Re: Re: Re: Re: social democracy

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Ken Hanly wrote:
> >      Politics beyond any type of reformism is necessary for the working class
> >  to bring about socialism. On the other hand surely it is necessary to fight
> >  back against attempts to savage social democratic reforms rather than do as
> >  social democratic parties in Germany and Britain are doing, namely serving
> >  as agents of capital in destroying the very reforms they had earlier
> >  championed.
>
> ****
>  These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of
> modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the
> capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general
> tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the
> average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less
> to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system,
> is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance
> against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at
> making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary
> improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of
> broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their
> struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the
> whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising
> wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and
> that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is
> inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities.
> By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they
> would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger
> movement. K. Mark, Wages, Price & Profit, Chap. 14*****

Leaving aside the conclusions that Carrol somehow derives from this
passage, I would say there are several important questions to raise.

(1)how is the value of labor power expressed? In some physical
quantity of wage goods that the working class must consume if it is
to labor for a period of average intensity.

(2) is Marx saying that the capitalist class tends (a)to  reduce the
necessary part of the working day; or (b) to reduce the ability of
the working class to consume a given physical quantity of wage goods;
or (c) to increase the intensity of laboring activity without
allowing for a commensurate increase in the physical quantity of
goods that the working class would then need to consume to reproduce
themselves.

In short, how is it that the capitalist class attempts to depress the
wage below the value of labor power? If (b) and/or (c), why would
capitalists be driven to depress wages to the point where the very
reproduction of their slaves would be jeopardized?

(3) is Marx saying that workers have to struggle so that more and
more of their working day is not apportioned to surplus as opposed to
necessary labor? Note however that the increasing production of
relative surplus value is compatible with worker ability to consume a
greater physical quantity of goods since the unit values of wage
goods are falling even as s/v rises; and if a greater physical
quantity of use values is indeed consumed by the working class even
as the rate of exploitation increases, then in what sense can Marx be
said to have a theory of immiseration? Does Marx have a theory of
immiseration? Does it apply to the actively exploited or to an ever
enlargening surplus population? Or both?

(4) is Marx saying that workers should struggle to increase their
consumption so that those imbalances between production and
consumption that (putatively) engdender general crises are overcome
and the capitalist system thereby stabilized? If this is not the
reason Marx gives for wage struggles, why is Marx defending the
organization of the working class?

One may want to consult Kenneth Lapides' Marx's Wage Theory in
Historical Perspective: Its Origins, Development and Interpretation
(Praeger, 1998).

rb