I wrote:> > so we need to think critically. so what's new?<<
Tom writes: >Commodity fetishism isn't new. Didn't somebody already write something about that once? Seriously though, is fetishism only a danger when it is eulogistic? I think not.<
Talking about speed-up (an increasing intensity of labor, as Marx would call it) is hardly eulogistic or fetishistic. In fact, the article was talking specifically about the "hidden realm" that is usually masked by commodity fetishism and the realm of freedom, equality, and Bentham that NC economists emphasize. I haven't the slightest idea how the concept of commodity fetishism is relevant to the article I posted.
>> so the folks who slave away producing Nikes for dollars a day under
poor conditions are engaging in discourse?<<
>That"s just it, Jim. It ain't the dollars making them slave away. It's
the social relationship, which are relations between people disguised as
relations between things. The alarm that I am trying to sound is about
OUR (and it happens to me, too) tendency to give theoretical lip service to a level of analysis, commodity fetishism, that we then cavalierly dispose of when engaging "empirical facts". Speed up is the cause of which
productivity is the effect? Oh yeah? UNDER WHAT SPECIFIC CONDITIONS?
>I say NOT THESE! NOT THESE CONDITIONS! We have a question here, not a
ready made answer. We have a whole suite of urgent questions that the
proverbial no one wants to ask because the proverbial everyone thinks the answer is self evident.<
I really don't know where this comes from, why you're on _my_ case. _Of course_ it's capitalism's version of labor productivity that is raised when speed-up occurs (and I never said otherwise). That is, it's _saleable_ commodities produced per hour that is raised (ceteris paribus) when there's a speed-up. In fact, it's only the existence of saleable commodities that allows the aggregation of outputs so we can have some reasonable estimate of the numerator. However, we could think of another way to measure of labor productivity, which might be measureable, at least as a second approximation:
labor productivity = (saleable output + workers' gains in pleasure during time the job - external costs to the environment and the like)/labor hours hired.
If measured this way, labor productivity may fall with speed-up.
JD
