[Marxism] Value creating and non-value creating labour III - comment for Jake

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jake wrote:

>love your whacky calculations ( 8%?) too bad one  can only guess what you 
>include  and exclude here.

I based my rough calculation on (1) total US population by age (2) data on 
employed, unemployed and institutional population (3) the known number of 
average working hours per year of American workers (4) what we know about the 
work hours involved in household and voluntary labor. I cannot claim the 
estimate is exactly accurate, and therefore I said specifically, somebody could 
make a more exact calculation than I have done. The 8% refers to paid working 
hours as a proportion of all the lifetime hours of all Americans put together. 
It's simple math, you take the total resident population, multiply by 365 days 
and multiply by 24 hours to get a grand total. You can multiply the employed 
workforce by the average working hours per year, and so on. I think this type 
of calculation is interesting myself because it puts the temporal dimension in 
perspective - we are talking about the relationship between worktime and 
lifetime.

New Internationalist magazine has cited figures calculated from World Bank and 
ILO reports which show that paid work done by Germans in West Germany in 1987 
totalled 55 billion hours a year, earning them a total of $335
billion, while for instance housework done by women inside the home totaled 53 
billion hours a year - and formally earns them no remuneration at all. But 
these figures exclude other voluntary labor outside the home.

Marx wrote specifically about class society that "The specific economic form, 
in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines 
the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production 
itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, 
however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows 
up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its 
specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of 
the conditions of production to the direct producers - a relation always 
naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods 
of labour and thereby its social productivity - which reveals the innermost 
secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the 
political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the 
corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same 
economic basis - the same from the standpoint of its main conditions - due to 
innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial 
relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite 
variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by 
analysis of the empirically given circumstances." 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm

Conventional economics expels serious consideration of working hours from 
economics and focuses on prices, but I think it is quite interesting to put 
Marx's statement in quantitative perspective. ]

Jubilee reported in 2000 that "The accumulated external debt of the world's 
richest country, the United States of America, is equal to $2.2 trillion. This 
is almost the exact amount owed by the whole of the developing world, including 
India, China and
Brazil - $2.5 trillion. In other words, three hundred million people in the US 
owe as much to the rest of the world, as do five billion people in all of the 
developing countries.  http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/analysis/reports/J+USA7.htm

Effectively this means that with a superior bargaining position and an 
enforcible credit system, you can live on borrowed time and also displace part 
of the costs of your lifestyle in space and time (a lot of US economic growth 
in recent decades was attributable to the inflow of foreign capital). At the 
other end, FAO reports that around 25 million human beings die annually from 
hunger, and in some countries (e.g. Russia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and 
Zimbabwe), average life expectancy has actually been decreasing. The United 
Nations estimated that in the 1950s the world average life expectancy rate was 
about 46 years, with the developed regions having a life expectancy of 66 years 
and less developed regions having a life expectancy of only 40 years. By 1998 
world life expectancy increased to 63 years with more developed regions 
increasing to an average of 75 years and less developed regions increasing to 
62 years. A majority of Africans can expect to die at or before 48 years. In 
sub-Saharan African countries like Botswana and Malawi, the average life 
expectancy is already below 40 years

Jurriaan


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