[OPE-L:7453] Re: Formal subsumption and putting-out

[clyder@xxxxxxxxxx]

Mensaje citado por Gil Skillman <gskillman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:


> Now, on the passage you cited.  First, as you'll see from my reply to John
> Milios, I think the economic logic undergirding this passage is suspect at
> best, and believe that Marx largely drops this "dependency" (i.e.,
> monopsony) interpretation of increasing capitalist control of production in
> his economic writings after the Grundrisse.
>
> But second, and more to the point, as I understand it *no* passage in
> Grundrisse, let alone this particular one, can possibly be taken to speak
> to the issue of what *Marx* meant by "formal subsumption of labor under
> capital," since Marx did not introduce this analytical distinction until
> the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, 3 years after he finished the
> Grundrisse notebooks.  The notions of formal and real subsumption of labor
> under capital are thus nowhere to be found in the Grundrisse.
>

does not the formal/actual subsumption parallel his later use of
the distinction between manufacture and modern industry. I take the
distinction between these to be the mature form of the concept that
is prefigured in the Grundrisse
> As far as I know, Marx first introduces the notion of "formal subsumption"
> early on in the EM 61-63 in the following passage:
>
> "This *formal* subsumption of the labour process, the assumption of control
> over it by capital, consists in the worker's subjection as worker to the
> supervision and therefore to the command of capital or the
> capitalist."  [Marx-Engels Collected Works, V. 30, p93]
>
> This definition of formal subsumption is then consistently maintained in
> other passages discussing the phenomenon in the Ec Mss 61-63 and the
> Resultate, from which I quoted in my previous post.  So far, Marx never
> contradicts his initial stipulation that formal subsumption involves direct
> capitalist supervision over the production process.  To the contrary, he
> associates this new form of worker subordination with the achievement of
> *absolute* surplus value relative to the surplus value that exists under
> preceding forms of the circuit of capital, associated with the greater
> continuity and scale of labor performed under capitalist supervision.
>
> As a corollary, Marx repeatedly asserts that the rural
> handicraft/buyer-up/putter-out relation *did not* constitute an instance of
> formal subsumption of labor under capital.  Besides the passage from the
> Resultate that says just that, quoted in my previous post, also see these
> passages from the EM 61-63:  [Marx-Engels CW, V. 30, p. 270; V. 34, pp. 96,
> 117-19, 144]
>
> And finally, Marx maintains this distinction in Volume I of Capital:
>
> "It will be sufficient if we merely refer to certain hybrid forms, in
> which...the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to
> capital.  In these forms, capital has not yet acquired a direct control
> over the labour process.  Alongside the independent producers, who carry on
> their handicrafts or their agriculture in the inherited, traditional way,
> there steps the usurer or merchant with his usurer's or merchant's capital,
> which feeds on them like a parasite."  [p. 645, Penguin]
>
>
> Note I'm not suggesting that you don't have a more economically coherent
> notion of "formal subsumption" than Marx.  Perhaps you do, and that would
> be an interesting line to pursue.  But in any case, it does not appear to
> be *Marx's* conception of the term.
>
> Gil
>
>