Well Nicky I'll try a stab at this. What the LTV does is to take a subset of the 24 hours in a day and to partition it (via the principles we all discuss) into paid labour time and unpaid labour time, or in the aggregate total wages and total profits, and it studies the time trends of these, what causes their movements and what the consequences are. (I am conscious of glossing over a large number of issues here, but never mind.) It has nothing to say about the rest of the hours in the day, except perhaps that they are a residual, a sort of domestic reservoir in which exhausted workers replenish their labour power in a variety of ways so that they can work the next day for capital. Now I think there is some truth in this (as presumably do we all), but only some. Call the time spent working for capital (producing both the equivalent of the VLP and a surplus value) <capitaltime>. Feminists would argue that there is another partition of time which divides the 24 hours into capitaltime and non-capitaltime. In the latter there is eating, sleeping, studying, leisure(ing), and caring for the very young, children, and the old and infirm. If you allow 7 hours for sleeping, the remainder of these activities take more time than capitaltime in developed industrialised economies. And a lot of it is a lot of work. In particular, caring activities are very labour intensive, and caring is an emotional activity. Consequently, these activities are very difficult for capital to supply: a) their labour intensity makes them potentially very expensive; b) the emotional activity of caring is very difficult to combine with the alienation of labour in a wage contract. Caring activities generally involve caring for people; more weakly they can also apply to other noncapitaltime, as in she/he takes pride in her/his housework/handywork/gardening or whatever. And then there is the question of who does these activities and why. So who looks after the old, the sick, the kids etc? Who takes the part-time job so as to have at least some flexibility in these regards? Who sacrifices a career for their children? Who goes frantic when carefully laid child-care plans go awry and scrabbles around to patch up a solution, sometimes by using holiday time to do so? And so on. No prizes for the answers. Caring activities may be a problem for neoclassical economics, but they are also a big problem for Marxism. For what has value theory to say about them? Value theory focuses on the partition of capitaltime, but what determines the bigger partition into capitaltime and noncapitaltime? Since it is in noncapitaltime that most people find the majority of their activities and their time, studies confined to the partition of capitaltime might seem beside the point, or of subsidiary and limited relevance. Hence I conjecture, the limited appeal of Marxism to women - it just doesn't speak to a rather large part of their experience and their lives. Of course one might say that capital/class struggle determines the partition into capitaltime and noncapitaltime, or that noncapitaltime is determined by capital. But is that convincing? There's some interesting work in Australia by Michael Bittman plus collaborators on noncapitaltime; National Accounts statisticians are increasingly interested in the contribution of noncapitaltime to GDP; and I write this on the day in which ONS in Britain has launched a Household Satellite Account (there's a report in today's FT if anyone is interested). Let's hope Marxists are at least no later than the owl of Minerva!! Simon At 19:35 25/04/02 +0800, you wrote: >Hi Simon, > >To take a different example: what might the bridge be between theoretical >questions of Marxism (discussed on OPE-L) and the political question >(maleness of Marxism, OPE-L)? And what do you think might be the special >skills of economists in finding an answer to the question. I do seem to be >the only active female participant! > >cheers >Nicky Department of Economics, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Tel: +44-(0)20-7882-5089 (direct) +44-(0)20-7882-5095/6 (Dept. Office) Fax: +44-(0)20-8983-3580
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu May 02 2002 - 00:00:10 EDT