Marx's hypothesis is surely not that it is a voluntary market transaction but a forced transaction because the capitalists own the means of production and the workers do not and have no means of access except through wage slavery. They cannot themselves produce and support themselves.Workers are forced into the transaction to keep themselves alive. The theory that it is a voluntary transaction is part of the capitalist ideology.
A voluntary market transaction doesn't mean that the will of those who enter it is absolutely free, unencumbered. Not even if you're very rich. Again, form is not irrelevant. The form is of the essence.
And ideologies don't hang in the air. They have social roots.
Let me say in passing that there are passages in Grundrisse where Marx emphasizes the *progressive* effect of this legal form on concrete people. Communism is not built from scratch. And one of the progressive results of capitalist development is that it forces people to take personal responsibility for their individual and collective lives, as opposed to relying on mystical forces or luck. That is progress, because without this individual sense of responsibility communism cannot be built.
But more relevant to our present, the conditions that impose unemployment on people are socially made and the acquisition of a class consciousness entails understanding the social source of this apparently natural event. For some reason, some leftists in the U.S. seem to believe that anything said about the progressive features of capitalist production amounts to bourgeois propaganda. Marx viewed alienation (the victimization of people by the social conditions of their own making) as the problem, not as the solution. The solution was overcoming alienation in the only way it can be overcome, collectively, by people transforming themselves into agents of history. Some radicals nowadays seem to think that alienation from public life is a virtue, as if public life were an illusion.
It is not assymmetry of wealth that makes the voluntary part a sham it is that the workers havent access to the means of production themselves.
Marx says explicitly that what's essential here is "the separation between the direct producers and their objective or material conditions of production" and living. In Marx's terms, means of production are use values used to produce other use values. Use values are the "material content of wealth" (Marx). With markets, one form of wealth can be transformed into other forms of wealth. If you have sufficient oranges, with an orange market plus a labor market (provided they are deep and "efficient"), you have money or means of production ipso facto. With markets you can turn use values that are not fit to be used as means of production into means of production.
So you're not saying anything different than I'm saying.
While we sometimes talk about capitalists and workers as if there were a clear line of separation between them, in real life the distribution of wealth is like a continuous curve and where precisely the line is drawn is not hard science, but an empirical and political exercise. Bottom line, it is wealth inequality (or, as I put it, "wealth asymmetry") what turns the market transaction between capital and labor into an exploitive sham.
It is not the market that explains the form of abusing it is the mode of production. The mode of production involves the capitalist class owning the means of production and producing for profit not on the basis of need--except of course need backed by consumers willing to part with bucks. It is because of the ownership of the means of production that the capitalist can appropriate surplus value. It is a function of ownership not of the market.
The capitalist mode of production is "generalized market production" (Marx). "Generalized" because inter alia the markets now include a labor market. Capitalist production is not the only conceivable or historical form of labor exploitation. The essential distinction with other modes of production is the widespread existence of markets, so that even the labor power of workers is bought and sold in markets. What underlies the existence of a labor market is the dispossession and legal freedom of the worker. So the separation of workers from the objective conditions of production is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for capitalist production. You can have a lot of poor proletarians (like in ancient Rome) and not have capitalist production. You still need generalized markets. It is the market (or commodity) form that makes the difference. And what is "ownership of the means of production" if not wealth ownership?
But markets require only private ownership of goods to be traded. Capitalism requires private ownership of the menas of production.
And what are the means of production? Non-goods? Non-use values?
And functional capitalist markets do not require voluntary trades and competition. Halliburton can save itself from bankruptcy through crony contacts and no competitive bidding in Iraq.
My point is that Halliburton involves a method of accumulation that Marx purposefully excluded in its pinning down the essential nature and fundamental historical tendencies of capitalism. Halliburton involves the use of the state -- it is akin to the method of accumulation that Marx documented as "primitive accumulation." Marx clearly stated that this method of accumulation was "characteristic" of the early stages of capitalist history. Tendentially, capitalist production gets to replicate itself without a prime mover and go on by its own dynamics. Thus, as a tendency, "primitive accumulation" becomes the exception and not the rule.
If you counter-argue that modern history exhibits more "primitive accumulation" (corruption, trade protection, corporate welfare, imperialism, etc.) than in any other stage of capitalist history, to refute Marx's argument you still have to show that what he called "normal" capitalist accumulation has become increasingly irrelevant in modern capitalist societies. So it's not in absolute terms, but in relative (or probabilistic) terms that Marx argument holds. I doubt that you can prove him wrong here.
I recall somewhere in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that Marx claimed that equality of wealth under capitalism although not possible would not change the essential nature of the system even if it could occur. In fact Marxian socialism is not about equal distribution of wealth or removing wealth asymmetry. It is for abolishing the capitalist system of production and for a system where the means of production are socially owned and production is based upon need not profit and democratically planned and run.
I don't imply otherwise. However, the elimination of gross wealth disparities does go a long way towards eroding capitalism and even markets. As Melvin points out often, full communism is not simply a reshuffling of (private) property but the outright elimination of (private) property. Fact is, if you eliminate gross wealth inequities, the operation of the labor market will change drastically because the edge in the carrot-and-stick mix that we call "capitalism" will be dented. In general, all markets would function *very* differently if wealth disparities were reduced. Note that I'm not saying that these scenarios are likely or that the way to build Marxian socialism is by sheer egalitarianism. Marx's critique to Gotha's program is clear about this. But these points do help in evaluating the experience of, say, Scandinavian socialism.
By the way, the rational germ of the notion of "human capital" is that, in an advanced capitalist economy, markets allow for people to turn the mere expectation of future income, not only from the deployment of physical wealth but from skill and human attributes, into present value. In that sense, human attributes are immediately capital.
Julio
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