Ken Hanly wrote:
>
>
>
> P.S. To Cox re Hardy post. I thought that slaves would often be directed by
> overseers what to do, not left on their own.
>
Of course they are directed what to do, but that is irrelevant to Marx's
argument. Consider a task that most subscribers to this list will have
taken part in at one time or another: collating, stapling, folding, etc.
a newsletter. Characteristically, in a slave system, the overseer,
master, would tell the slaves: collate those newsletters. Period! The
slaves might or might not analyze the task -- they probably wouldn't
because there would be no advantage to them in doing so and, in slave
systems, the master would probably never have performed the task himself
and hence would have no remote conception that it _could_ be analyzed.
The slaves would then procede to slog through the task in whatever way
had become customary. If they were anything like people I have worked
with in this task, probably they would collect the pages for one
newsletter, stack them, staple them, fold them, staple them, put on a
label, and put on a postage stamp (if they weren't being bulk mailed).
There would be no need for some sort of rack which would allow the
collating of 20 or so copies of the newsletter at once; there would be
no considering what the best way was to make one's fingers sticky, there
would in general be no technical division of labor of the sort that so
delighted Adam Smith. Plato wants his farmers to farm and have their
tools made by someone else, etc, but there is no evidence anywhere in
Plato that I know of, and certainly not in Homer, of an analyxis of and
reconstruction of the work task. That on the whole simply would not be
considred except accidentally and marginally until the labor of the free
worker became simply an aliquot part of the labor of the entire work
force of an entire society -- until the rise of a capitalist social
division of labor.
This is incidentally key to what Yoshie and I and others are currently
battling out with Mark and Lou. Capitalism is _different_; it is very
near to _unnatural_, a freak, an accident which very well might not ever
appear were the tape of human history (using Gould's metaphor) to be run
over again.
Carrol
Carrol
