I've decided that it's a mistake to quote Joan Robinson saying when she says that “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all” (ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY, Doubleday: 1962, p. 45) to explain Marx's theory of exploitation. (If Marx had something like that, it would not be a mistake.)
In context, she finds that "to call investable resources 'exploitation' or 'unpaid labor'" is "somewhat embarrassing." Then, she gives the well-known quote, followed immediately by "Here the _law of value_ develops a kind of squint that leaves one deeply confused" [her emphasis]. Her point is that she rejects Marx's law of value (as in her ESSAY ON MARXIAN ECONOMICS) -- and that the fact that workers "nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean" volunteer to be exploited is an empirical strike against that "law." If people are happier (less miserable) being exploited than not being exploited, then it really isn't exploitation. Or rather that's it's deeply confusing to think of it as exploitation. Unlike Marx, her viewpoint is quite microeconomic. In her book on imperfect competition, she used the following definition: “a group of workers are being exploited when their wage is less than the marginal physical product that they are producing, valued at the price at which it is being sold.” That is, a worker is exploited only if a worker is paid less than the wage that would prevail with perfect labor-power markets (in the capitalist utopia). Barriers to worker mobility between jobs which cause monopsony (a single buyer, the buyer's equivalent of monopoly) and Robinson's exploitation. In contrast, Marx's theory of exploitation is macroeconomic: under capitalism, workers (as a class) have no way to support themselves and their dependents without selling their labor-power to the capitalists (as a class), so they end up doing more labor than is required to pay for the cost of the provision of that labor-power (the cost of its reproduction over time). Mobility between specific jobs and problems of imperfect competition in labor-power markets are the problem, except that the normal existence of the reserve army of labor creates a _general_ barrier to mobility. Monopsony does exist, but it isn't necessary to Marx's theory. -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
