From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Jun 09 2007 - 12:21:24 EDT
Hi Jerry, There are plenty examples of employees who get other employees to do work for them, within or outside the workplace, on a contractual basis or informally. This could range from an academic who employs the labour of a research assistant, to managers using employees, to the employment of slaves, sex workers and children. It might have a gendered or racial dimension as well. Whether or not this should be viewed as "exploitation" will obviously depend on the circumstances of the case, but all I am arguing here is that exploitation in these cases is at least possible, and that this possibility should not be ignored, if we are to talk seriously about exploitation. I do not know what quasi-rents you have in mind. Marx refers several times to competition among workers, and obviously this competition can involve exploitation. I take the fact that capitalists exploit each other to be wellknown, except that it may not be called such, unless a bourgeois norm or law is explicitly infringed (lack of an equal opportunity of access to the market, illegal or grey trading practices, extortional prices). In other words, capitalist exploitation of capitalists tends to come under the rubric of unfair or illegal trading practices, and is not economically theorised because it is viewed as an abberation from normal market functioning or as an immoral transgression. The substantive argument I have, is simply that if Marxists think that the only kind of exploitation there is, is extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists at the point of production, they are simply wrong. In Das Kapital, Marx cites plenty examples of capitalists ripping off each other, but they are rather peripheral to his concerns, insofar as he aims to explain the real basis on which all further exploitation occurs. To put it crudely, in order for the looting to occur, there has to be loot being produced in the first place, and the production of the loot in the first instance already involves exploitation, according to Marx. Frederick Engels himself paid some theoretical attention to the sphere of consumption, for example in his discussion of the "Housing Question". He claims for example: "The distribution of this surplus value, produced by the working class and taken from it without payment, among the non-working classes proceeds amid extremely edifying squabblings and mutual swindling. In so far as this distribution takes place by means of buying and selling, one of its chief methods is the cheating of the buyer by the seller, and in retail trade, particularly in the big towns, this has become an absolute condition of existence for the sellers. When, however, the worker is cheated by his grocer or his baker, either in regard to the price or the quality of the commodity, this does not happen to him in his specific capacity as a worker. On the contrary, as soon as a certain average level of cheating has become the social rule in any place, it must in the long run be leveled out by a corresponding increase in wages. The worker appears before the small shopkeeper as a buyer, that is, as the owner of money or credit, and hence not at all in his capacity as a worker, that is, as a seller of labour power. The cheating may hit him, and the poorer class as a whole, harder than it hits the richer social classes, but it is not an evil which hits him exclusively or is peculiar to his class." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm Engels assumes here that labour power sells at its value (See the paragraph preceding this quote in his text). Kautsky wrote intriguingly in his influential pamphlet "The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx" that: "From the indications that have been furnished, it is plain that capital is no fixed, but a very elastic magnitude, which is capable of considerable expansions and contractions; it constitutes only a portion of the social wealth; by advances from other portions of the same, it can increase the consumption fund of the capitalist class and also of the working class, whilst these funds can be diminished by levying taxes thereon." http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/economic/ch17.htm However he does not elaborate (he did write quite a bit on taxes in various contexts). In fact, this cautious Kautsky quote is directly extrapolated from Marx's comment on consumption in Cap. 3 Chapter 10. The majority of social democrats were not Marxists, but there are many instances where they challenged unfair trading practices and rising consumer prices. And they still do. Nikolai Bukharin in his "Economic theory of the leisure class" devotes special attention to "The point of view of production and the point of view of consumption" and he has short shrift with it: "Without consumption there is no production; no one doubts this; needs are always the motive for any economic activity. On the other hand, production also has a very decisive influence on consumption. Marx explains this influence as making itself felt in three ways: first, in that production creates the material for consumption; second, in that it determines the mode of the latter, i.e., its qualitative character; third, in that it creates new needs." http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/ch01.htm#s3 That is the kind of thing Lebowitz is concerned with. My claim is that Marxists very frequently mix up the analysis of what *regulates* market-trade according to Marx, with the actual process of market trade, which does not presuppose equal exchange at all. They are so concerned with proving exploitation at the point of production, that they do not see the wood for the trees. Orthodox Marxism frequently denies that exploitation can occur in distribution or consumption, because they feel that admitting this, would distract from what they see as the root of the problem, namely exploitation at the point of production. But as soon as wages rise far beyond a physiological minimum, this idea simply does not make much sense, since other forms of exploitation clearly come into play, if they didn't already. As I explained in my refutation of Grossman, in modern capitalist societies the total mass of fixed assets (the largest component of Marx's constant capital) existing outside the sphere of production is now larger in value than total productive fixed assets, a fact which importantly influences the accumulation process. And I am not even talking about the stock of financial assets. Now of course you can ignore all that, but then you ignore the larger part of all economic transactions in an economy, and the fact that you can exploit even without producing anything at all. And to me, that stance is simply not credible. The Marxist theorists focus on equilibrium and what the significance of it is, but the real theoretical problem concerns the dimensions and modalities of economic exchange/property relations, and the conditions for human cooperation (there exists to my knowledge not a single profound and systematic theoretical-scientific treatise by a Marxist explicitly analysing "human co-operation" as such). Small wonder then that Marxists don't get anywhere much politically. Socialism or communism isn't simply a conclusion from exploitation at the point of production, even if Chris Harman says so. It encompasses critiques and alternatives with respect to all aspects of human life. Even just this simple insight already makes the difference between a socialist party of 3000 members or so and a socialist party of 50,000 members. Jurriaan
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