[PEN-L:27142] Re: Speed up!

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't been following the discussion closely, but
on a tangent, the 35 hours week introduced by the
socialist in France has had a favourable outcome for
the white collor and a not so good outcome for  the
blue collor. Becuse employers demanded an
intensification of the work effort. in short some have
the right to be lazy and thers don't.


--- "Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I wrote:> > so we need to think critically. so
> what's new?<<
>
> Tom writes: >Commodity fetishism isn't new. Didn't
> somebody already write
> something about that once? Seriously though, is
> fetishism only a danger when
> it is eulogistic? I think not.<
>
> Talking about speed-up (an increasing intensity of
> labor, as Marx would call
> it) is hardly eulogistic or fetishistic. In fact,
> the article was talking
> specifically about the "hidden realm" that is
> usually masked by commodity
> fetishism and the realm of freedom, equality, and
> Bentham that NC economists
> emphasize. I haven't the slightest idea how the
> concept of commodity
> fetishism is relevant to the article I posted.
>
> >> so the folks who slave away producing Nikes for
> dollars a day under
> poor conditions are engaging in discourse?<<
>
> >That"s just it, Jim. It ain't the dollars making
> them slave away. It's
> the social relationship, which are relations between
> people disguised as
> relations between things. The alarm that I am trying
> to sound is about
> OUR (and it happens to me, too) tendency to give
> theoretical lip service to
> a level of analysis, commodity fetishism, that we
> then cavalierly dispose of
> when engaging "empirical facts". Speed up is the
> cause of which
> productivity is the effect? Oh yeah? UNDER WHAT
> SPECIFIC CONDITIONS?
>
> >I say NOT THESE! NOT THESE CONDITIONS! We have a
> question here, not a
> ready made answer. We have a whole suite of urgent
> questions that the
> proverbial no one wants to ask because the
> proverbial everyone thinks the
> answer is self evident.<
>
> I really don't know where this comes from, why
> you're on _my_ case. _Of
> course_ it's capitalism's version of labor
> productivity that is raised when
> speed-up occurs (and I never said otherwise). That
> is, it's _saleable_
> commodities produced per hour that is raised
> (ceteris paribus) when there's
> a speed-up. In fact, it's only the existence of
> saleable commodities that
> allows the aggregation of outputs so we can have
> some reasonable estimate of
> the numerator. However, we could think of another
> way to measure of labor
> productivity, which might be measureable, at least
> as a second
> approximation:
>
> labor productivity = (saleable output + workers'
> gains in pleasure during
> time the job - external costs to the environment and
> the like)/labor hours
> hired.
>
> If measured this way, labor productivity may fall
> with speed-up.
> JD
>
>


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