At 22:25 02/09/99 +1000, Rob wrote:
> it is my understanding
>that it is in fact the western worker who is the more exploited. Working
>with state-of-the-art technology puts the western worker in the position of
>creating many times the value of one's wage (more surplus value is extracted
>per worker). Of course, many NIC [newly industrialising country]
>workers do work with up-to-date technolgy,
>but definitively most do not. Though their lives are often brutalised and
>impoverished by the exploitative relationship that pertains between employer
>and employee, it is their level of *immiseration* rather than exploitation,
>that is so particularly hideous.
I know this argument and have always had difficulty with it. eg the small
number of elite electical engineers who run the electricity grid of modern
capitalist countries, and really are the aristocracy of labour in the old
sense with their very high wages, are according to marxist logic said to be
much more exploited than the person who cleans out the toilets in a
transport cafe.
I know that marxism is not "common sense" but really this is extremely
counter-intuitive. Am I heretical or am I revealing my revisionist colours
again? I must grasp this nettle even at the risk of exposing my true nature.
I think it is wrong.
I think this is a product of the simple reductionist application of Marx's
abstract and dialectical analysis to a concrete situation in which
mechanical marxists simply transfer costs in money terms to exchange value,
and say that is marxism.
Even allowing for the fact that highly skilled workers have
disproportionately high wages anyway judged by the basic marxist model of
the reproduction of labour power (for a variety of reasons) I think this
has got to be the nonsense it appears. I think the answer must lie
elsewhere in marxism. Although Marx mainly developed his abstract analysis
in Capital as if he was dealing with a single capitalist economy in which
geographical differences between one part of the economy and another can be
set to one side in order to grasp the fundamental point, he does somewhere
have a concept of "relative surplus value" arising from the "relative
monopoly" that a capitalist has as a result of new technology, until it
permeates to become the standard means of production for that commodity in
that economy.
I therefore suggest that the high profits per worker in highly capital
intensive enterprises should substantially be put down to relative
monopoly. The disproportionate high wages of the workers can also be put
down to relative monopoly, it taking perhaps even a generation to train a
new workforce more widely and in the particular technical skills required.
Further I suggest that the great disparities in wealth between the advanced
monopoly capitalist countries and the NIC's and the massive and continuous
unequal exchange between the two should largely be attributed to the
workings of relative monopoly under a global capitalist system.
Hence our solidarity in Rob's example should go overwhelmingly to the NIC
workers as our hearts dictate, and not to the "super-exploited" first world
workers since they are super-exploited in the heads of mechanical marxists.
Our heads and hearts can once again be in harmony.
Mechanical marxism has a lot to answer for.
Chris Burford
London
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