[To save time, I'm ignoring anything that shows up in Gil's responses
to Charles, David, and others even though it will likely result in
neoplasm. Also, the below may seem unduly pedantic. But it's not aimed
at Gil alone. As usual, it's also aimed at any third parties who may
be interested. Walt?]
I did read Mike Lebowitz's last comment (on July 19). I agree with his
statements that:
1) "Marx's discussion in Vol. I, ch. 1-6 [does not provide] a logical
basis for the conclusion that capitalist exploitation requires the
buying and selling of labor-power."
That book, including that part, is not an example of the application
of deductive logic and should not be treated as such. Rather, Marx
applies dialectics, i.e., logical-empirical heuristics, while working
from the very abstract toward the concrete in his presentation. Of
course, as scholars have argued at length, the mode of presentation in
CAPITAL is quite distinct from the method by which he derived his
conclusions: the book is more like a textbook that starts with simple
cases and moves toward more empirical (i.e., complex, concrete) cases,
with each step implying the next. (For example, in volume II, his
"reproduction schemes" imply the need for lending and borrowing. In
volume III, he brings those in.) This is akin to a modern labor
textbook that starts with perfect labor markets and then moves to
monopsony (even though the latter includes the former as a special
case). This is not "logical" in the deductive sense (while Marx would
never start with perfect markets).
2) In the Marxian theory, "capitalists may exploit in other ways –
they may exploit commodity producers, feudal lords, and the like, but
capitalism within the capitalist mode of production occurs through the
sale of labor-power (and thus … work according to the goals and
direction of capital [with] … capital as owner of the products of
labor)."
Of course, the real world (the "social formation," as the
Althusserians termed it) includes not just capitalism (the pure "mode
of production" that currently dominates the social formation) but also
other, non-capitalist, institutions. As noted below under point (E),
therefore, capitalists may benefit from the power of non-capitalist
forces, e.g., gain access to surplus-labor resulting from proto
(capitalist) subjection of labor.
3) John Roemer doesn't prove anything at all with his "credit market
island," since he simply assumes that "the delivery of labor for the
wage is 'as simple and enforceable a transaction as the delivery of an
apple for a dime.' [There is] … no shirking and no need for
surveillance and monitoring."
I totally agree. This kind of thing is on the level of the old joke
where (when starving and unable to open a can of food) the economist
says "assume we have a can-opener."
Now on to what Gil wrote on 7/9/06:
This "labor power question" thread started from what I took to be a
reasonable question from Walt: why does Marx insist in V.I. chapter 6
that capitalists purchase (just) labor power, that is, only the
capacity to work? <
The phrase "why does Marx _insist_ …?" sounds as if the hairy old guy
was ignorantly and pettishly refusing to listen to Gil's strictures. I
also wonder why Marx insisted on not discussing joint production, even
though Ian Steedman rightly thinks that it's an extremely important
phenomenon? My gods and goddesses! Marx never even brings it up!! What
a benighted fool! Why wasn't he informed by modern and correct
neoclassical and/or neo-Ricardian economics?? He should have stayed in
school, studied Frobenius and Roemer, and received a Ph.D. at MIT!
(Since Frobenius and Roemer weren't alive at the time, and MIT didn't
exist, Marx should have assumed that he had a time machine!)
But this "insistence" should be seen in historical context (rather
than in a scholastic text-dissection or an abstract NC economic vision
alone). Before Marx, as far as I know, no-one made the
labor/labor-power distinction at all. People such as Smith, Ricardo,
and the Ricardian socialists didn't know the distinction. It was, it
seems, Marx's innovation. It clarified a lot of the ambiguities in the
value theories of the aforementioned authors. (To me, the benefits of
this assumption highly outweigh any costs.) So he emphasized it.
Since Marx was trying to write CAPITAL for a popular working-class
audience (which was wishful thinking on his part), he decided not to
deal with the "gray areas" where wage-labor relations get mixed up
with simple commodity production (SCP).
The fact that "black" (pure proletarian class relations) was the
predominant situation of most people in England at the time he wrote
suggests that he'd put more emphasis on it than on "white" (petty
commodity sale) and especially gray (mixtures of proletarian relations
and petty commodity sale). In any event, you can't deal with a gray
area without first understanding the black and white areas. To
paraphrase Erik Ohlin Wright, you can understand the "contradictory
class locations" by way of understanding the bordering "pure"
locations in the class structure, but you can't understand those pure
cases simply by understanding the contradictory class locations. Even
in neoclassical economics, it's a mistake to try to understand an
oligopolistic market without first understanding the pure cases of
monopoly and atomistic competition (since the latter represent the
sustainable limiting cases on oligopolistic markets).
Marx may not have been thinking exactly in these terms. But he did us
a major service nonetheless. By analyzing "black" and "white," he
allowed later authors to understand "gray." I hope that no-one believe
in the interpretation of Marx's CAPITAL as a book for which
"everything that's Marxist is in it." This ignores the long tradition
of Marxian political economists _building on_ Marx's contributions.
Thus, Gil's question should be restated as "why do Marxian economists
assume that capitalists purchase (just) labor power, that is, only the
capacity to work?" and the answer is that they don't.
Gil: >Why can't they [i.e., capitalists] purchase [what Gil would
call] specific labor services?<
(A) As far as I know, _no one_ has ever said one couldn't purchase a
specific labor service (if one has sufficient money of course and the
type of society is such that having money gives one power over other
people's time). I don't think Marx denied this possibility. (Gil,
where did he do so, if he did? You're the one who's good at quoting
chapter and verse.) Rather, he didn't see it as _essential_ to
defining capitalism as a social system, especially the kind of
capitalism prevailing at his time.
He also saw capitalist social relations, unlike that of the purchasing
of specific labor services, as emerging from the existing political
economy (or social formation) of his time and tending to swallow the
entire world. (For him, the "essence" or shared characteristics of
anything indicated its dynamic tendencies. Essence isn't the correct
word here, as discussed in note *** below, in part 3 of 3.) He seems
to have been right.
Again, it's important to understand what's important before one moves
onto what's not. NC economists similarly believe that understanding
rational and single-minded individual goal-seeking – which they often
see as essential to human nature – is needed before one can understand
the demand for any commodity. I don't agree with them, but that's
another issue.
(B) BTW, it should be stressed that "labor power" represents what
economists currently term a "stock variable," while "labor services"
(i.e., Marx's "labor" or to others, "labor done") represent a "flow
variable."
When someone purchases "specific labor service" he or she is hiring
(or "renting") labor-power for a specific purpose, i.e. to produce a
specific use-value, which then provides labor service. That means that
the labor-service provider is submitting to the contractor's
authority, just as with normal sale of labor-power for specific time
periods. The actual enforcement of that authority is conflictual (even
_with_ bonding and the like) and may end up in the courts.[*] So it
ends up being very much the same as hiring labor-power, requiring
domination (subjection) of some sort.
It's also quite possible that (contrary to Roemer's assumption) that
there's no exploitation at all involved in the hiring of "specific
labor services" (because "equal exchange" prevails in simple commodity
production). In that case, if one's goal is to understand the nature
of exploitation that prevails under capitalism, the study of the
hiring of "specific labor services" is irrelevant.
[*] I just had a new light-switch installed in our house. What do I
know about what the "South Bay Handyman" actually did inside the walls
and attic? what do I know about the raw materials and skills he used?
not much. He did find a beer-bottle in the attic, which suggests that
earlier workpeople were engaged in non-work activities while working.
Gil: >Or for that matter, I would add, appropriate surplus value by
lending money at interest to finance production of new value?<
I think we went through this a few years ago. I thought I answered
this question. Perhaps, as too often, my prose or my thinking was
unclear. I'll try again.
No-one denies that individuals can and do _appropriate_ surplus-value
by lending money at interest. But there's a big difference between
"appropriating" (taking, receiving) something and producing it (or
organizing the production of it). For example, I am able to
appropriate the sun's rays into my skin without producing those rays
myself. With the input of solar rays, my skin does produce warmth for
the rest of my body, a tan or sunburn, more freckles, and eventually
skin cancer and of course death. But my skin does not produce the
solar rays.
(This common sense goes against the NC grain, by the way. For example,
they often assume that because someone gets (appropriates) money, they
produced it, as long as they didn't violate property rights. Cf. the
Denison-Kendrick-style "growth accounting" that allows the calculation
of "total factor productivity" by assuming that capital's income
corresponds to contribution to total production, etc. This stuff still
appears in textbooks, though luckily some of the more enlightened
"new" growth theorists have rejected it, emphasizing the role of
externalities.)
(C) For Marx, under full-blown capitalism, interest-appropriation was
typically a matter of _redistribution_ of surplus-value. If a banking
capitalist lends money to another capitalist, then the latter pays the
money-lender interest for the service of engaging in what's currently
called "financial intermediation" out of the surplus-value that the
capitalist's workers had produced under his or her (temporary) rule.
The industrial capitalists organize the production, while the
financial capitalists appropriate some of the results of it.
In Marx's view, financial intermediation did not produce surplus-value
directly. Obviously, it is sometimes hard to separate these
"unproductive" and "productive" activities completely in the real,
empirical, world in which productive and unproductive activities are
often mixed. But the distinction makes sense in the abstract.
Thus, Marx talks about financial activity as M-M', money being used to
allow the owner of M to appropriate more money (M'), but sees this as
parasitic on the industrial-capitalist's M-C…P…C'-M', where P is the
production process, C refers to commodities purchased to use in
production, C' are new commodities produced, and M' is a larger amount
of money.
This fits with Keynes' vision of lending, by the way. It doesn't do
you any good, for example, to accumulate financial assets if not
enough production is done to pay the interest, dividends, and/or
capital gains.
(D) On the other hand, in a non-pure version of capitalism -- with
direct producers who are not fully proletarianized and are thus not
socially dependent on capitalists for survival -- it's more
complicated. If direct producers have direct access to the means of
production and subsistence (i.e., are not proletarians at all), they
aren't going to do surplus-labor for the merchant or banking
capitalists. They aren't going to borrow money in the first place
unless they face hard times (bad harvest or whatever, with no royal
granaries to tap). In many of the settler colonies, as Marx argues in
the last chapter of volume I of CAPITAL, the ability of producers to
go into business for themselves prevented capitalist class relations
from persisting and expanding, preventing exploitation. That's why
wealthy folks and their hired advocates complain about
backward-bending supplies of labor-power and the difficulty of
trusting and monitoring those to whom they lend.
Further, direct producers may lack assets that can be used as
collateral, perhaps because of the ambiguous and/or incomplete
imposition of individual property rights, as in pre-capitalist
England.
In Africa and elsewhere, there was an active effort to proletarianize
the direct producers, by using the power of the colonial state to
forcibly impose head taxes and take away the producers' lands. (Of
course, this is similar to the "primitive accumulation" in England and
elsewhere.) Without these kinds of oppressions, the money-lending
capitalist must become an industrial capitalist, i.e., go in and
directly supervise (subordinate, dominate) the direct producers in
order to get the principal back, not to mention the interest on the
loan.
But even then, the direct producer can decide not to borrow money
again if he or she has direct access to the means of subsistence and
production. The money-lender has no ability to force the direct
producer to do anything.
(E) Another alternative is for money-lenders or merchants to rely on
already-existing "pre-capitalist" systems of subjection. That is, if a
feudal lord has a local army of thugs ("knights," "sheriffs," etc.)
that forcibly squeeze rent out of the direct producers, use this to
encourage the payment of interest-rent-taxes (these three forms were
not really separate until capitalism arose). In more modern times,
e.g., the post-Bellum U.S. South, the landlords and moneylenders
formed coalitions with the politicians and merchants (or all of these
were the same people) to squeeze interest-rent-taxes out the direct
producers (the freedmen who became debt peons).
These systems of unified landlord/merchant/moneylender/politician
power might be called "proto-capitalist subjection" or
"proto-subjection" because of the parasitic reliance of the
merchant/money-lending capitalist on non-capitalist class forces. They
preceded full-scale capitalist subjection of labor – and followed
purer feudal, slave-system, etc. subjection. (Perhaps "proto" is the
wrong prefix (or protofix) because it suggests some sort of automatic
transition from proto-subjection to actual (formal or real) capitalist
subjection. History is not that simple. I use the term because it is
parallel to the historically co-existing "proto-industrialization,"
which refers mostly to technology.)
<ellipsis>
--
Jim Devine / "You need a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
