Re: Labour aristocracy

From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Sat Jan 17 2004 - 09:33:56 EST


Paul C. are you thinking of differing international rates of s/v or within
a country?  I was think within a country.  I was thinking of workers within
Mexico earning similar wages (we are abstracting from labor market
segmentations, no?) buying similar 'baskets' of goods, thus produced with
similar labor times.   Ergo, if working hours are similar, their rates of
s/v are similar, regardless of the productivity of the factories involved.
Paul Z.

--On Friday, January 16, 2004 9:55 AM +0000 paul cockshott
<clyder@GN.APC.ORG> wrote:

> The issue here is that the amounts of labour required
> to produce things differ between countries so at the level of
> the world economy the concept of socially necessary labour
> is ill defined. Factories in Mexico producing for export
> to the USA are part of the US system of exchange value
> with respect to the valuation of their output in dollars
> but part of the Mexican system of valuation with respect
> to their purchase of labour power. This undermines the
> assumption of a uniform rate of surplus value.


***********************************************************************
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY,  Paul Zarembka, editor, Elsevier Science
******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jan 18 2004 - 00:00:01 EST