Jerry is right to say that unfree labour does not necessarily produce surplus value. It does though, caveats about value being definable only within capitalist commodity production aside, when unfree labour produces for the market, as when slaves in the US south produced cotton sold onto the world market. Marx also makes the point that surplus value can arise from merchant capital, where the surplus value does not arise from hiring workers to produce commodities with more value than costs of production, but from buying cheap and selling dear. >Re Rakesh's [6817]: > >> We had some argument about whether workers who are not formally free >> wage laborers could still produce surplus value--I tended to find the >> old arguments of Jairus Banaji persuasive. I would consider these >> workers to be clearly proletarians productive of surplus value. > >The continued persistence of bonded labour was never in doubt in >our previous exchange. For more information on that subject, see >Tom Brass _Toward a political economy of unfree labour: case >studies and debates_ (Library of Peasant Studies No. 16, Frank Cass >Publishers). Brass's case studies include examinations of bonded labour >in eastern Peru (and the "enganche system"), northwest India, and northeast >India. He also attempts a critical evaluation of the role of unfree labour >in both neoclassical and Marxian theories. However -- in reply to Rakesh >-- the continued existence of unfree labour for millions of people globally >does not of and in itself speak to the question of whether they are >productive of surplus value. > >In solidarity, Jerry Associate Professor Ian Hunt, Director, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Philosophy Dept, School of Humanities, Flinders University of SA, Humanities Building, Bedford Park, SA, 5042, Ph: (08) 8201 2054 Fax: (08) 8201 2784
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