Tom wrote:
>What if we push the preceding argument "Beyond Capital" (so to speak) to
>consider the depreciation of wage labour on more or less the same basis?
>Somewhere in vol. III of Capital (I haven't been able to track down the
>location), Marx criticized those vulgar political economists who become so
>enamored of the idea of interest-bearing capital that they even proclaim
>wages as a form of interest on the labourer's "capital". Gary Becker, eat
>your heart out.
in the International Publishers' paperback edition of volume III, it's on
page 465-6. Marx provides quite a relevant critique of those who seen
labor-power as a kind of "capital" that pays "interest" to its owner (the
worker). Becker was obsolete before he wrote.
>But couldn't we imagine that by some time around the third quarter of the
>twentieth century a considerable portion of employment income in the U.S.
>had taken on the characteristics of a legal claim on revenues, backed by
>"credentials", similar to what share ownership represents (thereby
>anticipating the trend of compensating employees with stock options)? By
>analogy, this would give us "fictitious human capital" and we could view the
>1973-1992 period as one of shaking out the fictitious human capitals and
>concentrating the legal claims on future revenues. Telling the story this
>way begins to make 1973-1992 look a bit more like 1873-1897 -- or perhaps I
>should say more like its mirror image.
I think this makes sense: individual workers do receive promises on the
basis of their education, both their credentials & skills. The
"capitalized" form of those promises is indeed a kind of "fictitious
capital," though I find the phrase "fictitious human capital" to be
confusing. As with other promises, a lot of these were violated. A clear
case is with those folks in the high-tech sector who were accepting stock
options as deferred wages, only to discover that the stock options were
worthless. (It's a little like having "frequent flyer miles" (another kind
of fictitious capital) from an airline that's gone bust.)
Unlike 1873-1897, the 1973-1992 period had clear beneficiaries, i.e., the
capitalists who survived the shake-out. In the early period, I can't think
of who benefited from the destruction of fictitious capital. Maybe it's
because when the stock market goes into panic mode, it has an effect on
aggregate demand (sometimes), whereas when bosses break promises, it's
business as usual.
>The identity of surplus-value and surplus-labour imposes a qualitative
>limit upon the accumulation of capital. This consists of the *total
>working-day*, and the prevailing development of the productive forces and
>of the population, which limits the number of simultaneously exploitable
>working-days. But if one conceives of surplus-value in the meaningless
>form of interest, the limit is merely quantitative and defies all fantasy.
I don't get this.
>That qualitative limit on the accumulation of capital is also, *pari
>passu*, a limit on the extent to which the worker can participate as a
>"stake holder" in his/her self-exploitation. The problem with the analogy
>between fictitious capital and fictitious human capital is, of course,
>that the owners of human capital also have to supply labour-power in order
>to receive their "interest payments". This might explain why hours worked
>have become unhinged from productivity considerations over the last 25
>years or so -- people are getting paid for "putting in hours", not for
>performing work.
I interpret what's been happening in simpler terms. If given a chance,
bosses will pay workers with promises. If given a chance, they'll break them.
>Are we headed for a crash? I'll be provocative here: I don't think it
>matters. At this point it seems to me that the end of the recent boom will
>have immense social and political consequences. That is to say, a "soft
>landing" may be the worst thing that could happen to the "new economy" --
>just as a stalemate was the worst thing that could happen to the two-party
>political monopoly. My inclination is to expect a lull that after a while
>will begin to feel uncomfortably entrenched.
Since the "market for fictitious human capital" isn't as important as the
stock market for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism, I don't read it
this way. However, if credentialed workers get enough in the way of broken
promises, they might unionize or similar. Here in the US, they sue.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
