lntellectuals vs. activism

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Wed Aug 7 01:48:46 PDT 2002


Note that Marx's argument, which rests on the principle of value creation - - he who creates value should own and control it; workers are sole creators of value under capitalism, ergo: workers should own and control all output of capitalist production - does not apply here. It is quite obvious that the claim to foreign aid cannot be truthfully based on the assertion that the recipients are entitled to it because they produced it wojtek

Goodness, where does one even begin with this argument? First of all the idea of workers controlling "all output of capitalist production" is such a travesty of Marx as to almost take one's breath away. But secondly, does value observe national boundaries? At least with all the talk of globalisation today one would have thought that organisation of capitalist production on a world scale is something that has begun to be understood. Value theory is a lot more subtle than your crude caricture suggests. Are you also one of these people who think that women who do housework contribute no value to capitalist production because they are not the ones who receive the direct wage? So would it be purely "altruistic" on the part of the wage earner to allocate to such women their due share of value? (I am not agruing BTW for "foreign aid", which is in reality far from altruistic and also not a means of redistributing wealth in any significant sense.) Tahir



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