From: Michael Schauerte (mikeschauerte@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Sat Jun 23 2007 - 22:37:31 EDT
If there is a distinction, as you seem to recognize, between exploitation in the sense of the creation of surplus-value and what you refer to as "additional exploitation," wouldn't it be worthwhile to use two separate terms to avoid confusion? Consider how much confusion arose in the thought of Smith and Ricardo for using a single term, "labor" to refer to both the living labor in production which adds value to the product and the labor-power commodity that workers exchange in return for their wages. By making this distinction, Marx cut through a tremendous amount of confusion, and this distinction is the very basis for the understanding of the generation of surplus-value (i.e. exploitation in its essential sense). I say that you "seem to recognize" the distinction, because then you say, "once a surplus product has been produced (whether thorugh exploitation or not)." I don't understand why you move from speaking of surplus-value in the beginning of the sentence, to "surplus product," when there is a crucial difference between these two terms, which is related to the fundamental distinction between "value" and "use-value." The Physiocrats failed to make this distinction, and could only recognize surplus-value in a tangible form as agricultural products, mistakenly categorizing manufacturing as unproductive (or "sterile") labor. But at any rate, in every society that exists above the level of bare subsistence, there will be a suprlus product, but this does not necessarily signify that exploitation is occuring, where a minority lives off of the labor of others. And I suppose that is what you are recognizing when you say parenthetically "whether through exploitation or not." But while this is true for "surplus product," it is not the case for the surplus in value that emerges in the production process, which stems from that difference between the value of the labor-power exchanged and the labor added in the production process by the worker exchanging that labor-power for a wage. Here it is not possible to say "whether through exploitation or not" because this is precisely exploitation itself (in the "essential sense," if you like). (I should also add that I don't follow the logic in limiting the "additional exploitation" that occurs in the process of the ciruclation, distribution, and consumption of the "surplus product." Isn't the entire product circulating, distributed and consumed, not just the surplus product --however that term is defined.) At any rate, I would simply repeat that the key question is to discover where profit arises from. If you do in fact agree that this can ultimately be traced to the surplus-value generated in production (as already explained), then we share the same understanding of exploitation in its essential sense. And I would then suggest the need to clearly note this essential fact by using some specific term to identify it. If you have another explanation of the *ultimate source* of profit (and not simply a description of how the surplus-value created is later distributed or coerced from one pocket to another), then could you express it succinctly? If your argument is merely to list up all of the cases where a person profits at another's expense, and point out that workers have also been known to do this, I would respectfully say that this fails to answer the question that political economy was puzzled by for centuries, and which the Physiocrats took a first step towards answering in their theory of the "produit net." I think that it is only once we have answered the question of the ultimate origin of "profit" (=society's surplus in value at the end of a given period of production) that we can then go on and consider how surplus-value is distributed. But that discussion is quite complex, as it is related to the concept of productive labor, the formation of an average rate of profit, etc. One reason for the complexity of the question of exploitation (and profit) today is the specialization of the economy and vast expansion of companies involved in the circulation process of commodities. To cut through the confusion, I think we can learn a lot from ch. 17 in vol. 3 of Capital where Marx discusses commerical profit. There he points out that in considering commercial capital (and how it obtains a portion of the surplus-value created by productive labor), "the problem must at the outset be put in the form in which the phenomena peculiar to commercial capital do not yet appear independetly but are still in direct connection with industrial capital, of which commerical capital is a branch." That is to say, things become clear if we think in terms of a single company handling production and circulation. In such a case, certain costs are necessary to "realize" the surplus-value produced by means of successfully selling the product, but obviously in this case those functions to sell the product are not the source of the surplus-value. It is only when a company has "outsourced" these functions of circulation to another economic player, which makes a profit for this service, that things become very murky and confusing, and it seems that profit can spring from any sort of labor. Indeed this is true as far as the concept of profit is concerned, but there is an essential distinction between the surplus-value that emerges in the production of a product and the subsequent distribution of that surplus-value as the profit earned by all of the economic actors involved in the circulation of commodities. Lumping together everything together under the term "exploitation" means that we lose sight of the distinction between the concept of surplus-value and profit, as well as the origin of surplus-value. Michael
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