[OPE-L:7051] Re: Re: the value[s] of labour power, nationally and internationally

From: nicola taylor (n.taylor@student.murdoch.edu.au)
Date: Tue Apr 23 2002 - 11:46:26 EDT


Re Jerry's [7049]

> Yet, as a practical matter, money wages tend to be paid  at  intervals
that begin 
*after* production has commenced.   How many workers do you think receive
wages 
before they have produced  anything?  Indeed,  the lag between work done
and wages 
received is one of the mechanisms of control by capitalists over
wage-workers.

Agreed.  Yet, it might still useful to theorise the money wage as being
paid at the commencement of a circuit of money capital and the real wage at
the end of it.  If workers' and firms' expectations are met and the real
wage buys the historically given requirements for reproducing labour power,
then profit would express the rate of exploitation of living labour in
production.  I realise that in practice such a tidy 'equilibrium' condition
is unlikely to arise.  I'll think about it.
  
>Thus,  the M-C-M'  description  is misleading since it doesn't begin with M 
purchasing MP and LP and _then_ there is production; rather there is M
advanced
for MP and labour-power is secured, through an employment contract,  where
both workers and capitalists understand as part of that contract that the
money for
LP won't be paid out to workers as wages until  *after* production has
commenced.
(Perhaps Ernesto S would like to comment on this?)

Agreed.  Even if expanded to M-C-P-C'-M' we still have only one of the
three forms (the money capital form) that constitute the whole of
circulating capital (a completely open ended process). I recently went into
the need to take the circuit as a whole, so won't repeat it here.  

comradely
Nicky    
-----------------------
Nicola Taylor
Faculty of Economics
Murdoch University
South Street
Murdoch 
W.A. 6150
Australia

Tel. 61 8 9385 1130 
email: n.taylor@stu.murdoch.edu.au



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