Re Charlie's [5291]: > Both capitalists and workers can gauge > comparative intensities of > labor without a theory of value and of the socially > necessary > labor time that constitutes its magnitude. The > capitalist sees > how his "labor cost" compares with another > capitalist, and > workers see--and feel--how their effort compares with other jobs. There is some truth to this. The capitalist "sees" intensity through (labor) cost. Their frame of reference, though, is the individual firm and individual market. Individual capitalists are thus little able to "gauge" intensity of labor in different markets, regions, and countries. Furthermore, it is difficult or impossible to reliably guage labor intensity due to the fact that typically a non-homogeneous commodity is being produced at different plants of the same company and at different firms. This is a consequence, in part (but only part) of a competitive strategy of product differentiation by firms in oligopolistic markets. Thus, the individual firm only "sees" that if they can increase intensity then, assuming output level remains constant, they can eliminate a certain number of jobs that produce that output and thereby lower their wage bill, and v, and thereby lower the cost of production/unit of output and thereby increase *individual profit*, ceteris paribus. Yet, they can most certainly can not "see" labor intensity from a global perspective in terms of the variation of labor intensity internationally. The individual worker, as you suggest, also sees and feels increases in the intensity of labor (a point I made as well earlier). Thus, capitalists see labor intensity in terms of cost whereas workers come to know labor intensity sensuously by sight and feel. Yet, the individual worker's frame of reference for labor intensity tends to be limited to her/his experiences at the current individual worksite and at other worksites that the worker is familiar with directly through prior work experience or indirectly from the "hearsay" of other workers who have other work experiences at other job sites. What neither the individual capitalist nor the individual worker can know is what is the average intensity of labor internationally. Indeed, although this is crucial for determining SNLT (more shortly), the individual capitalist is not concerned with this since that capitalist must deal with "cultural and moral" constraints on their ability to increase the intensity of labor that are specific to the geographic area where the capitalist's work site is located. This is another way of saying that the histories of class struggle in different regions, countries (and even markets) have established different "standards" of labor intensity which are "culturally and morally" possible. Within any area one might think of this as a range of variation that is possible. But, the range of labor intensity that is socially possible within an individual region or nation is not the same range of variation for the nternational capitalist economy. *Even if* one reduces this range of variation within a region or nation to an *average* of labor intensity within that region or nation (NB: a highly dubious -- or impossible -- magnitude to calculate) it could *only* be said to equal average labor intensity in the world capitalist economy in the very *special case* where the average labor intensity for that individual region/nation *exactly equals* the average of labor intensity for the world capitalist economy. Even if such calculations were possible -- which I dispute -- there would still be an enormous problem with gathering reliable data for all parts of the world capitalist economy so that we could calculate the average labor intensity. This, however, raises another (brainteasing) problem: is there a reason to believe that *average* intensity of labor internationally is *different from* the degree of labor intensity that is the *standard* for what becomes SNLT? I.e. are we talking about "average" or "best practice" or a "range" of labor intensities when we refer to SNLT? > Before trying to measure the socially necessary > labor time in > individual products and the jobs that make them, > I'd ask why one > would attempt to use the theory of value this way. That is similar to asking why we would want to know what the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, the rate of profit, etc. are in different nations. A simple but pragmatic answer would be that our tactical decisions about what the working class should "do next" depends, in part, on a realization of what is happening now and what has been happening in the past. Workers want to know what is happening in the economy ... shouldn't we? In solidarity, Jerry
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