On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 5:05 PM, Shane Mage <[email protected]> wrote: > > They make conceptual clarity possible. Marx went to very great length to > show the relationships among value, capital, and surplus value. If Marx is > nothing but a dead dog his conceptual apparatus can be treated as nonsense, > and if that is your view you've a right to natter about "catechistic > responses." But it was Charles, not you, who introduced the concept of > relative surplus value--and he has the right to a serious reply. >
I think Doug's point was: and then what. You get conceptual clarity and then what do you do with it? In this case, I think you're splitting hairs in the wrong way. Ultimately the relationship between capital and labor has less to do with whether the labor is "unproductive" in the sense that it produces an actual widget. In the case of IBM, there are still workers who are producing value for them - it may be "immaterial value" or it may be a service to other businesses. I met one of these consultants - a friend of a friend - who is some sort of hybrid of a development worker (she had been doing pro bono consulting in China), market researcher, and intelligence gatherer, along with pushing a bunch of buttons on a typing machine of some kind or other to produce something other people will pay for. In her case, and in the case of all the other people working for IBM in this capacity, the relationship is not all that mysterious: IBM makes more money off of them than they are paid. The difference here is that there may be parts of her job that could be automated or taken over by a software program. And, just as in the so called productivity boom of the 1990s, you can be sure that any gains of productivity - even those that she herself devises - will be pocketed by the corporation rather than the worker. Does it really matter whether there is productive labor in the classical Marxist sense involved? The relationship between capital and labor remains relatively the same. I'm also struck by the anachronism of the working day in this context. For what it really does is push the worker to exploit themselves further - maybe take on some other freelance gigs or otherwise supplement their precarious existence as a contract consultant that can be dismissed at will. In this way, they are forced to exploit themselves - likely for a longer part of the day than they would need to were they paid in full for all the value they provide to IBM. I am all for thinking about the real, productive labor as being the core of most economic activity - and normally I would cringe at the use of terms like immaterial labor as if it is something so unique and unprecedented. But in this case, I think it is useful to have a clarity of the stakes of the concept. Relative surplus value certainly has a very specific meaning in Capital, but there are obviously changes to the way labor works today which the concept should be flexible enough to understand. The purpose of the concept was to illustrate the productivity of labor and the way the laborer is taken advantage of by the owner of capital; her productivity doesn't give her the promised freedom of modernity: instead it just gives her a different brand of oppression - at the hands of the people who her labor enriches. That should be the reason we talk about these concepts: to show the alternative reality of capitalism and inspire people to work against it as a system. Otherwise, Marx might just be that dead dog you speak of. I'm sure there is a better way of explaining this in Marx's terms, but carving out the bulk of the labor of the industrialized world as irrelevant to his most basic concepts is the best way to ensure his most basic concepts are irrelevant. sean _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
