shag wrote:
>
> The lens is never turned on capitalist exploitation in the u.s.
> Exploitation is never learned as something that happens to _you_ --
> leastwise in these introductory courses taught by women's studies
> professors anyway. (What I mean is, there are debates within marxism about
> whether the exploitation of a software developer or even Tyson chicken
> factory worker is even exploitation. But this is not what usually happens
> in such courses; they're not typically taught by serious marxists who would
> be familiar enough with the field to even begin to explore the issues)
[Your final paragraph, not quoted here, is classic and cannot be improved upon. But I wish to pursue a slightly different tangent from this quoted paragraph.]
Understanding exploitation (in the Marxist sense) is necessary to understand the unity of capitalism (a unity which I have expressed in the only partially flippant suggestion that Marx can be reduced to the historicity of capitalism and commodity fetishism). But that exploitation (surplus value) is core to the abstract understanding of capitalism as a unity does NOT mean that exploitation should or even can be the _political_ organizing principle of a political movement for the overthrow of capitalism.
As an agitational slogan, exploitation (in any of its many variations) has the concrete effect of dividing the working class: in fact, of dissolving the working class into an identity (often expressed in the silly phrase, "poor and working people"). This is the dissolution of class politics into identity politics (working class as identity rather than as relation and process), and bizarre arguments over whether such and such a group are "really" working class as not.
There are two absolutely core demands for a working-class movement, and those two demands generate an accurate conception of class and of the aims of our political activity. ( I have discussed one before.)
1. Open Borders. 2. Twenty-Hour Week
When Marx speaks of the degradation or dehumanization of the working class, he means above all, and centrally, that they must sell their time, that is their life to live. And it is this alieanation of living human activity that (potentially) unites the working class from the most oppressed migrant stoo-laborer to the $300K IT consultant and the multi-million dollar professional athlete: their life is not their own. Both demands together operationalize "this land was made for you and me." Both demands celebrate the unity of the working class; the second grasps the destructive nature of capitalism as such. Both point to the socialist world beyond.
Carrol