I think I am closest to Lew on these questions.
I don't agree with Chris that the theory of exploitation is mechanical
because it is counterintuitive. On the contrary all science is
counterintuitive. It would be a very mechanical thinking indeed that
tried to adapt itself to intuitions.
So, put simply, exploitation is a theoretical category, not a moral one.
The rate of exploitation is the ratio between the consumption fund of
the worker and the surplus value produced over and above that sum. Thus
it follows that where the total product is greater, and the worker has
not managed to secure a correspondingly greater proportion of the
product, the rate of surplus value is greater. And that roughly
describes the difference between the third and first worlds. The
productivity of labour is higher, so the profits are greater.
There are some other factors, which are secondary. First is that the
workers in the first world have managed to secure a proportion of the
additional product (though not as great a proportion as capital).
Consequently their wages, reckoned in use values, are higher than those
in the third world.
Furthermore there are various means by which first world capital deploys
its monopoly over new technologies to secure 'rents' from third world
capital. There is the discrepancy between prices and values between the
third and first world analysed by Arghiri Emmanual in unequal exchange.
And there are returns upon capital invested in the third world from the
first. All of these are important means by which first world capital
augments its profits at the expense of the first world.
But none of them explain why first world workers are better paid than
third world workers. First world workers do not participate in the
exploitation of third world workers. For that to happen, wages in the
first world would have to exceed the value of the product in the first
world (which does not happen). Only then would first world wages include
a component of third world surplus value.
As to Andy's concept of superexploitation, I do not think that this
helps us. Lenin used it to explain the way that exported capital
repatriated profits to the first world. But in the wage labour/capital
relationship there are differences of degree but not of kind, not
without it being a different kind of relationship altogether.
Lew is plainly right that Marx talks about a law of an increase in the
relative poverty, but not of the absolute poverty of workers (though
that can and does happen).
One useful thing to bear in mind is that the greater part of the
industrial workforce is still located in America, Europe and Japan.
These are still the most important sources of surplus value for capital,
though there has been an important opening up of East Asia for
exploitation.
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Lew <lew@lewhi
ggins.freeserve.co.uk> writes
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Schaap
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>
>>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.
>
>Volume 1 of Capital, Ch XXV, sec 4:
>
>"The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and
>energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the
>proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the
>industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive
>power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The
>relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with
>the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in
>proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a
>consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its
>torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of
>the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is
>official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist
>accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many
>circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here."
>
>In other words, an absolute fall in living standards or "immiseration"
>(I believe Marx does not use that term) applies only to the industrial
>reserve army, the unemployed.
>
>Incidentally, Rob, I have been asked if this list has a searchable
>archive and, if so, how does one access it.
>
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chris
>Burford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>>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.
>
>Presented like that, it does give the wrong impression. But there are
>two ways of looking at exploitation: as the rate of surplus value (s/v),
>or as the historically developed relations of production. The former
>category of exploitation is a useful technical device for analysing the
>structure of capitalism. However, throughout the history of capitalism
>different jobs have yielded different rates of surplus value, so no
>great surprise on that count. The "problem" here is to be found in the
>nature of capitalism, not the analysis itself. The latter historical
>approach explains exploitation as a class relationship, eg:
>
>"Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of
>outlawed proletarians, the bloody discipline that turned them
>into wage-labourers, the disgraceful action of the State which
>employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital
>by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour, the question
>remains: whence came the capitalists originally?" (Ch XXIX).
>
--
Jim heartfield
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