unions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>I think that the grouping that you are talking about is what C. 
>>Wright Mills calls "the power elite."  It is indeed the power elite 
>>who make decisions on "the deployment of US imperial power abroad," 
>>but is it the power elite who determine "the conditions of social 
>>labor"?
>
>I prefer the term ruling class to power elite, but it's a class with 
>several subspecialties. A bunch of CEOs might say, "W, I think you 
>need to do something about X," and W will probably listen, though 
>neither he nor the CEOs will be involved with the planning of the 
>operation directed at X. (That may be a cruise missile attack or a 
>new tax policy.) The same CEOs may also say, "We need to get our 
>costs down," and they tell their subordiantes to cut their costs by 
>10%. They may think that because their share price is slumping or 
>the chief investment officer of CalPERS has been on the phone 
>complaining about weak earnings.
>
>Doug

Conscious political interventions (legislating, backroom wheeling & 
dealing, changing interest rates, changing money supply, etc.) by the 
power elite must have some impacts on "the conditions of social 
labor," but the "conditions of social labor," as Marxists understand 
them, are determined primarily by private decisions of individuals 
(buying & selling) through the market and secondarily by class 
struggles (in which autonomists give primacy to the self-activity of 
the working class).

*****   ...[T]he social functions of production and distribution, 
surplus extraction and appropriation, and the allocation of social 
labor are, so to speak, privatized and they are achieved by 
non-authoritative, non-political means. In other words, the social 
allocation of resources and labor does not, on the whole, take place 
by means of political direction, communal deliberation..., but rather 
through the mechanisms of commodity exchange...based on a contractual 
relationship between "free" producers -- juridically free and free 
from the means of production -- and an appropriator who has absolute 
private property in the means of production (Wood, Democracy against 
Capitalism, 1995, p.29)   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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