[Mike Ballard posted}:
"Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class."
Karl Marx, CAPITAL Volume I (section on the working day)
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The chapter I am reading now:
``As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks...'' (216p)
I really encourage anybody who hasn't to check out Harvey's lectures. Once again:
Working day is lecture six, so I am reading it before listening, like a good little student. This is turning into a transformative experience, which I need some time to cool off, like a kid who just discovered sex, oh goodie, goodie, goodie.
The fundamental point really is to begin from labor's point of view wihtin the production system. This is completely missing from all the pop and the formal economics I've scanned and just dismissed as bullshit. Why? Because I struggled for forty years at labor and have never once before now, seen my world in print.
Julio posted a cartoon on Pen-L, to wit Jim Devine answered:
two out of three economists are women?? (of course, the _real_ equation in question is something like y = c + v + s.)
Julio Huato wrote:
> It's a cartoon:
>
> http://openeconomicsnd.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/economists-have-an-equation-for-everything/
--
The cartoon points to an equation (with a differential) of somesort which is hard to read. At a guess, find the derivative, for any moment of time to measure how near or far you are from an inequality turning into an eguality. Markets working through averages tending to equilibrium, is what Marx attacks in its older ratio form. Harvey goes into some of this in Chapter 9, Rate of Surplus Value. The basic arguement is if equals are passed on as equals, there is no surplus value, therefore no profit. So C-M-C and M-C-M (neoclassical model) doesn't work to explain what's going on. It has to be M - C - M + delta M where delta M = S.
The JD's equation for those who don't recognize it, is constant capital C, variable capital V, and surplus value S. Harvey from Marx writes, Productivity = C/V, Rate of Exploitation = S/V, and Rate of Profit = S/C + V, where C + V is total capital advanced. Harvey notes that neoclassical economics and capitalists only look at Productivity and Rate of Profit and forget S/V Rate of Exploitation. Both Mike Perelman has noted this absence.
The consequence is to exclude the dynamics of the real working day. My fortunate experience was to have the rate of exploitation run up my ass every work day of my life.
In indirect form it ran my day in student services, because instead of profit I was measured on cost per student served, and of course I looked like the maximum of inefficiency, waste, fraud and abuse of state and federal funds. I rather relished this, since if you really do serve a population, you can blow most of a day working through a concrete human problem.
Consider how much time it takes to do a home visit and figure out why the living space is inaccessible or very inconvenient, and what you can do to change that. Get your tools and some material and make temporary changes. That can blow off a few days. Now look at the UCB cost to put one disabled student in one apartment so they can go to school.
In any event after the first page or two of the work day, Marx outlines the actual nature of the class war as seen on the shop floor, in labor-power's resistance to exploitation:
``I will each day spend, set in motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration, and healthy development.''
It is much easier to see these relations in blue collar labor because its physical demands imposed on the body are much more directly sensed and measured in the body. It is also essential to routinize as many tasks as possible and get rid of the need for creative improvizations. While construction is highly routinized, free adaptation for improved accessibility of an apartment isn't. It amounts to that anathma, custom work.
It is far more difficult to see these relations in the office and elsewhere if you are placed slightly above the lowest level where claims, data entry and other routine tasks are easily seen and measured as a number of such units processed per day.
As a weird observation, just about every one of my managers and bosses thought in terms of Marxist concepts in the actual work day. Thinking back on them, they would be astonished to read Marx and discover themselves on the job. So if business actually works on Marxist principles, what's so radical about Marx?
Mike Ballard writes:
All coordinators of labour should be elected.
What I found worked best was the Sancho Panza method where everybody served as coordinator (governor) for a week cycling through the shop personnel. It was a great test of who knew their job and it made for good feed back. We also did this job cycle for the worst jobs too, which meant answering the phones.
CG