Brad writes: >Consider the comparison of Erich Honecker and Ferdinand Marcos. Erich Honecker exploits the East German people, and manages to get some nice dinners, a pretty big house, some servants, and... a deer park. That's the most he gets out of them in the way of surplus value because he takes it out of his people in use-values. By contrast, Marcos gets... $3 billion. He can use the international financial architecture to take it out of his people in exchange-values.< I don't have a brief in favor of E. Germany (or the Marcosian Philippines) and I'm not going to make one. But I do think it's a mistake to focus too much on individuals. So let's move on... >I think that the point is incomplete because it neglects the impact of the social system on human productivity. Where labor power is effectively free to the boss, the boss has no incentive to make sure that the labor power is used productively.< This is a valid point, as far as it goes. IMHO, both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism (like the G.D.R., R.I.P.) are class systems in which the ruling classes are striving to extract as much surplus-labor as possible. (This is what "using labor-power productively" means in practice.) The G.D.R., despite its technological advantages relative to the rest of the old East Bloc, seems to have failed here, relative to capitalism (though I am far from being an expert on this). On the other hand, the ruling class there didn't have as much control over the workers' work time, so that workers could say "we pretend to work" (like in the rest of the East Bloc). The value of that kind of freedom (for the workers) shouldn't be downplayed. (But for some reason it's left out of both GDP and GMP statistics...) This point goes further when we compare capitalism to the tributary mode of production. The fact (as I understand it) is that when the head Inca wasn't mobilizing tributary labor (with whips, Max, because I know that excites you) or taking tribute, the various communities under its rules were pretty autonomous. They had freedom within the context of the Inca empire's hierarchy. This meant that communities could "use labor-power productively" for their communities' purposes. It's important to remember that this use of labor is as important in the grand scheme of things as the Inca's use of the tributary labor. (Strictly speaking, however, labor-power was not a commodity under tributary modes of production or in such communities.) >Someone once wrote something about the bourgeoisie being a "most revolutionary class" that awakened productive powers that no one before had ever imagined slumbered in the lap of social labor. Capitalism gives you higher productivity to go along with its higher rate of surplus value as well. < Holding real wages constant, higher labor productivity implies a higher rate of surplus-value by definition. But that's a quibble. It's important to remember that capitalism awakened the "productive powers that no one before had ever imagined slumbered" by taking over the production process completely (what Marx called the real subjection of labor by capital). This allowed not only the increase in the productivity of labor but also the amount of labor-effort done per hour of labor-power sold (an increase in labor intensity). It also involved the increasing dependence of workers on capital for their means of subsistence (falling self-sufficiency), so that the entire life span of workers was under capital's dominion, unless they struggled back. Not only that, the way that capitalism unleashed those productive powers has led to greater and greater threats to not only non-capitalist systems but the natural environment. (Bureaucratic socialism, which was an authoritarian but relatively egalitarian effort to emulate capitalism while promoting national economic development, had similar results.) >But if you are enslaved in the mines of Pitosi, capitalism is no bargain. (Of course, if you have your heart torn out still beating in Tenochtitlan, not-capitalism is no bargain.)< Potosi is exactly what Marx was talking about when he said that combining capitalism with overtly-forced labor was the worst of both worlds. On the other hand, I never thought that being dominated by the Aztecs (or Incas, for that matter) was socialism. Let's sing a chorus of "I left my heart in Tenochtitlan." Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
