I wrote:
>It's not that the "book on wage labor" is missing from the
"Marxian canon." Rather, Mike's point is that it was left out of
the book CAPITAL. Mike's book quotes a heck of a lot of material
from Marx's _other_ writings (especially the GRUNDRISSE) which
can form a "book on wage labor." ...<
Jerry wrote: >>On the contrary, I think that Mike L.'s point is
that both capital and CAPITAL are "one-sided." A separate book,
according to Mike's book, on wage labor is needed because capital
is only one side of capitalism as a whole. The other "side" is
wage labor.<<
Yes: in CAPITAL, Marx was looking at capitalism "from the
standpoint of capital," which is one-sided because it does not
take into account such trivial matters as the human nature of
workers. But ideas such as the need to organize wage-laborers
(and for wage-workers to organize themselves) to go beyond the
"logic of capital" has long been part of the Marxian tradition.
It shows up in Gramsci's notion of hegemony or in Marx's slogan
about the only force that can liberate the working class being
the workers themselves, for example. Of course, the Marxian
tradition has also included a lot of "automatic Marxism" where
the forces of production triumphantly march over and
revolutionize the relations of production to create revolution
and even socialism (a recent incarnation of this theory was
produced by GA Cohen); this is the "one-sided Marxism" that Mike
L. criticizes and sees as a reflection of the one-sided nature of
CAPITAL and capital.
It's been awhile since I read Mike's book. Let's let him do the
talking....
for socialism from below,
Jim Devine jdevine@lmumail.lmu.edu
Los Angeles, CA (the city of the future: the home of long, expensive trials)