[lbo-talk] Exploitation

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Apr 12 10:51:42 PDT 2005


Justin:
> Your account of Marxisn exploutation is erroneous.
> Exploitation for Marx is not mere surplus transfer
> from producer to nonproducer, It is _wrongful_ surplus
> transfer. The wrongfulness may be, as some people
> believe, theft, although I do not think Marx thinks
> so. It might be injustice, which is more plausible,
> but stll in my view nor Marx. I think Marx's view is
> that the wrongfulness is deprivation of freedom --
> coerion, dominatio9n, and the like.

Huh? Methinks Marx condemned not the transfer of surplus value (he mentioned that in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, if memory serves, but I do not have the text handy, so correct me if I am wrong) - for quite frankly such transfer is unavoidable in any complex society. What he condemned, imho, was that the method of surplus extraction - i.e. making workers work longer than it was necessary to reproduce their labour power what was the basis of its exchange value i.e. wages - prevented them from attaining their full human potential - the fishing in the morning and writing poetry in th evening instead of working in the satanic mills 16+ hours a day. Marx was a closet Aristotelian, hence the concept of good as the full attainment of the potential and evil as falling short of that attainment (that was the _Nicomachean Ethics_ no? or was it _Politics_? ).

Ergo, capitalism is wrong not because it does not pay workers "full" wages, but because it uses them in a way that makes them lose their human potential and humanity. And it makes perfect sense - just think of the SUV-driving, gun-toting, NASCAR-cheerleading working class in the good old US of A. They are paid more than working class almost elsewhere in the world - so surplus transfer is not a problem here. The problem is capitalism using them in way that diminishes their humanity - as mindless receptacles of junk produced for commercial profit and Sturmabteilung called upon to beat the assorted enemies of the ruling class to submission.

Tom Walker:
>Nice try. Primitive populist v. sophisticated and defensible.

Yep. Critiques of primitive populist concepts of social justice (such as "utopian socialism" or "unequal exchange") are abundant in Marx's writings. The _critique of the Gotha programme_ is a good example. The task of the LTV was internal critique of capitalism by showing its paradoxes and contradictions - in this case, exchange of equal values producing glaring inequalities.

You do not need the LTV to show that the workers are screwed up. You can argue, for example that they are screwed up because of unequal power relations, as Justin tried, e.g. the capitalist having the power to pay low wages and then command high prices for the product. But that is an external critique of capitalism, based on assumption that capitalist are pigs, so by implication, changingth9ier hearts is a way to change the system. The weakness of that argument is quite obvious. So accepting the notion that labor-power- wages exchange was in fact "equal" .f. at their exchange value set by the market forces was a smart move when he had a way of arguing that even with that assumption capitalism sucks because it exploits. The trick here was that products are "imbued" with another kind of value, namely the use value - which for the capitalist was its capacity to make profit by selling it. So it was swapping the exchange value of commodity (= socially necessary cost to produce it) for its use value where the screw up occurs.

As I said before, Marx did not need the LTV to show that workers were exploited, but that argument needed additional theoretical assumptions (such one about the nature of what is good and what's evil). That would probably put the whole critique of capitalism on rather solid footing, but it would lack certain aesthetic qualities, such as elegance of simplicity, or cleverness of defeating the enemy wit his own arguments, or for that matter certain popular appeal to the unwashed. The unwashed could easily comprehend the concept of theft, but they would certainly be lost pondering over actuality and potentiality.

Frankly, I think it was the aesthetic simplicity and the cleverness of internal critique rather than the appeal to the unwashed that swayed Marx to adopt the LTV. However, we should not underestimate that appeal, albeit we should also be cognizant of the shortcomings as well.

One final remark. I think that populism, the so-called workerism, or blue collar and kindred underclass identities suck. Big time. I also think that Marx shared the same feelings. However, he did not stoop to merely showing his contempt (as, for example HL Mencken did) but instead tried to lift these folks from their stupor, the idiocy of the rural (and underclass) life if you will by making the benefits produced by capitalism, hitherto available only to bourgeoisie, to the working class. Unfortunately, that lesson has been largely lost by the modern leftist who, in a search for exotic experiences, condemn everything bourgeois and flippantly embrace weird identities as a cure to the boredom of the bourgeois life.

Wojtek



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