Negri on globo

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jan 9 01:30:56 PST 2002



>in other words, you can make (and have) a lot of money (and
>property) and still be working class? i never said these guys were
>capitalists. that's not my point at all. quite the contrary. nor did
>i mean to suggest that their wages and working conditions are
>anything other than the product of struggle.
>
>j

Fundamentally, classes in the Marxist parlance (unlike in our common sense) are not categories of social stratification endlessly divided by more or less incomes, more or less monopoly powers, etc., into which we may classify concrete individuals. Marx analyzed capital and wage labor as two sides of the essential relation of production that makes capitalism what it is and gives it its peculiar drive -- i.e. the drive to increase productivity and bring down the value of labor power.

Given Marx's theory of value, higher paid workers in rich nations may very well be more exploited than lower paid workers in poor nations; if individually considered, the best paid workers may very well have more incomes than the least successful capitalists and petty producers (though such unsuccessful capitalists are likely to go out of business soon); etc. -- Yoshie

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