At 03:23 PM 9/15/96 -0700, you wrote: >I should have made my intent clearer. I'm interested in finding out >whether superexploitation has been used to mean >1) paying wages below the level of subsistence, or >2) getting proportionately more surplus value out of workers in relation >to wages. > >The former might apply to workers in the, roughly speaking, poor countries; >the latter to the rich countries. (In some cases both usages apply.) > >I'm trying to find out what's been said on this in the Marxist literature. > >Thanks again, > >Walter Daum ____________________________________ I think by 'Superexploitation' one means layers of exploitation. It could be used in two senses, (a) lets take the example of the "untouchable castes" in Hindu society. These people are not only economically exploited but also socially exploited. So one may say they are superexploited--the case could also apply to minorities in general and blacks in particular in the USA and Western society in general; (b) keeping within the context of the economy itself, one may say that poor peasants and workers in the third world countries are superexploited because not only they produce surplus value but also because they find themselves in debt bondage to the large farmers and traders as well as exploited by the core capitalist countries through the manuverings of terms of trade against them. As far as your two points mentioned above, I find both of them problematic. First of all it is not easy to determine what one means by subsistence for human beings. Marx was quite explicit about the fact that human beings are one race of animals who has amazing capacity of supressing its subsistence needs. The Classical economists of course defined a subsistence. But their "subsistence" was strictly defined by the wage which coincided with the zero rate of growth of population. Thus to sustain this notion of "subsistence" one needs Malthusian theory of population--by the way Adam Smith had a crude malthusian theory of population much before Malthus. But once you give up Malthusian theory of population, subsistence is no longer an easy thing to define. The point number two simply did not make any sense to me. What could you mean by a sentence like that? Cheers, ajit sinha
