[Was: curses!] Mike writes: >At 05:41 PM 7/22/2002 -0400, you wrote: >>Hi, Mike, it's good to hear from you--How are things on Lasqueti? > >terrible, gil--- the screen on my laptop is disintegrating infinitely more >rapidly than capitalism, and I will be unable to communicate after this >note until I resolve the problem (likely involving leaving the island). What a pain. Don't worry, this can wait until you're up and running again. Meanwhile, though, I'd like to clarify where I'm coming from in this particular discussion and add some food for thought in responding to the following: > Suffice it to say that we disagree on the definition of formal > subsumption; for you, it appears that real monitoring is a necessary > condition whereas I would see the right to monitor as sufficient-- i.e., > a question of property rights. In support of my interpretation of formal > subsumption, see the Grundrisse (vintage), p.510. I should make clear at the start that my primary goal in this discussion is not to criticize any argument of Marx's (unlike in the Chapter 5 discussion), but rather to ascertain what his actual position is. Thus I want to emphasize that it isn't "for me" that actual monitoring of workers in the labor process is the distinguishing feature of formal subsumption, but for Marx, who explicitly states, in the passages I cited in the previous post, both this point and that the putting out system (i.e., the framework corresponding to your scenario A) *does not* constitute a case of formal subsumption. But I remain open to any textual evidence that Marx meant something else by the term than what was indicated in the passages that I quoted from him. Now, on the passage you cited. First, as you'll see from my reply to John Milios, I think the economic logic undergirding this passage is suspect at best, and believe that Marx largely drops this "dependency" (i.e., monopsony) interpretation of increasing capitalist control of production in his economic writings after the Grundrisse. But second, and more to the point, as I understand it *no* passage in Grundrisse, let alone this particular one, can possibly be taken to speak to the issue of what *Marx* meant by "formal subsumption of labor under capital," since Marx did not introduce this analytical distinction until the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, 3 years after he finished the Grundrisse notebooks. The notions of formal and real subsumption of labor under capital are thus nowhere to be found in the Grundrisse. As far as I know, Marx first introduces the notion of "formal subsumption" early on in the EM 61-63 in the following passage: "This *formal* subsumption of the labour process, the assumption of control over it by capital, consists in the worker's subjection as worker to the supervision and therefore to the command of capital or the capitalist." [Marx-Engels Collected Works, V. 30, p93] This definition of formal subsumption is then consistently maintained in other passages discussing the phenomenon in the Ec Mss 61-63 and the Resultate, from which I quoted in my previous post. So far, Marx never contradicts his initial stipulation that formal subsumption involves direct capitalist supervision over the production process. To the contrary, he associates this new form of worker subordination with the achievement of *absolute* surplus value relative to the surplus value that exists under preceding forms of the circuit of capital, associated with the greater continuity and scale of labor performed under capitalist supervision. As a corollary, Marx repeatedly asserts that the rural handicraft/buyer-up/putter-out relation *did not* constitute an instance of formal subsumption of labor under capital. Besides the passage from the Resultate that says just that, quoted in my previous post, also see these passages from the EM 61-63: [Marx-Engels CW, V. 30, p. 270; V. 34, pp. 96, 117-19, 144] And finally, Marx maintains this distinction in Volume I of Capital: "It will be sufficient if we merely refer to certain hybrid forms, in which...the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to capital. In these forms, capital has not yet acquired a direct control over the labour process. Alongside the independent producers, who carry on their handicrafts or their agriculture in the inherited, traditional way, there steps the usurer or merchant with his usurer's or merchant's capital, which feeds on them like a parasite." [p. 645, Penguin] Note I'm not suggesting that you don't have a more economically coherent notion of "formal subsumption" than Marx. Perhaps you do, and that would be an interesting line to pursue. But in any case, it does not appear to be *Marx's* conception of the term. Gil
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