free labor

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxx>]

Recent posts have strayed from what I consider the Marxist view of free
labor.

Julio Huato writes:

>I may not be qualified to characterize DeBeers, but I can say that, if they
use some type of forced labor systematically in the production of diamonds,
if workers are not free and voluntary wage workers, then that doesn't
qualify as capitalist production.  I don't care how rich the owners of
DeBeers are or what their lifestyle is.  This is a matter of observation and
measurement of conditions of production that we may not be able to settle
here.

David McDonaldn responds:

Marx meant by free labor, labor that is untied to any particular method of
employment, alternatively labor unfettered by pre-capitalist economic
formations. He most decisively did not mean labor voluntarily entered into
or uncoerced. What is voluntary under capitalism, sort of, is that one may
choose this or that capitalist employer. What workers are not free to do is
to choose not to be wage laborers, etc. This tendency is most highly
developed in the United States, where no breaks are given to small commodity
producers like farmers, in distinction to most advanced capitalist economies
that have roots in pre-capitalist modes of production not thoroughly
obliterated by capitalism.

A few days ago I posted Marx's observation that if the workers could live on
air, they could not be hired at any price. This expresses a deep truth. It
was for this reason that the English bourgeoisie implemented the enclosure
movement, which took away from English peasants their rights to the use of
common land. Why? To force them into the factories. No one who had the
slightest choice would voluntarily engage in work in the factories
desscribed in some of the purpler prose of Volume I of Capital, 16 hours a
day, horrible environments, I could go on.

Similarly, is a maquiladora a capitalist establishment? Or rather, does an
obviously capitalist maquiladora, built with US capital, operated with US
capital, creating goods for the US commodity market, etc. etc. cease to be
capitalist because there are armed guards (with submachine guns) paid to
keep the workers inside the factory, slaving (yes, slaving) away? Not in my
book.

What is the effect of all the compulsion in place in a maquiladora? It is to
depress the price of labor below its value. Certainly this method of
reducing the wage bill is not only reactionary, it could be argued that it
is extra-capitalist in its nature, because capitalism's lawful, pure method
of increasing the rate of surplus value is to reduce that portion of the
working day during which the worker produces the equivalent of his/her wage.
It is this dynamic that is the engine of the intensive development of
capitalism because it exploits that peculiarity of social labor, that it can
produce more than is required to keep it going. Each capitalist exploiting
this feature of human labor (in this "lawful" manner) thus imperceptibly to
himself helps to reduce the total portion of the working day that must be
given over to creating an equivalent that allows the working class to
reproduce itself as a whole, thus as a totality reducing the amount of the
working day required for the mere reproduction of the human race. In this
manner the more productive a steel plant becomes, i.e. the less human labor
congealed in each pound of steel produced, the cheaper become the steel-toed
boots the workers must have, and so on. This leads to the piling-on of
capital to replace human labor in the production process, to the
ever-lessening effect of each succeeding revolutionization of the production
process (in terms of the ever-greater amount of capital that must be applied
to achieve an aliquot reduction in the paid portion of the average working
day), and thus to the decline in the rate of profit that leads to capitalist
crises.

But all of this should never be taken to mean that "unlawful" means of
reducing the paid portion of the working day are not capitalist, at least in
the sense that they are not omnipresent in capitalism from the beginning to
today. Taken together, all the unlawful methods of extracting surplus value
operate as gigantic brakes on the fundamental capitalist law, which is the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Thus, the difficulty of further
intensive development of capitalism is highly mitigated by the extensive
development of capitalism, which in our lifetimes has taken the fundamental
road of bringing capitalism to billions of people whom it had never touched,
say, before the end of World War II, and doing so often in the most
primitive way. Thus, as capitalism as a world system has been expelling wage
labor from the production process by the revolutionization of the means of
production like gangbusters, it also and at the same time, introduces
billions of workers into the wage system by extending capitalism's reach to
the ends of the earth, where it can start over and over again in conditions
where the fall in the rate of profit is masked by its greater mass, often
because the price of labor is reduced by coercion to below its value.  This
is all in general found in that section of Volume III of Capital that deals
with countervailing tendencies to the falling rate of profit, foremost of
which is the development of the world market.

Free wage labor thus means labor that the capitalist is free to exploit by
paying a wage.

David McDonald