From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 09:36:25 EDT
Hi Paul C. > I would be very surprised if this dominated at a world scale > considering the growth of wage labour in China and India. No doubt, v has grown in China in recent years. For India, it might be interesting to compare the rate of growth of wage-earners employed by capital who are productive of surplus value (since that is the relevant category of workers when measuring v) to the rate of growth in 'informal sector' (petty commodity sector) employment. In any event, when looking at the issue globally, we should note (among other things): a) the growth in informal sector employment throughout most of Asia -- including Indonisia, Pakistan and the Phillipines -- Africa, Latin America, etc. b) a global tendency for the ratio of unproductive laborers to productive laborers employed by capital to increase; c) despite 'structural readjustment' pressure by the IMF to decrease public sector employment, one would want to know whether the ratio of state-employed wage-workers to productive wage-workers has increased (and, one should note, how those structural readjustment programs via decreasing social welfare programs have forced the poor, in the presence of _mass_ unemployment, to increasingly seek out informal sector employment). These are all questions which, in principle, should be able to be measured empirically. Another point, which I suggested earlier, is that if v is measured in nominal prices (which it is, right?) then an increase in the size of v can not be used to necessarily infer an increase in the quantity of workers who are productive of surplus-value since when there are increasing nominal wages for productive laborers a given amount of v will employ less wage-workers. In solidarity, Jerry
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