Carrol Cox wrote:
(Side remark: "Because it is useful . . .factory system"? I would prefer Because it explains the separation under capitalism of act and motive" -- though without insisting this is _the_ 'correct' construal. Your formulation, "origin of profit," points away from "critique of political economy" to "economics." This is a side remark because I suspect pursuing it might lead us to the black hole of debate over market socialism.)
>
> If workers' labor creates no special claim
> > over labor's product, why does this distinction
matter?
>
> See above.
Marx's own formulation seems sufficient here. Workers' labor creates no special claim over the product because workers have already sold their actual product -- their labor power. If I sell Mike B my shirt, then it is up to him to decide what to do with it. If I sell him my labor power it is up to him to decide what to do with that labor power. The only disputable point is the length of time over which that labor power is to be expended. Where rights are equal, force decides. Morality has nothing to do with it. I didn't sell my "power to weave cotton" or "my power to sell brushes" or "my power to generate algorithms." What I sold was my abstract labor power, which is separate from me as a concrete historical person. (As Portia notices, I can't sell my flesh because it isn't separable.) So "labor's product" is _not_ the worker's product, it is the product (as Locke claimed) of the capitalist who purchased that labor power.
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Precisely...that is the socialist issue. The workers create the product, because they are wage-slaves, they do not *own* their social product, but have only their labour power to sell again and again and again. Thus, they remain powerless. To the degree that they become powerful, they are organized to control the product of their labour and the conditions under which they are exploited.
The point is to change that system.
Again, Marx on the issue:
The worker therefore sells labour as a simple, predetermined exchange value, determined by a previous process—he sells labour itself as objectified labour; i.e. he sells labour only in so far as it already objectifies a definite amount of labour, hence in so far as its equivalent is already measured, given; capital buys it as living labour, as the general productive force of wealth; activity which increases wealth. It is clear, therefore, that the worker cannot become rich in this exchange, since, in exchange for his labour capacity as a fixed, available magnitude, he surrenders its creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself, as we shall see further on, because the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him. He divests himself [entaüssert sich] of labour as the force productive of wealth; capital appropriates it, as such. The separation between labour and property in the product of labour, between labour and wealth, is thus posited in this act of exchange itself. What appears paradoxical as result is already contained in the presupposition. The economists have expressed this more or less empirically. Thus the productivity of his labour, his labour in general, in so far as it is not a capacity but a motion, real labour, comes to confront the worker as an alien power; capital, inversely, realizes itself through the appropriation of alien labour. (At least the possibility of realization is thereby posited; as result of the exchange between labour and capital. The relation is realized only in the act of production itself, where capital really consumes the alien labour.) Just as labour, as a presupposed exchange value, is exchanged for an equivalent in money, so the latter is again exchanged for an equivalent in commodities, which are consumed. In this process of exchange, labour is not productive; it becomes so only for capital; it can take out of circulation only what it has thrown into it, a predetermined amount of commodities, which is as little its own product as it is its own value,...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm#p307
Best, Mike B)
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