When I wrote:
>>Selling your own labour-power is not where power and prosperity is at.
>>Selling other people's labour is.
I was asked:
>Well, unless you're an artist or a novelist -- someone who produces
>something completely "useless". Or?
And I replied:
The petty-bourgeoisie is in-between the bourgeoisie and the working class,
owning its own means of production but using its own labour-power to
produce the labour needed to finish the commodity, which it then sells for
its value (allowing for the effects on value/price allotted to the
individual commodity by the process of equalization of the rate of profit
etc), appropriating this to itself. So it keeps the surplus-value, ie the
value over and above what is required to pay for the elements going into
the commodity, including labour-power.
The working class doesn't own the means of production, and only gets paid
the value of its labour-power, not the labour it put into the commodity.
The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and appropriates the value
realized by the sale of the commodity, but doesn't put its own labour into
the commodity.
Artists or novelists fall into the petty-bourgeois category. If they are at
the lower end they end up exploiting themselves. If at the higher end (some
artist employing assistants, like the workshops of the renaissance, or Enid
Blyton,say) they use the labour-power of others as well as themselves, so
they get most of their wealth from exploitation. The petty-bourgeoisie is
not what it was. Its ranks have been thoroughly proletarianized, so that
formerly independent operators are now employees, hence the large new
intermediate layers of specialists (doctors and engineers, say). Of course
the recent neo-liberal reaction has attempted to recreate formally
petty-bourgeois groups back out of these proletarianized hordes, hence the
new phenomenon of independent consultants who used to be employees. In
historical terms, in relation to the general development of the means of
production, this is like a wave or two falling back while the tide is
coming in. Choose your moment and you could claim the tide had started to
turn, but forced to take the whole process into account, you'd get egg on
your face.
As for the "uselessness" of a commodity, that's purely in the eye of the
purchaser. Any commodity that's bought has use-value in the economic as far
as the transaction is concerned. A commodity that gets sold has both
exchange value and use value, full stop. A commodity that doesn't, don't.
This even goes for such things as poison gases, plutonium, warheads,
landmines, Maggie Thatcher knick-knacks and the products of the
entertainment and media industry.
Perhaps someone could add another angle or two to give it some colour and
3-D, so it really helps.
Cheers,
Hugh
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