Re: Labor aristocracy

[dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dan Peyser)]

* Charles Brown (BrownBingb@xxxxxxx) wrote:
>
> CB: As I read Marx's discussion of this , the typical capitalist introduces
> new instruments of production that increase productivity ,not to increase the
> rate of exploitation, but to be able to produce more commodities at the same
> wage and thereby get an advantage on competitors who don't have the new ,
> more efficient instruments of production or constant capital. See discussion
> of lower pay issue below.

I'll have to think about this some more.

> Dan: Just because the means of production become more technologically
> advanced does not means themselves
> are necessarily less labor intensive, does it?
>
> CB: Here's the way I reason it, Dan.  When Marx is discussing this he defines
> the new technology or instruments of production or constant capital that is
> introduced as decreasing the number of hours of variable capital , i.e. human
> labor, per unit commodity. That seems to me to be per se less labor
> intensive.  "More productive " is by definition that the workers produce more

It seems to me that Marx meant that in revolutionizing the means of
production, a greater surplus could be extracted from the same amount of
labor, not that the work became less labor intensive. I may have misread
this though, so I will go back and check.

> commodities in the same amount of time. If you produce 8 widgets in the same
> number of hours that it used to take you 4, then each individual widget has
> less labor time in it, ergo its production is less labor intensive.

Yes, per commodity. But surplus value is looking at the aggregate
surplus extracted from the working class as an entirity, not from the
production of said widget. It can be broken down that way, but what is
key is the aggregate. In any case, I think the same amount of labor
power is still be extracted, it is just being made to produce more with
the same. But again, I'll go back and look.

dan

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