Re: Marxism in rich countries

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greg Schofield wrote:
>
>  the singer and the haircut never become
> commodities because they never become fully alienated from the worker - it
> is the workers labour being sold directly as consumption.
>

Marx's social laws (i.e., historical tendencies) simply do not connect
to the practice of categorizing particulars. What you fasten on here is
that _physically_ some jobs (_from the point of view -- _individualist
point of view_ of the particular worker) offer a more direct
relationship between the worker and his/her usable product. But from the
perspective of social analysis, this is utterly irrelevant. (It may be
relevant to the worker's spouse or therapist.) One does not arrive at
social categories (complexes of social relations, not boxes of marbles)
by starting with details and adding up to the category. One begins with
the whole and analyzing its internal relations. The working class are
all those in the social order who possess nothing to sell but their own
human capacity (mental/physical), and thus must sell that capacity to
live. The singer may be as it were self-incorporated, a petty producer,
as may the barber. The singer may also have so high a wage as to make
her/his class membership an irrelevant consideration (hard cases make
bad law).

This adding up to reach a whole (two combine into one, as the Chinese
capitalist-roaders proclaimed it) rather than one divides into two
involves one in endless minutiae and is foreign to the spirit and letter
of marxism.

Carrol