Caff.'s critique of Negri/Rifkin (o'connor)

Barbara Laurence cns at cats.ucsc.edu
Fri Jul 23 16:44:32 PDT 1999


Another late intervention...

High organic capital industries don't need the "right" to call on low organic industry pool of value, because the equalization of the profit rate (average profit rate) tendancy automatically redistributes surplus value from low to high organic industry. No?

Also, I don't know of any study of the cost of wages or the socially necessary cost of reproducing laborpower in the Sough as a whole, or any part of the same. To get at the question of S/V in the South. This would seem to be a sociological question (oh god there he goes again with that sociology crap). If local elites/propertied classes keep meat off the market; don't advertise or distribute cars; pay wages so low that they must be supplemented by labor in "traditional" sectors; put cheap cloth but not clothing on the market, so that local people have to make their own clothing, etc., etc., the cost of labor for capital is relatively low, and cet. par., surplus value is relatively high....Then there's the analysis of unlimited supplies of labor at the going wage; that keeps needed money advanced for variable capital low, too. Yet productivity, or production per unit of labortime, may be very high, in a new hypermodern factory (19th century labor conditions, 21st century technology) or very low in the hand-loom weaving sector, for instance. Anybody seen any studies of the cost of wages in the South, something like the BLS's typical consumption basket for a family of four, etc.? Jim O'Connor



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