Writes Mark:
>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;
Well, we will have to simply disagree about this, Mark. It is precisely
because we avoid recognition of this pointless truism in our cultures and
seek to divorce nature from econometric calculation that the rebound of
nature threatens to destroy us. The attempt to trivialize the fact that
"everything is part of nature" lies at the heart of the mess we are in. We
have deliberately and conveniently walled off a whole set of consequences,
variables and perceptual requirements that we foolishly thought we could
control or render irrelevant.
I suppose this is where I would inject the strictures of Deep Ecology into
the discussion; so I am sure that while you may not agree, you at least
understand the direction in which I would move the argument. This is a very
shorthand rejoinder, I realize. It would take more paragraphs than I can
type to be specific (or coherent? <g>).
And of course I am not saying that consumption of goods consists wholly of
physical resources. For example paying a hero in the currency of glory is
symbolic, uses up no resources, but is nonetheless important.
Here are my further objections:
You write:
>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).
I also do not regard those services as "simply physical", but I would object
to the characterization of such observations as a "futile iterative
process". To ignore a single nanny's energy and food requirements to provide
a service may seem a trivial, unimportant thing. To ignore those
requirements for the entire population of nannies -- and Douglas Adams'
Telephone Sanitizers -- throughout all time is to pile up a huge debt in
natural resources, the bill for which is rapidly coming due.
and you write:
>The real reason it is wrong to say that the wage is determined by the
>worker's
>consumption-basket
No no! not "determined by". The determination of wage rates is an insane
process (as the discussion between Julien & me spotlighted) which is indeed
partially determined by cultural values.
wage is also *affected by* what you term the "consumption-basket", however.
>.... 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.
Yes, yes that its the very soul of the paradox. Precisely by narrowing the
definition of price/wage/consumption the way you just did to ONLY concepts
like "socially necessary" and "labor power" walls off perception of the
price of human activity within the biosphere. It's all well and good to use
those terms in the abstract world of economic theory, but in reality it is
*impossible* to separate human activity from nature. Perhaps it's the
artificial factors within those definitions which wrongly diminish and
trivialize "nature" that are the heart of this misconception.
I feel you are blinded by the necessarily fictitious concepts that are
required to conceptualize the sphere of "Economics" and allow you to
erroneously imagine economic activity in some place other than within the
natural world. This allows you to overlook the true wage of human activity.
In the spirit of John Lennon, there is nothing you can do that can't be
done, but it all *must be done* within the biosphere, even if you can
temporarily ignore the consequences.
All human activity is an energy sink. Therefore all human activity requires
consumption of resources. We have ignored this to our peril.
You may redefine "wage" as you will, that's okay with me. I am not hugely
enamored of the way it has been used as a term by me, Julien or you.
Disagree if you wish, as well. <G>
I wish I had more time, but I do not.
Tom
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