Tom Warren writes:
> 2)As Mark ONCE said, Marxist theory has had to
>be convoluted and streched beyond recognition to even begin to address the
>issue.
I don't think I said that. I was trying to say that classical economics couldn't
deal with 'resource consumption', even tho that's what the classicals inc
Ricardo - from the Physiocrats on - took as their prime object. The physiocrats
thought that the price of wheat determined the value of labour. There is an
obvious circularity about these physicalist arguments which none of the classicals
including Ricardo escaped.
Marx *did* deal with the wage. He took as his starting point society as a whole,
ie, the total social division of labour which together is the economy. But you
know all this.
But BTW, why do you suppose that the wage qua basket of consumption goods consists
only of 'natural resources', whatever they are? Either this is a truism, in that
even workers are 'part of nature', so therefore everything is part of nature, but
nothing is not, so it's a pointless observation; or it's surely just not so: not
just because, for example, you cannot regard services as simply physical (you
enter a futile iterative process if you say that, eg nannies, who provide
non-physical baby-management services, require food and other 'natural resources'
before they can provide their service, ditto telephone engineers, realtors etc).
The real reason it is wrong to say that the wage is determined by the worker's
consumption-basket is more basic: it's because the price of the wage is the same
as it is for every commodity, ie, it is determined by *the socially-necessary
abstract labour-time required to reproduce the commodity*. But what the wage buys,
is not anything natural, but on the contrary, it buys labour-power, the definition
of which is that it is human activity which would not and could not occur in
nature. [I was just rereading some old debates about the value of domestic
labour, in connection with a new book Sheila Rowbotham has published, and I was
struck again by how empty that whole debate was: it is surely clear ab initio that
domestic labour - ie mostly, women's unpaid labour - is not waged because it does
not produce a commodity, but only produces *the conditions fo existence of the
particular commodity* (ie labour-power). If domestic labour (including the process
of procreation!) could be waged, then capitalism would fall, because the central
paradox of capitalism is that it depends upon a commodity which it itself cannot
produce, ie, the commodity, labour-power. If it COULD produce labour-power, then
competition would soon ensure that the value of the product of labour produced in
a working day would never rise above the value of that working day. To put it
another way, in this situation, where labourers were produced to a price like any
other mechanism, the price would be set as (would inevitably gravitate around)
*the value of labour's product*. Therefore there would be no surplus: no extra
hours worked 'for free'. There might be enormous social productivity and a
cornucopia of goods, in such a system, but these goods would have no marketable
value, for they would no longer be scarce: since the ability to manufacture
workers to a set price implies foreknowledge of the availability of all
consumption-goods.
This, of course, would preclude profits and make further accumulation impossible.
Nevertheless, the sucidal (for capital) Faustian fantasy of turning workers
themselves into machines (the Polish for 'worker' is 'robot', in Russian,
'rabotnik') is right at the heart of the daydream that is capitalism. But
capitalism depends upon of 'free' labour, whose conditions of existence it can
oversee but not produce. Incidentally, it is possible to read off from this the
connection between the collapse of rigidly-determined gender and of the family
(especially marked in Europe), on one hand, and the collapse of birth-rates and
impending demographic crisis, in Italy etc, on the other. This is really a serious
problem for capitalism, and it shows how fundamentally contradictory capitalism
is, because, as Tom Warren was just pointing out, it is precisely the need for
double income in households and the recruitment of women to the workforce, which
is a hallmark of the system since 1970, and this is one of the forms of the
capitalist deconstruction of the unwaged domestic labour it depends on and without
which it cannot guarantee the creation of a population of workers.]
Mark
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