Surplus Value (was Re: Socialism & American Workers)

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx 03/26/01 01:41AM >>>

-clip-

CB: I am glad Yoshie has brought this question up once again on the list.

What I don't think all the way through is whether the fact that the workers in the U.S. whose productivity is raised by more hi tech instruments of production, but who thereby add less value per commodity and per hour ( since labor is the only source of exchange-value and therefore surplus value) than with less efficient instruments of production , whether this fact means that the workers in countries with less efficient instruments add more surplusvalue per time than the others. Then also, wages are lower generally for the workers in countries with lower tech.

In other words, as Marx says ( I'll find it) everytime the capitalists increase the proportion of constant capital to variable capital (organic composition), the total capital gives surplus value at a lesser rate, because the variable capital is the only source of surplus value. This algebra underlies the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The upshot of these aspects of the logic is that Mexican workers might be exploited at a higher rate than U.S. workers, even though U.S. workers produce more.


((((((((((

Are workers in Mexico on the average more oppressed than workers in
the USA?  Clearly yes.  They are more politically oppressed, they
experience more economic hardships, etc.  Do workers in Mexico
produce more surplus value than workers in America?  The second
question is different from the first one.  More oppression doesn't
necessarily equal more exploitation & more production of surplus
value, unless you argue that higher real wages = less exploitation =
less production of surplus value, which Marx didn't.  Marx thought,
instead: "A rapid growth of capital is synonymous with a rapid growth
of profits.  *Profits can grow rapidly only when the price of labor
-- the relative wages -- decrease just as rapidly.*  Relative wages
may fall, although real wages rise simultaneously with nominal wages,
with the money value of labor, provided only that the real wage does
not rise in the same proportion as the profit.  If, for instance, in
good business years wages rise 5 per cent, while profits rise 30 per
cent, the proportional, the relative wage has not increased, but
decreased" (emphasis added, Karl Marx, _Wage Labour and Capital_ at
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/wage-lab/ch08.htm>).

Yoshie