surplus-value

[Charles Brown <BrownBingb@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Philip for working through the logic below. I was too lazy to go
back to the books myself, and find the formula for the rate of exploitation.
It seems logical that as Philip points out, though there are fewer labor
hours (v) per production of a commodity as the technology increases
efficiency, since v is in the denominator of the rate of exploitation ratio,
decreasing labor time increases the rate of exploitation, even though labor
is the source of the surplus value, if I'm giving up my math laziness now.
Hope so.  ( I must follow my comrade Les' example more)

By Philip's discussion below, it would seem that the 3rd World/colonies might
be the source of higher rates of profit or super-profits , but have lower
rates of exploitation. If so, that makes clearer to me a lot of the
discussion that has gone on on these topics. I won't try to apply this to the
labor aristocracy discussion yet.

Thanks Philip. As I said , I had never thought this through completely every
time this issue has come up over the years. I had forgotten the paradox of
higher rate of exploitation, but lower rate of profit with increasing organic
composition of capital ( I believe that's the increasing organic composition
, c/v; still too lazy to go to the book, sorry).

It was more than ten years ago, but the late Marxist economist Victor Perlo
did a study concluding that rate of exploitation in the U.S overall has
increased greatly in the long term, empirically corroborating Philip
reiteration of the fundamentals on rate of exploitation and "greater
concentrations of constant capital" or "greater use of technology" . As I
recall, Perlo calculated the average American was working about one hour for
herself for every three-plus hours for the boss in about 1988.

CB



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