and Linux are free. I can log onto Murdoch newspapers for free. I can listen to the radio. Once networks are running, the marginal cost of a byte is infinitesimal (how much does this email cost?) If initial investments are high and marginal prices vanishingly small, what is the ROI going to be in the absence of cartelisation and privatisation of knowledge? Mark
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
And how, exactly, is the marginal cost of info-production zero? I can I presume what Prof. Perelman meant was that once created, information can be used by additional persons or additional times without cost, unlike depreciable capital or 'exhaustible' consumption goods. Conveying or preserving said information via the printed page or the byte is another matter and possibly not zero in cost. You might be alluding to the point, with which I don't disagree, that the MC statement is trivial in light of the definition of information, sort of like saying a firm arse tends not to sag. MBS == Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 1200 202-775-8810 (voice) 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-0819 (fax) Washington, DC 20036 Opinions here do not necessarily represent the views of anyone associated with the Economic Policy Institute. ===
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
Rakesh Bhandari wrote: Why is the theft of alien labor time a miserable foundation for creation of wealth? I have a somewhat different interpretation of miserable. My reading of the passage is, that as direct labor becomes a smaller and smaller part of the entire production process of a commodity -- and as scientific or what Marx called universal labor becomes more important -- it makes no sense [miserable] to concentrate on squeezing the last elements of economic efficiency out of the production process. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: High Wages or Abolition of Wages?
On Sat, March 21, 1998 at 11:42:31 (+) Mark Jones writes: ... the era of so-called informatics, which, as Rob Schaap and I and Michael Perelman and many many others have been and are pointing out, contains a radical internal contradiction, in that the marginal cost of info-production is zero. And how, exactly, is the marginal cost of info-production zero? I can understand how this might be very small, for certain "info". But even replicating electronic messages carries a cost that is non-zero (ever try to administer a busy, high-speed network or a mail server? Ever try to add a new node?). What sort of "info" do you have in mind here? We should remember that most software systems, on the back of which rides the era of informatics, are not scalable. That is, this dominant scale relation of software (decreasing returns to scale) exists not only in software production itself (because it in turn uses software), but characterizes the software products that are produced. Though I don't have empirical evidence to support this, this is something I deal with professionally on a day-to-day basis: one of my skills is in writing scalable high-performance software systems and believe me, it can be miserably difficult to get right. It is much easier to write one-off, non-scalable software which is costly and inefficient for the end-user. Bill Gates in fact sells little, individualized, non-scalable factories (Excel, Word, etc.) for producing knowledge that are made out of software. Once in the hands of the end-user, they must then exert considerable effort to create new information, as any user of even a word processing system knows. Gates is rich not because of the supposed zero marginal cost of info-production. Gates is rich because he was able to help create an inefficient market based on atomized computers which ran atomized software, both of which (computer platform and software) could then more easily be made "obsolete" with a flick of the corporate wrist. Just as the prescriptions of the market are not for the powerful, so too the fantasies of the "liberative" potential of a personal computer on every desk are not for serious (corporate) computer users, who have long realized the benefits of large-scale and scalable client/server computer systems (not to mention true multi-tasking operating systems, such as UNIX as opposed to that Lockean toy OS, Windows). One of the reasons that Gates hates the Internet is that it makes his pathetic PC-based operating system irrelevant, and allows users to create a much more efficient network of information-sharing on their own, wiring it as it suits *their* needs, not the needs of Microsoft. I claim that attention must be paid to the technologies that are actually used to produce and propagate information, because they determine to what extent and with what ease you can create information: the act of information creation is not simply when you think it up, but when it arrives in the hands/minds of those who will use it, hence transmission mechanisms are socially integral to its production, hence absence of scalable computer systems (software and hardware) which provide the transmission mechanisms are to me evidence of non-zero marginal costs. Bill
