On 3/29/07, michael a. lebowitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Remember that Marx assumes that the standard of necessity is given
for a given country, era, etc. Thus, by that assumption, increased
productivity cannot lead to rising real wages. If we relax that
assumption (all other things equal), productivity increases [falling
values of the wage bundle] mean rising real wages which may be rather
relevant for employment; the necessary [but unacknowledged] premise
for relative surplus value is job destruction, i.e., an increased
technical composition of capital. Insofar as there are both
productivity increases and increases in the variable which I call
'the degree of separation among workers' [the X-factor], a likely
result is, as Marx acknowledges, an increase in both real wages and
the rate of surplus value. On this see my 'Beyond CAPITAL' but
especially 'The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics'
(the Deutscher Lecture published in Historical Materialism, 14.2,
2006) which both reinforce these inferences with cites from Marx's
1861-63 Economic Manuscripts.
Relevance to the current discussion? What about the effect
of globalisation upon (a) the prices of commodities consumed [the
Wall-mart factor] and (b) weakening of US workers as the result of
the increase in the degree of separation from other workers [the X-factor]?
Doug points out "the fact that the 5 years after NAFTA were about the
only ones in the last 35 that showed sustained gains in real hourly
wages in the U.S." Isn't that in part because an increase in the
X-factor keeps down the prices of commodities necessary for workers'
social reproduction? Capital thus successfully cheapened labor of
American workers who therefore saw their real wages go up even as they
lost their bargaining power, the conditions that obtained till the
renewed US push for power in the Middle East helped raise energy
prices.
--
Yoshie
