From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Thu Sep 16 2004 - 04:58:24 EDT
Ajit ___________________ Ian, I think even today in capitalist economies even income tax departments find it very hard to assess the correct incomes of small businesses. How do you expect individual workers to get this information so easily? As a matter of fact, I would expect to find strong family traditions in various lines of production in a scp society. And one of the major reasons for this would be absence of wages as public data. I think I have taken care of your first point in my response to Paul C. Cheers, ajit sinha [snip] > ------------ Paul C I think your point about family tradition is significant, but the same thing exists in capitalist countries as well with sons following their fathers to the mines or shipyards. It is just that the time periods are compressed. Industries grow and shrink over the course of a century or so. In pre-capitalist society the rate of technical change was somewhat slower, and the family traditions could last longer. But alongside that is another consequence. Because technical change is slower, prices have a longer time to equilibrate, so that less mobility is required to achieve it. The basic technologies of carpentry and wine production for example, remained the same for a couple of millennia in the Mediterranean prior to the development of capitalist industry. That gives plenty of time for even marginal movements of labour between vine growing and carpentry to establish customary prices for the products of the two trades that were proportionate to their labour inputs. It should also be noted that some forms of pre-capitalist production obviously had much higher levels of labour mobility than others. Slavery had a relatively high mobility of labour since the slave owners could allocate slaves labour in a rational 'capitalistic' way. Where there exists a significant amount of corvee as well, the feudal lord has disposition of a relatively flexible amount of labour that can be directed into the production of different crops.
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