Workers can understand Marxist concepts, but not if they are presented as you do here. I have never heard "rentier classes," "bourgeois society," "value theory," "proletariat," "fetishistic expression," "surplus labor time," or "necessary labor time" roll off the tongues of workers with whom I have dealt over the course of more than 30 years of union work (except for the "revolutionary vanguard" among them, most of whom come to the workplace from a political economy course at a top shelf university). "Heroic expressions" notwithstanding, the Left had better learn to speak to people in terms that they are likely to use themselves or we'll just be talking to ourselves (very correctly, of course).
In solidarity, Michael E.
At 01:56 PM 9/3/1998 -0400, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>I think working people are best positioned to understand the abstractions
>which dominate bourgeois society and captured in Marx's theory. Value
>theory is based on how labor time, abstracted from its concrete contents
>and special qualities just the way the proletariat experiences work, is
>expressed in money in bourgeois society and how it is dynamically
>allocated. Who better than workers can understand all the concepts about,
>say, the dollar as a monetary expression (and misrepresentation) of labor
>time or the wage as a fetishistic expression of necessary labor time or
>the division between necessary and surplus labor time itself or the
>difference between absolute and relative surplus value or the difference
>between the rate of exploitation and the real wage or the qualitative
>changes brought about by accumulation and expressed in the organic
>composition of capital?
>
>The rentier classes and bourgeois economists shy away from understanding
>society in terms of the abstract expenditure of labor time. But this
>heroic abstraction is something the working class can much more easily
>grasp; it arises out of their lived reality after all.
>
>best, rakesh
>
>