G'day Chris,
You take exception to the literal definitions required to make Marx's law of
value, indeed his whole critique of capitalist political economy, coherent.
Whilst your instinct does you credit (I doubt anybody here doesn't share
it), I think you forget that the NIC worker is suffering to the ghastly
degree s/he is precisely because capitalists must/can rationally allocate
their constant and variable capitals components according to variations over
space. That's the economics of it. We might also suspect it's a good idea
to keep a significant proportion of the first world's proletariat (and the
requisite compradorial compenent in the NICs) in clover. That's the
political bit. It's all one system, isn't it?
The proletariat *as a whole* tends to a condition of immiseration on the
Marxist view. Accumulation grows the proletariat, and the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall causes immiseration in the sort of drama we saw
unfold in SE Asia last year, where over 200 million innocents simply had
their lives ruined. All are exploited, but to differing degrees, and all
are immiserated, but to different degrees. Only at the analytical level of
*class* do we see the ties that bind - not only worker to capital, but first
world worker to NIC worker.
On that reading, your mandarin engineer is like the business class passenger
in a jetliner whilst the NIC workers are cramped into economy class. But it
is profit which sits in the pilot's seat, not the capitalists (they're
sipping their camparis in first class). On Marx's reading, profit can't fly
planes. And the plane will crash unless profit is unseated. To do this,
those in the rear of the plane had better join forces to get to the cockpit,
as we have to get past first class if we're to get there.
So solidarity with NIC workers ain't obviated by these definitions, but
indeed recommended by them.
Even if that's right (and it convinces me), I might have put that in a
rather school-masterly tone. Forgive that Chris - I just rather liked it as
it took shape.
Cheers,
Rob.
----------
> From: Chris Burford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: M-TH: Super exploitation and relative monopoly
> Date: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 09:02:46 +0100
>
>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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>
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