[lbo-talk] Re: What is value, anyway?

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

John B:
> Here I have to disagree. Labour could organise and produce under
cooperatives or
> government corporations (and does so around the world, regardless of how
oblivious most
> Americans or British are to this) and, so long as such entities did not
function as capital,
> labour would not be exploited to the extent that it is in the
capitalist-controlled production
> of goods and services--simply because capital/capitalist management (such
as managers
> with stock holdings) would not and could not extract profits. This is why,
until credit unions
> were forced to become more like banks (by overt legislation in the case of
the US), credit
> unions could return more interest on a savings account and give out car
and housing loans
> and lower interest rates to borrowers with more lax standards of 'credit
worthiness'. Credit
> unions didn't have to pay out to capital and its demands for its
parasitic, unproductive share,
> whereas banks have to pay out hundreds of millions even billions of
dollars to ca!
>  pital. So Marxist concepts such as the Marxist notion of LTV still has
pragmatic value in
> analysing the current state of things and how things could be changed for
less exploitation.
> Work isn't necessarily exploitation. Extraction of profits to pay capital
(with its owners
> equity as its 'natural right') is.

Few quick points:

1. Capital does contribute to the production process in the form of
organization and that part should be treated as remuneration for work.
However, capital has also the capacity to extract payments exceeding that
remuneration, due to its ownership privileges (economists call that rent).
Only the latter can be considered exploitation.

2.  According to Marx, exploitation occurs when the surplus generated by
labor is not returned to the laborer but retained by someone else.  So it
does not matter whether that surplus is retained by a capitalist or
"society" or rather its representative - in each case it is 'exploitation.'
It can be of course argued that 'society' returns the surplus back in the
form of providing public good, but so does the capitalist i.e. by funding
extravagant  consumption, the arts, or by plain reinvestment.

3.  There is a different between labor and laborers - while "labor" in
general may not be exploited i.e. by getting the entire surplus for itself
(as in a cooperative), individual laborers almost invariably will not
receive an equivalent of what they produced for a number of reasons, chief
among them being than in any complex organization it is impossible to
measure individual contributions with any precision.  So the bottom line is
that individual will always be "exploited" in one form or another within
this framework - so this framework is quite useless to discuss individual
exploitation.  However, when we want to apply this framework to labor viewed
collectively - the difficulty is to draw the line between what is and what
is not labor (see point 1 above).  However, without drawing that line, the
concept of exploitation is meaningless.  So the whole framework boils down
to identity politics: who is in and who is not considered "labor."

These are my 3 cents.

Wojtek