----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 1:30 AM Subject: Re: Negri on globo
> >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.
=========== So complexification of the division of labor cannot undermine the explanatory manichean relationship between capitalist and wage labor tout court? There shall only be two categories and the diffusion of ownership throughout a population in historical time shall not make the categories regarding class position problematic under any circumstances? Does the value of labor go down when the price[s] of labor goes up and vice versa?
> 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
================
Nonetheless, the basic dualism still exists and shall not be sundered by mere surface empiricisms that might fuzzify the issues of class position. Nor are the explanatory weaknesses of M's theory of value to be explored in light of what's happened to legal models of ownership since Berle and Means.
Ian [wrestling with G A Cohen and Morris Cohen]