Marx on Smith (jim o'connor)

[Barbara Laurence]

Roger, the wage bargain is not "about wages only." There's the other side,
namely, what exactly is sold. We know that it's laborpower not labor
services, but what's the proof? The worker's experience, I think.
1) I the worker am told that I'll get a fixed sum of money at the end of
the week or month. This deal is made before I produce anything. My
experience quickly confirms that the boss's rule in the workplace is
therefore to maximize increases in production per unit of labortime.
Everything I produce over and above my wage is potentially surplus. This is
where the discussion usually stops, at the quantitative level.

But surplus value in the quantitative sense of workers producing more than
is required to reproduce their laborpower (that is, variable capital
defined quantitatively) presupposes a concept of LP in the qualitative
sense, that is, variability of LP not in terms of more or less but
"different." Flexibility is of course the universal word today.
2) In or during the wage bargain, the boss states something about what the
worker is expected to do. The peculiar nature of this bargain is that the
boss rarely if ever says exactly these tasks and no others will you do. The
reason is that the boss must be free to vary the utilization of LP in terms
of specific tasks. So "work" isn't and can't be specified as a "job" in the
traditional sense of the word, but as an activity that may require all
kinds of "jobs" in the course of the work day or year. This is because the
lobor process is never fixed, always undergoes changes. E.g., when GM and
Japan retooled GM's Fremont Cal auto works some years ago, the existing 16
job categories, overnight, became three.

If the worker is hired not to do a particular job but many and varied jobs,
potentially, then some of these jobs are likely to be unexpected. The
worker is thus surprised to learn that this or that is expected of him.
When asked to think about this surprise, she can be made to realize that
it's because actual specific duties weren't specified or fully specified at
the hiring office.

The general rule: LP can't be varied quantitatively unless it can be varied
qualitatively. This qualitative variation Marx somewhere speaks of as a
"matter of life or death" of capital...during the crisis. Called
restructuring today, or one aspect of it.

You can see that a variety of observations, deductions, experiences, and
memories are required to nail down a proof of the production of SV. No, not
the production of SV, but the potentiality in the captial/labor relation
for such production.

I've taught Marx this way for years, and it's always a thrill to find that
those students who have had wage labor experience understand the system,
when they are made aware of what they already know; while those without
wage labor experience can't really understand what I'm saying in terms of
their own experience, in practical terms, only in idealistic terms or
objective terms. That which for wayge labor is an experience and memory is
for non-wage labor only a concept....
Jim O'Connor