replies to Rakesh, Wojtek, Charles, Chris Anarchism / Marxism debates

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Aug 27 11:02:10 PDT 1999


In message <37C6CF28.DC74C401 at igc.org>, Roger Odisio <rodisio at igc.org> writes


>Marx said that social subsistence needs are commonly known. And, because those
>needs were so basic in his time, this was largely true. With, for example, the
>proliferation of consumer goods, determining needs is now a much more difficult
>task.

This is such hogwash. Like any price, the price of labour power is not reckoned by some rational planning process, but established through exchange.


> Workers' consumption needs are determined socially separately from the
>labor process that is a main determinate of wages.

Yes, they are not related directly to the labour process, that's true. But then neither is it true that the labour process directly determines wages. The wage is the price form of the value of labour power. It is equal to the aggregate price of the commodities that are needed to reproduce a labourer, at the established cultural level of his time.

When, for example, the British National Health Service reduced nurses wages below what was necessary to live in London, trained nurses left the country taking their skills with them.


> They must catalogued by
>analysts--you and me, Jim;

This is nonsensical. Clearly you know nothing of Marx's method in Capital. Marx does not see the purpose of economic theory as one of establishing just prices. Prices are established on the market, spontaneously, not through planning.


> they don't exist in the NIPA. Wages are not a proxy
>for them.

You must be talking about some consumption needs that exist in some other dimension that the one the rest of us live in. Workers' meet their consumption needs through their wages, not with magic money from the planet x.


>
>Contrary to your claim that I "talk as if" such numbers are "some ideal standard
>with no bearing on real life", I have repeatedly emphasized the opposite.
>Quantitatively, until you understand what is labor's subsistence needs, you
>can't
>know what surplus value is.

Talking to you is like talking to someone who changes the subject mid- sentence. First you think you have to establish wages theoretically (when everyone knows that they are established in practice). Then you think that you have to establish surplus value in theory, but that too is established in practice, behind the backs of the producers, so to speak.


>Looking at wages won't get you there.

If I were to accept your point that we were now investigating the sum of surplus value, then I would have to disagree, the wage would be a very important indicator of surplus value. Certainly surplus value is a real quantity, the difference between the wage and the cost of the total product. You seem to think that it is an ideal quantity, related not to the actual time necessary to reproduce the value of the worker's labour power, but related instead to some ideal basket of consumption goods that workers don't consume.

I thought you had some familiarity with Marx' categories, or I would have taken more time to explain them to you.


>I'm left wondering who you think you're fooling with such obvious reversals of
>what I said.

there's no need for me to reverse what you said when you do it so artlessly yourself.


> Don't you realize there is an archive now? You may reply anyway
>you wish to this post. You'll not get another response from me on this topic.

I'm not sure yet that I have had a response from you at all. -- Jim heartfield



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