LTV defense, part 9

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roemer and exploitation (first part of two on this topic)
=======================

[Note:  LTV part 8 raised the subject of the 'specialness' of labor.
This has several dimensions, but in this message and the next I focus
on labor's specialness as it relates to *exploitation* -- hence getting
around to Roemer's arguments at last.  After commenting on Roemer,
I plan to return to the LTV as such, i.e. to follow up more directly on
the Smith, Ricardo and Marx quotes that I left hanging last time.]

1.  Classical Marxism conceives of exploitation as the extraction of
surplus labor by an exploiting class from the exploited.  By some
mechanism -- which varies from one mode of production to another --
the exploiting class is able to compel the exploited class to perform
more labor than is required for the maintenance of the latter.  The
fruits of this surplus labor are available to the exploiters, to support
their consumption and/or to augment their wealth.  Under capitalism,
the extraction of surplus labor proceeds via the exchange of labor-
power for wages: the worker receives a wage equal (on average) to
the cost of (re-)production of labor-power, but once he has
purchased the worker's labor-power, the capitalist is able to make the
worker perform more labor than is needed to reproduce the wage.

2.  The underlying precondition for this mode of exploitation is the
capitalist pattern of ownership of the means of production.  The
compulsion of the workers to submit to exploitation via the wage
system stems from their propertyless status: possessing no means of
production, they are unable to secure their subsistence outside of the
wage-contract.  At the other pole, it is their exclusive possession of
society's means of production which permits the capitalists to set the
terms on which the workers get access to those means.

3.  The assumption of classical Marxism is that there exists a strict
correlation between the capitalist/worker distinction and the
exploiter/exploited distinction: capitalists are exploiters and wage-
workers are exploited.  The petty bourgeoisie -- agents who both
own means of production and work on their own account -- may be
harder to classify in terms of surplus labor accounts, but the situation is
clear with regard to the 'basic' classes of capitalism.

4.  Against this background, Roemer's critique involves unpicking the
relationship between unequal ownership of the means of production,
on the one hand, and the extraction of surplus labor on the other.
According to Roemer, the proper object of ethical critique on the part
of socialists is inequality in the ownership of productive assets *rather
than* exploitation in the form of extraction of surplus labor.

5.  This argument is set out clearly in the article 'Should Marxists be
interested in exploitation?' (in Analytical Marxism, CUP, 1986 -- all
page references below are to this piece).  The target: A theory of
exploitation which conceives "goods as vessels of labor, and
calculates labor accounts for people by comparing the 'live' labor they
expend in production with the 'dead' labor they get back in the
vessels" (p. 261).  The conclusion: "[T]here is, in general, no reason to
be interested in exploitation theory, that is, in tallying the surplus value
accounts of labor performed versus labor commanded in goods
purchased" (262).

6.  Roemer identifies four possible uses or justifications for a theory of
exploitation as extraction of surplus labor, before attempting to cut the
ground from under each one.  We shall concentrate on two of these
uses: (a) exploitation of workers might provide an explanation of
profits; and (b) exploitation may be seen as a measure and
consequence of the underlying inequality in the ownership of the
means of production.

Does exploitation explain profits?
==================================

7.  Granting Morishima's formal 'Fundamental Marxian Theorem',
according to which the exploitation of labor is a necessary condition
for positive profits under capitalism, Roemer nonetheless claims that it
is erroneous to infer from this theorem that the exploitation of labor
serves to *explain* profits.

(quote)
For, as many writers have now observed, every commodity (not just
labor-power) is exploited under capitalism.  Oil, for example, can be
chosen to be the value numeraire, and embodied oil values of all
commodities can be calculated.  One can prove that profits are
positive if and only if oil is exploited, in the sense that the amount of oil
embodied in producing one unit of oil is less than one unit of oil -- so
oil gives up into production more than it requires back.  Thus the
exploitation of labor is not the explanation for profits and accumulation
any more than is the exploitation of oil or corn.  The motivation for the
privileged choice of labor as the exploitation numeraire must lie
elsewhere... (265-6)
(unquote)

8.  First response:  The 'exploitability' of oil is a consequence of
technology (i.e. it is a technological datum that a barrel of oil can be
extracted at a total oil-cost of less than one barrel).  This is not so for
labor: the 'exploitability' of labor depends in part on the consumption
bundle, which is socially determined.  Here is a real economic
difference, which gives a special role to the exploitability of labor in
explaining the existence of profits.  By raising the price of labor-power
sufficiently, workers could, in principle, render themselves
'unexploitable' -- which observation points us towards the socio-
economic factors that *prevent* the workers from doing so: these
factors explain the possibility of profit.

9.  Second, consider the whole list of commodities which capitalists
*might* choose to produce.  Some of the items on this list may turn
out, given current technology, to be inherently 'unexploitable' (e.g.
currently it takes a larger energy input to produce a given energy
ouput from a nuclear fusion reactor).  This is not a problem: capitalists
simply don't try to produce them (there are no commercial fusion
reactors for electricity generation).  From this perspective, the
'exploitability' of all of the commodities actually produced in capitalist
economies is not an *explanation* of profits.  Rather, the need for
profitability explains why only 'exploitable commodities' get produced.
Labor's special role -- in this context -- consists in the fact that its use
is *not* optional (short of a science-fiction world of complete
automation).  Labor is not employed because it 'happens to be
exploitable', but rather it is the exploitability of (non-optional) labor
that explains the possibility of profit.

==========================
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
cottrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(910) 759-5762
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