Jon, I'm sorry that I didn't respond quickly. My son was visiting from Connecticut and I couldn't make it to the office.
On 8/15/07, Jon Baranov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Pages 171-176 in that book (section called "uneven development: social > labor"). > > here's a quote [from James L. Becker, MARXIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY, page 176]: > "By paying the technically and administratively advance grades of labor at > rates in excess of exchange value, the market mechanisms of capitalism > stimulate the production of these grades of labor by making them more > attractive to the young, on the one hand" on the other, by pulling surplus > value out of labor of less expensive grades and transferring it to advanced > sectors for overpayment, hence the overproduction of skilled labor, the > market cruelly represses the production of labor power of less skilled and > educated workers." > > I might be just imagining, but I'm not sure if Becker is talking about the > OCC of firms putting pressure on wages, or the internal OCC of labor power > directly determining the price-cost of labor power. Becker does not explain himself at all, at least not at this point in the book. He earlier [page 173], he writes that "even if we grant social mobility [i.e., an absence of Cairnes-type barriers to the mobility of labor-power] ... the structure of wages would still tend to an excessive distortion because of the divergent movement of [the] terms of exchange among all grades composing the division of social labor. In sum, the law of unequal exchange [??] explains both the extent and secular movement of wage differentials.... systematic deviations of wages from the values of labor power are only to be expected." Maybe my eyes are failing me (again!), but I couldn't find a reasonable explanation of the "law of unequal exchange" relevant to the price of labor-power. Thus, Becker's explanation doesn't make sense to me at all. He does define what "equal exchange" would be in this context (though he does not make that explicit) in his paragraph on the views of "conventional economics" [page 172]: relative wages would correspond directly to the relative costs of producing different kinds of labor-power, which would include training costs. He also posits that the production of skilled labor has a higher ratio of constant capital to variable capital than does so-called "unskilled labor" [page 173]. But that doesn't really explain why the skilled workers would be paid out of proportion to the value-cost of their production. (I guess that the point is not about a C/V internal to the worker (a skill ratio) as I thought it might be.) The theory _seems_ to be as follows. The OCC = C/V in the sector producing skilled workers is higher than that in the sector producing "unskilled" ones. Thus, the equalization of profit rates between sectors implies (as is very familiar to students of the so-called "transformation problem") that the ratio of the price of skilled labor-power to its value-cost of production is higher than the ratio of the price of "unskilled" labor-power to its value-cost of production. In his terms, seen for example on page 137, the (P of X)/(Value of X) > (P of Y)/(Value of Y), where P is the wage paid, X is skilled labor-power and Y is "unskilled" labor-power. The problem with this theory is that much of the education of the "unskilled" is done by not-for-profit institutions (public schools). So is much of the education of the skilled (what with government subsidies for higher education). Thus, there would be an extremely limited role for the equalization of profit rates between sectors. Thus, there would be a very limited role for the deviation of prices of labor-power (i.e., wages) from the value-costs of their production. Unequal exchange of this kind _could_ occur, but not necessarily in the way that Becker suggests. Suppose that "unskilled" labor is entirely produced by the not-for-profit sector but that skilled labor is produced entirely by the profit-seeking sector. In that case, the wage/value ratio for the "unskilled" would be less than unity, since there is no profit added on to the variable and constant "capital" costs of production. (They aren't really "capital" if it's a not-for-profit sector.) On the other hand, the skilled workers' wages would be higher than is justified by the cost of production, because profits have to be paid. Thus, it makes sense to say that "the doctor can afford the housemaid, [while] the latter keeps her troubles to herself" [p. 174]. The doctor is paid more, but in a simple cost-of-production [here, value] theory, it's the company that educated her or him that gets the profit, not the doc. Even if the gaps are explained, I can't see why they tend to grow larger over time. I do like Becker's statement on pages 174-5: "Capitalism takes all varieties of social discrimination serviceable to its ends, refurbishes and systematizes them, and presses them into catering to its own requirements. In this sense, capitalism may be said to be the cause of discriminations that may, in some instances, have their roots far in the distant past." -- Jim Devine / "The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. -- Ralph W. Sockman. (he's a deceased preacher.)
