From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 08:45:53 EDT
Re: (OPE-L) Re: the _struggle_ over the length of theRe Rakesh's message dated Tuesday, June 10:
Previously I wrote:
> The quote you are evidently referring to is from Section 5 of
> XIII ("Main Causes of Attempts at Raising Wages or Resisting
> their Fall") of _Value, Price and Profit_ (see
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm ).
> Marx wrote that "In all the cases I have considered, and they
> form ninety-nine out of a hundred, you have seen that a struggle
> for a rise in wages follows only in the track of *previous* changes ..."
Rakesh asked:
> Why not quote the entire paragraph, which reads: <snip, JL> <
It was a long paragraph and I gave the exact location -- and url --
of the paragraph. I thought that was enough.
Rakesh continues:
> Marx conceives wage struggle here as "reactions of labour against the
> previous action of capital."
Your memory, on Monday, had Marx writing that in nine out of ten cases
"workers struggles are in fact defensive." The paragraph that you cited
does *not* deal with workers' struggles in general -- *or* the specific issue
under discussion in this thread, namely, struggles over the length of
the working day -- but _only_ with struggles for increased wages. It
would be a very big mistake, imo, to conceive of workers' struggles as
_only_ struggles over increased wages.
Rakesh then cites another paragraph 'a few pages down' which shows
that:
> Again Marx has workers responding "against the encroachments of capital",
> not vice versa.
Again: Marx is discussing *wage* struggles.
Rakesh continues:
> My point here is that Marx may have been wrong to conceive of
> worker struggles in overly defensive terms.
> Perhaps he could be read falsely casting the worker struggles as
> defensive,
Again: Marx didn't claim that workers' struggles in general are defensive
in nature.
> as responses to the previous actions and encroachments of
> capital in order to embolden oppressed who would otherwise be fearful of
> actually offending the powers that be. Perhaps Marx worked around rather
> than assaulted the inhibitions of the oppressed who could at best see themselves
> defending but never offending their social superiors?
> Perhaps Marx is a conservative, and theorists like John Holloway and
> Michael Lebowitz are developing a more uninhibited radicalism.
Marx wasn't a conservative but he may have had a 19th Century
belief that if workers are portrayed as victims then the self-awareness of
workers as victims will help mobilize and empower them. Psychology,
Social and otherwise -- it should be recalled -- was in its infancy when
Marx was alive.
In solidarity, Jerry
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