A response to Paul C's ope-l 3350.
Paul, wouldn't it just have been simpler, and more to the point, to
acknowledge that you were wrong and I was right?
Lest there be any doubt about this, let me note the following. In ope-l 3317,
Paul responded to something I wrote by writing: "If v were 0 then there would
be no incentive for capitalists to accumulate constant capital. It would
obviously be cheaper to throw away their machines and have all the work done
by hand."
In ope-l 3326, I replied: "None of this is obvious to me. What about
sabotage, slowdowns, strikes, sitdowns, and other S'es? Machines are used to
bring an ahuman, "objective" discipline to the labor process, and the
subjection of the worker to this discipline. This incentive to substitute
dead labor for living is *also* present when v = 0, but since it (this
particular incentive) is independent of wages, it is most clearly seen when v
is set equal to 0."
In ope-l 3334, Paul then wrote: "With v=0 you are talking about concentration
camp labour being worked to death without even being fed. The response to
slowdowns and strikes would be to shoot the wretches a day earlier. How many
strikes did von Braun have to contend with at Dora[?]"
In ope-l 3340, I then demonstrated conclusively that (a) even if v were 0,
there would be an incentive for capitalists to accumulate constant capital,
and (b) it would not necessarily be cheaper to throw away their machines and
have all the work done by hand. I explained that the basic reasons for these
conclusions are that investment in constant capital is needed to extract labor
from labor-power when workers don't want to do the work and that it can be
cheaper to produce with machines rather than having to bear these non-wage
"labor costs" to put down or keep down recalcitrant workers.
In his ope-l 3350, Paul has replied: "Andrew still thinks that there would be
an incentive to invest in constant capital even under the most charitable
interpretation of zero wages, that limitless supplies of slave labour are
available. His argument is that the constraints necessary for enforcing labour
discipline on slaves would be constant capital.
"My main point was that in considering v=0 you are considering a quite
different mode of production ....
"The point is that as soon as labour becomes free the whole labour theory of
value breaks down."
The record of this debate, above, shows that this was NOT Paul's main point.
It was not even a subsidiary point. It was not articulated by Paul at all
until now. His main point was this: "If v were 0 then there would be no
incentive for capitalists to accumulate constant capital. It would obviously
be cheaper to throw away their machines and have all the work done by hand."
In ope-l 3340, I showed that this was false. Rather than admit the falsity of
his argument, Paul has changed the subject and introduced as a new "main
point" something that was not even under discussion.
His precis of my argument is also misleading and one-sided at best. My
argument does not reduce to the claim that "the constraints necessary for
enforcing labour discipline" are constant capital. Paul remains silent about,
and omits from his precis of my argument, the most crucial aspect of my
demonstration. By means of a simple numerical demonstration, I showed that,
irrespective of the level of wages (and thus also when v = 0), it can be
cheaper to produce with more machines and less living labor, and thus
capitalists have an incentive to substitute dead labor for living labor. This
demonstration does not in the least require either that v actually equals 0 or
that we consider a "different mode of production," though it is certainly
compatible with the v = 0 assumption. As I wrote in ope-l 3326 and
demonstrated in ope-l 3340: "[t]his incentive to substitute dead labor for
living is *also* present when v = 0, but since it (this particular incentive)
is independent of wages, it is most clearly seen when v is set equal to 0."
Paul then makes some empiricist objections to my methodology in general.
Since I agree with Hegel that empiricism is a "doctrine of bondage" (an apt
phrase in the present context), and since, by Paul's criteria, I am only doing
mathematics anyway, I see no need to respond to his philosophical
disagreements. I will, however, note, first, that there is no evidence
whatever that Marx ever contended that relative prices and relative values are
closely correlated, that low correlations are eidence against his value
theory, or that high correlations are evidence in favor of it.
Second, when Paul writes: "As historical materialists we should be concerned
with real social systems, we can not when creating models of them abstract
from their central features and expect the models to be of any relevance in
predicting what actually happens ... What we need to do is to make our models
more concrete, closer to reality and more testable against that reality if we
are to advance the subject," this begs the question of what is a "central
feature" in exactly the manner I outlined in ope-l 3340. Is or is not the
repression of the working class, in the direct process of production, and at
the level of the social totality, a "central feature" of capitalism? If you
don't think it is central, Paul, then please explain how capitalists manage to
get work out of workers. (Or is labor extraction a non-central epiphenomenon
of capitalism?) If you do think repression of the working class is central to
the production of value and use-values, and therefore the costs of it are
unavoidable, where is it to be found in, for instance, your dynamic value
model? Why are you so concerned that one not set v = 0 and not similarly
concerned when people implicitly set R = 0? (R is the cost of repression.)
Isn't R > 0 "more concrete" and "closer to reality" than R = 0?
Finally, an answer to Paul's question: "Why should the wages of a slave
overseer count as constant capital, when the wages of teamster supervising the
labour of horses counted as variable capital?" Because in Marx's value
theory, human labor, not horse labor, is the source of value.
Andrew Kliman