From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed Jun 06 2007 - 13:20:44 EDT
> This is not the only place where Marx says that certain economic > magnitudes are not governed by economic laws but depend on other > circumstances, for instance, the force of the contending parties. Two > other famous examples for this are, of course, the length of the > workday and the interest rate. Hi Hans, Anders, and others: The interesting question here might be how the topic is presented at a level of abstraction associated with capital-in-general versus a more concrete level of abstraction in which skilled workers can be able to organize collectively for higher wages. Labor market segmentation is a key part of the process which explains the wages for skilled workers in the following sense: the existence of an industrial reserve army composed of unskilled workers tends to depress the wages for that group; however, the demand for skilled labour power is relatively independent from that condition. That is, the demand for skilled labour power can increase even when the demand for unskilled labour power is decreasing. If there is excess demand, then, for skilled workers of a certain type, then capitalists may be in a situation where they are forced to compete against each other to obtain that labour power and that obviously bids up their wages. One could argue that this is a short-term situation in the sense that if the demand for unskilled labour power is very high then that will over time encourage others to obtain the training required to perform that skill and as more people then enter the pool of skilled workers that undermines the condition of excess demand for labour power and could perhaps lead to an excess supply of skilled labour power in particular occupations. In practice, there may be various obstacles to this mobility of labour power. There are other complications as well: e.g. technological changes can not only result in new commodities being produced, they can also cause entire groups of commodities to become obsolete and with that you can also have the obsolescence of skills. Thus, the transition from transportation by horse to automobile involved the obsolescence of certain skills (e.g. blacksmiths who made horse shoes) and the creation of new skills or the same skills in additional quantities (e.g. tool-and-die makers). I think that -- by far -- the most interesting issues connected to skilled labour arise at more concrete levels of abstraction, which is the main reason that debates over the "reduction problem" have tended to be rather stale and dull. In solidarity, Jerry
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