From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Tue Nov 09 2004 - 12:42:16 EST
---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Production shifts From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Date: Tue, November 9, 2004 10:37 am -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry asked: Is this claim to asset ownership by the working class via stock ownership in pension and mutual funds to be understood as: a) an increase in the customary value that is represented -- indirectly -- by the wage?; or b) a claim by the a portion of the working class to the *surplus* value produced by other workers? As I have mentioned before, in Marx's time taxation and social insurance was a much more marginal phenomenon. The claims of taxation on current income & revenues were not so large. In reality, however, the data show that stock ownership is not very dispersed (see e.g. Edward Wolff's work on this) and that the amount of stocks directly owned by ordinary workers is small. Specifically, Wolff mentions that the richest 10 percent of families own about 85 percent of all outstanding stocks. They own about 85 percent of all financial securities, 90 percent of all business assets. In 1983, only 32 percent of households had some ownership of stock. By 2001, the share was 51 percent. So there has been greater dispersion stock ownership, in terms of number of families. But on closer inspection, a lot of these families have very small stakes in the stock market. In 2001, only 32 percent of households owned more than $10,000 of stock, and only 25 percent of households owned more than $25,000 worth of stock. So a lot of these "new stock owners" have had relatively small holdings of stock. The majority of ordinary people holding significant stocks are older middleclass workers, not the younger ones, who generally hold few stocks. That makes sense, because the younger ones haven't yet the ability to save enough from their income. If ordinary workers directly receive profits from stocks, then they obviously do participate in the share-out of surplus-value, but as mentioned, this phenomenon is quantitatively not so significant. If workers pay into pension, mutual or insurance funds, however, the payout they get later is normally a cost to the pension, mutual or insurance business, not a direct disbursement of the income of that business, which proceeds to invest these funds. Hence it should be seen not as part of surplus-value, but as a distribution of revenue. In principle, the Marxian economic concept of surplus-value applies to the valuation of the output of production; though surplus-values can of course be realized in exchange. Only the payout from insurance funds can be considered part of the real wage, assuming that the worker is earning a wage. I personally do not regard variable capital, the value of labor-power and the (real) wage as identical concepts, although often Marxists do so (in my opinion wrongly). You might do that, I think, in some abstract academic model, but in real life or in an analysis of empirical data, this conflation cannot be sustained. As regards skilled workers, I haven't got a data set yet on that, but there more "drain" of skilled workers from developing to developed countries than "drain" of semi-skilled or skilled jobs from developed to developing countries. Of course, we have to distinguish between shifts in jobs and shifts by workers themselves. Jurriaan
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