[OK, I'm freaked out. I started working on a reply to Walt's post on the topic "Yet another labor-power question" right after it came in, and in the process of writing that response noted a followup post from him on a related question. But then when I finished my reply and went back to my inbox to check on something, his two posts had disappeared! (And I don't see how I could have erased them.) Now, I know that I'm not hallucinating this post, since I see that Bill Lear has also responded on this thread. So where did they go? (Cybernetic Twilight Zone?) And also, could someone (re-)send me Walt's two recent posts on this thread? Thanks in advance.]
Walt writes:
The one problem I still have difficulty with in Marxian economics is the idea that labor power - the mental and physical capacity of humans to work - is sold, rather than labor (not that I think its incorrect, I just have some problems in understanding it). Intuitively, it seems like the reasoning for the sale of labor power is that it is the only thing the worker *has*; the thing which possession over transfers to the capitalist. Could someone elaborate why what the laborer sells must be a thing he or she *has* rather than something he or she *does in the future*? Does this have to do with the materialist conception of history?
Not really. I think there are two things going on at once in this aspect of Marx's account in Capital V. I, a story about the *form* of exchanges between capitalists and workers in markets for "labor power," and a story about *the value* of whatever it is that workers supply to capitalists in these markets. It's important to keep these two things distinct, because they speak to different problems and different aspects of Marx's theory. The latter speaks to the question Marx thought Ricardo begged, concerning how one might account for the existence of surplus value and thus capitalist profit in labor value-theoretic terms. The former speaks to a much different question concerning the *process* by which capitalists extract surplus value. On the former story: aside from the fact that it is necessary to have the power to labor in order to sell services that might flow from that power, there is no *logical* reason why workers must sell simply their labor power--their ability to work--as opposed to specifiable labor services flowing from that power. Nor are there categorical *empirical* grounds for doing so: when firms engage outside contractors (consultants, say, or builders) rather than employees, they are exactly buying (specific) *services* from these suppliers rather than simply their labor power. That's not the case when firms hire employees. This distinction between "contractor" and "employee" is mirrored in the difference between the law of contract and the law of employment (see, e.g., an article by Stephen Masten, "A Legal Basis for the Firm"--I'll dig up the reference if you want it). So then why don't firms engage *all* their workers as contractors, rather than as employees? There are some variations on this theme, but they all come down to the same basic problem : some imperfection or limitation in the use of contracts to secure exactly the labor services that firms might seek. Examples: (1) asymmetric information about worker effort--employers can't tell exactly how hard their employees are working, so it's impossible to stipulate desired effort levels in employment contracts; (2) incomplete information about possible contingencies that might arise subsequent to hiring that determine exactly what given employees should be doing. When these fail, firm owners must do something else to elicit the desired labor--this "something else" is what Marx addresses in his theory of "the subsumption of labor under capital," which unfortunately he deleted from the published version of Capital V. I (it's in the section called "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", or more simply the "Resultate," found as an Appendix in the Penguin and Vintage editions of the first volume). An interesting corollary of this argument: since the form of capitalist labor contracts is thus best understood as contingent, it does not follow *categorically* from Marx's theory of surplus value that capitalists must extract surplus labor in the setting of capitalist-controlled production processes. To the contrary, capitalists might conceivably exploit labor without hiring "labor power" or even "labor services" at all, as Marx acknowledges in any number of places in his various drafts of Capital--e.g., in his Vol. III account of interest-bearing capital supplied to worker-owned firms (so-called "cooperative factories"). On the latter issue: No matter the form taken by exchanges between capitalist firm owners and workers, in Marx's value-theoretic framework one may, and must, determine the labor time socially necessary to reproduce the good in question. And since possession of "labor power" is a necessary condition for the provision of "labor services" in any case, the answer remains the same: the relevant value magnitude corresponds to the labor necessary to reproduce the labor power that is either sold directly or else is the source for specific labor services that are sold instead. So Marx's value-theoretic story about the systemic basis for capitalist profit would hold in any case. [There is a separate question as to whether this story has any theoretical significance. I've argued elsewhere that it isn't, because the puzzle Marx posed to motivate it: "How can one account for the existence of surplus value on the condition that all commodities exchange at their respective values?" is irrelevant. But that's another post.]
Or could someone explain (Better than Ch 6 of Capital 1 does) why it is labor power rather than labor which is sold if there is a different justification for this idea?
In a nutshell: employers purchase simply labor power rather than specific labor services flowing from that power if and when they are practically unable to specify those services in enforceable contracts. That's not what Marx says in Ch. 6, but (1) per the foregoing, it is not inconsistent with his account in Ch. 6, and (2) it is consistent with, supports and extends Marx's theory of labor's progressive subsumption under capital under the capitalist mode of production. For what it's worth. [Assuming I haven't just replied to a hallucination...] Gil
