From: Jim Devine c b wrote: > Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers > > True or false ?
as usual is true/false questions about complex questions, the sophisticated answer is "both." False: according to Marx, the basis of wage labor (i.e., the proletariat) under capitalism is a double freedom: (1) freedom from the bondage of serfdom, slavery, and the like; and (2) freedom from ownership of the means of production and subsistence, so that the "free" labor has no choice but to buy consumption (subsistence) goods from those who own the means of production. True: if the laborers were to totally unite, to form One Big Union as it were, then the institution of wage-labor could go away. ^^^^^ CB: This comes from the Manifesto *. It seemed to be a quasi-technical economic assertion. I was struck by the word "exclusively". Is there an political economic argument that might underlie the statement ? I guess reading further in the passage the "competition" is lessened by capitalists combining workers in factory association ,termed "cooperation" in _Capital_. But maybe it's more political as in your "True" answer, since they end that essay with "Working Men of All Countries, Unite! " * The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
