>Rakesh, you write: > >>In order to extract surplus value in a free exchange society in which >>labor is carried out by formally free proletarians--that is, assuming >>the basic institutional set up of a developed capitalist >>society--entrepreneurs have to find on the market a commodity whose >>use value posseses the peculiar property of being a source of >>exchange value. In Steve's K terms, the dialectic of use >>value-exchange value allows Marx to specify that it cannot be labor >>time but rather labor capacity which proletarians alienate on the >>market. This basic distinction is novel. > >OK, so your reading is that Marx shows in, or at least as of, Vol. I, Ch. >6, that under the conditions you mention--free exchange economy with >workers "free in the double sense"-- capitalists must hire labor power as a >commodity in order to appropriate surplus value. [I agree, by the way, >that Marx's use of the distinction is novel, and would add that the >distinction is fundamentally important in capitalist political economy.] No, they have to find a commodity the use of which creates value, which *is* the objectification of new labor. This *then* suggests that it is not their future labor time which proletarians have exchanged for wages. What is it then that proletarians sell? It is not labor time at all but the capacity to labor. So I think you got the "must" wrong. Marx is not proving so much that capitalists must hire free wage workers in any and all cases of surplus value production--again he has already accomodated himself to this fact; he is demonstrating that in a free exchange economy in which all labor is assumed to be carried out by such workers, it "must" be labor power, rather than labor time itself, which workers exchange on the market for wages; and the price on this labor power, a subject's capacity for labor and creation, is determined no more or less by the labor needed to reproduce it, that is by the laws of big number commodity exchanges. Hence, the thingification of the human coupled with the humanisation of things, as already analyzed in the fetishism of commodities. And once we have figured out what it is that is alienated on the market, the question then becomes the more difficult and profound one of who it is exactly that can be found *freely* alienating labor power in the form of a commodity on the market. We are dealing here with proletarians, qua juridical subjects. We find human the persona of legal agents who are by law free to enter into binding (and thus be bound by) contracts--we have to go back to Chris Arthur's work on Pashkunis.It is fundamental. See also Lawrence Krader Dialectic of Civil Society and Treatise on Social Labour. Oh, it's late. I hope I made some sense. Yours, Rakesh
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