On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Tom Walker wrote:
> Productivity has become
> largely a managerial afterthought. It is more a way of retroactively
> matching outlays to output than it is a way of adjusting output.
The whole point of the computer revolution is that capital can
increasingly measure the productivity of the service and symbolic economy.
I know, I know, such measures are still notoriously sketchy, and the BLS
is revising its survey methodology, but I'm talking about the
difference between Ford's white-collar bureaucracy circa 1955 with, say,
the free-floating e-mail networks of Microsoft, where each new software
release reduces the labor-time it takes to download a program, copy an
image file, etc. To be sure, programmers and professional workers have
been very canny about defending their class interests, and creating new
niche markets and expensive services (marketing, finance, etc.) as a way
of extracting lucre from management and keeping their wages high (a kind
of high-tech version of the high wages created by the American frontier in
the 19th century, and certainly not as effective as unionization, but a
strategy which has put a floor beneath the income of the aristocracy of
labor).
> Given the immense transformations of capitalism since the late 18th century
> -- that is, transformations of the *capitalist labour process* -- can anyone
> seriously argue that units of output are directly proportional to hours of
> labour in any but the most peripheral and inconsequential niches of
> production?
They're not directly proportional, but they are mediated by the world
average of labor-time per given commodity (a fancy way of saying that it's
not just a question of market forces: these forces themselves are complex
constellations of class struggle, local market power, tariff
protection, the effectiveness of unions, Government regulation,
international competition etc.). Presumably, a socialist society would
have a completely different concept of productivity and labor-value than
we have today.
-- Dennis
