> Roger noted:
>
> >I asserted that in the last 25 years wages and work changes have combined to
> >produce disposible income that at times lagged the rise in v. If so, this is
> >*absolute* immiseration--less money to buy a worker's social subsistence.
>
> The value of labor power rises in the sense that the use values required
> for its reproduction rises due to a combination of the intensity and
> historico moral factors, but to the extent that the rate of exploitation
> rises, the value of labor power falls, to put it tautogously, relative to
> the value it produces (this is indeed increased social misery, though not
> quite yet physical misery).
Here you merely say that labor's share of the product, relative to capital falls as the rate of exploitation rises. OK. A tautology, as you say.
> I think in the above you confuse variable
> capital (v) with the value of labor power.
I think it's fair to say one of us is confused on this point, Rakesh. In the following sentence, which I will get to in a minute, you define v as the use values (consumption basket) that measure the reproduction cost of labor (it's productive labor only, actually, but I digress). But you offer no different definition for the value of labor power (to try to clear up my confusion, I mean). May I suggest that is because there is no such defintion--they are two forms of the same thing? Variable capital is simply the measure of the value of labor power in the exchange process. Marx called it variable capital because, in production, it is being continually transformed from an amount--a constant capital--into a variable magnitude, because the amount of surplus value produced is variable (Capital, Vol 1, p.209).
Marx perhaps best explains the value of labor power in Value, Price, and Profit, a compilation of two talks he gave at sessions of the First International, in trying to debunk the wage fund theory. Admittedly his talks are popularization. For example, he slurs over the difference between the rate of exploitation and the rate of profit. But on the topic of the value of labor power and the difference between labor and labor power, he is clear and concise, for that is at the heart of his critiques of the theory.
So what is the value of labor power? Like any commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of labor necessary for its (re)production. What is necessary? That is measured by the cost of social subsistence consumption basket, deemed sufficient to reproduce the individual worker and his family so that labor might be reproduced as a class (he mentions, btw, the cost of education and development as part of the basket). Same thing as v, which as I said, is merely the measure of labor power value in exchamnge where output = c+v+s.
But then you say:
> By rise in v (traditionally
> variable capital) you mean the greater quantity of use values that go or
> must go to ensure the reproduction of labor power, i.e., that labor power
> sells at its value.
Labor power does NOT sell at its value, Rakesh. It sells at a wage, which has little to do with its value. Capitalists, and need I say, some marxists (not including you), do not know what the value of labor power is. That value has no bearing on the wage bargain, except in the following, very limited, sense. Capital as a class, and to a lesser extent individual capitalists, must take some cognisance of the need for the reproduction of labor in such a way or in such a form that will not substantially harm future productivity. (That doesn't stop them from locking millions in prison and killing some of them, of course.) So capital can't starve workers, or at least the bulk of them. What they must do, i.e., how much pay and supplemental benefits they fork over is a complicated question, and need not concern us here. It's enough to see how unconnected wages and v are.
But for people like you and me, v must play a major role in our understanding of the laws of motion. We measure v, after the fact, after the wage bargain is reached and a round of production completed, in order to (1) determine the rate of exploitaion and rate of profit, and (2) increasingly for me, as an entree into the myriad ways surplus value is realized today (e.g., unproductive labor is part of the distribution of s).
The rest of this, I see as posible special cases to the general case for the deviation of wages from v which I just outlined. But, I confess, I find them confusing.
> The reason for the wage having fallen below the value
> of labor power may be an insuffiently commensurate increase in variable
> capital to the growing total number of workers hired out of that variable
> capital.
You're saying that the reason why wages fall below v is that v/worker falls? But v/worker is determined outside of production. Hiring more workers can't cause v to fall. And changes in v don't cause wages to change either, as I have explained.
But perhaps you mean that hiring more workers causes wages to fall, which drives them below v. OK (not a marxist explanation). But if that's what you meant, there's that problem you've been having throughout this discussion--slipping back and forth between v and wages like they were the same thing; perhaps saying one thing when you mean the other
> But the reason for variable capital having fallen in this sense
> must be sought elsewhere. Grossmann of course locates it in the diminishing
> flow of surplus value--which is really what governs all of Marxian
> dynamics.
A decrease in s causes a decrease in v? Huh (must mean wages here too?)?
Roger