Waged & unwaged work, urbanization etc

[m-14970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hugh Rodwell)]

Rakesh and Lisa R had the following exchange:

R >I just found out that the Austro Marxist Max Adler dealt with this
  >question in 1933 as it was becoming evident that no upturn in the
  >business cycle was going to eliminate unemployment.  He raised
  >questions of the relation of these marginalized people to the
  >actively exploited workers.
  >***
  >
L >This sounds interesting, _actively_ exploited vs. what?  I know that
  >one point Marx emphasized was that the unemployed were part of the
  >working class, and one of their 'relations' to the employed is that
  >the more unemployed there are, the lower the wages that anyone gets,
  >etc.  All part of the reserve army of labor.
  >
  >This reminds me of Selma James' [and others'] distinction between
  >wage-work and unwaged-work.  Point is that even if one is not
  >receiving wages directly from a capitalist, or in addition to
  >wage-work, one may be doing a lot of unwaged-work that serves the
  >interests of capital.  Unwaged-work includes things such as producing
  >replacement workers and daily reproducing the labor power that was
  >expended at wage-work.

Lisa, there's no real point in leaving out the distinctions between use
value, exchange value and surplus value here.

What is sold as a commodity has use value (somebody wants it) plus exchange
value (somebody pays for it). What is not sold has use value if somebody
wants it. Labour power as a commodity has the use value of producing
exchange value exceeding its own exchange value, the unpaid-for difference
being pocketed by the capitalist class as surplus value. *Actively
exploited* workers are ones actually producing surplus value, they're also
known as *productive* workers in that they produce surplus value. The rest
of the proletariat - with nothing to live off but the sale of their labour
power, which for various reasons they can't realize - are *potentially
exploited* workers in terms of the production of surplus value. They are
*actively oppressed* in terms of their social existence, relations to the
state etc.

There has been a huge increase in the ranks of the *potentially exploited*,
*actively oppressed* members of the proletariat (ie the working class as
opposed to the bourgeoisie and the class of landowners of all sizes) in the
postwar period owing to the process of *urbanization*.

This urbanization has stripped people of the relationship they had to their
means of production, the land, which enabled them to reproduce themselves
by means of subsistence farming without selling their labour power as a
commodity in the capitalist labour market. It is an instance in our day of
the processes Marx wrote about in relation to the primitive accumulation of
capital - the violent separation of the direct producers from their means
of production in order to create the most important precondition for
capital, a *free* proletariat. Freed of all ties to the means of
production, its only place in the relations of production is that of the
seller of the only commodity it possesses, labour power. No sale, no
reproduction.

Further, this process of *proletarianization under capital* is today being
attempted in the efforts being made to *restore capitalism* and *create
bourgeois states* in place of workers' states in the former Soviet Union
etc. The people of these states had a place in the relations of production
by right, not by sale. Their society belonged to them (in spite of the
exploitative bureaucratic regimes) in a  way few people have discussed. The
difficulties being experienced in creating a stable and legitimate
bourgeoisie in these countries indicate that there are very deep and
powerful forces resisting the process. I'm convinced this is the resistance
of the whole mass of the producers not wanting to hand over their
birthright to exploiters. In exchange they expected and were promised
improvements in the regime. And as the fraudulence of these promises is
becoming more and more evident with every day that passes, the strength of
the resistance is increasing.

So. We have the basic concepts we need for a discussion of what is
happening to the working class on a world scale and where the international
class struggle currently stands - Marx gives us two sets in Capital: one
the developments within a capitalist system following from the exchanges
between labour power and capital, and two the developments needed to
produce the preconditions for a capitalist mode of production ('primitive
capitalist accumulation', with further historical perspectives provided in
the Grundrisse section on 'precapitalist economic formations'). Lenin
applies these to provide us with a perspective on our epoch as an epoch of
wars and revolutions *and transition to socialism*.

Let's start.

Cheers,

Hugh




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