On 7/8/06, Walt Byars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It is obvious that when an employer and worker make a contract (in
the realm of C in Marx's famous schema) the contract doesn't specify the concrete labor to be performed, it just says the parameters within which the boss will direct the worker. This seems like a classic case of the sale of LP. <
yes, if by "C" you mean the initial stage of the market purchase of labor-power (and material inputs) by the capitalist.
But what if someone argued that in the realm of P [the production
process], we were still implicitly in the realm of exchange because for every act of concrete labor workers were asked to perform, they had the power to weigh that against the wage they were paid. Thus, the wage is really payment for specific acts of concrete labor? < I don't think this makes sense. There are all sorts of external effects (positive and negative) on all other labors that arise from each worker's labor. The individual contribution of any worker to the firm's revenues cannot be separated out from those of others, except in the the idealized world of most neoclassical models. Further, there are too many information problems to tell what kind of effort each worker is making. -- Jim Devine / "It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness." -- G. K.Chesterton.
