[PEN-L:27330] Re:Why workers get poorer

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>I am on another listserve, ANTHRO-L, which sometimes turns political -- there are a >few good marxist anthropologists on it. a few months ago, i was discussing the gap >between the rich and the poor in terms of the labor theory of value. to me, it seems >self-evident that the richer the rich get, the poorer the poor will get. Since value is >based on labor-power, there can be only a finite amount of it in the world, whether it >is stored up as capital or circulating as money.

>There were many and great objections to my statement -- too involved to summarize here, but mainly centered around the idea that value is created by the market dynamic of supply and demand -- the more demand, the more value; the less demand, the less value. Suffice it to say that I didn't know enough about the labor theory of value to be able to meet all their arguments. In the meantime, I have brushed up on the idea of the fetishism of commodities, and do understand a little bit >more.

>but i wondered if anyone of the many who know more about marxism would be >willing to comment: does the LTV show that the rich and the poor are directly >connected in that the more the rich get, the less the poor get? If so, why? If not, >why not?

>thanking you all in advance for any enlightenment you might bring to the question,

>nancy brumback
>new college of california
>766 valencia st.
>san francisco, CA 94110
>415-437-3405
>nancybrumback@xxxxxx

Reply:


I have no desire to enter this question as presented or discuss the ambiguous character of the labor embodied in articles - commodities or products and services; the concrete specific human activity on the one hand and the abstract labor that creates value. Nor is the contradictory unity of price (cost) and value the subject. I shall merely state that value is the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in the production of commodities.  

The standpoint of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - or what is the same, their method of inquiry revolutionized human thinking and founded the modern science of society. Also unraveled are the primary features of capitalist commodity production as it appeared during their lifetime; the transition from manufacture to industrial production and industrial social relations, although Marx analysis in Capital begins from the basic relations of merchant capitalist society.  In doing so they unraveled the law system that constitutes the internal compulsion of the capitalist mode of production.

>does the LTV (labor theory of value) show that the rich and the poor are directly connected in that the more the rich get, the less the poor get?< possesses the question of polarization of wealth and poverty incorrectly in my opinion.

The workers become poorer as a class of producers because the productive forces - expressed through the means of production, are privately owned. This is why the workers as non property owners get poorer and the rich- capitalist and owners of property get richer. The capitalist appropriate the wealth of society.

Here I am not describing how the commodity finds the form of its movement in the external contradiction, which emerges as the relations of the relative and equivalent forms of value, which are polar opposites, indissolubly connected - fused. That is to say I am publicly side stepping the value form - an ongoing discussion with Comrade Miyachi Tatsuo.

Marx states in Capital:

"Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital."

Below is how the matter is presented in its external logic by Frederick Engels. Here Engels is not describing the external form or rather the commodity external form movement. Rather, he is explaining the question you asked outside of the form in which you asked it.


    "Capital," says Marx, "has not invented surplus-labor Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the laborer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production." Surplus-labor, labor over and above the time required for the worker's own maintenance, and appropriation by others of the product of this surplus-labor, the exploitation of labor, is therefore common to all forms of society up to now, in so far as they have moved in class antagonisms. But it is only when the product of this surplus-labor assumes the form of surplus-value, when the owner of the means of production finds himself facing the free worker -- free from social fetters and free from possessions of his own -- as an object of exploitation and exploits him for the purpose of the production of commodities, it is only!
 then, according to Marx, that the means of production take on the specific character of capital. This first took place on a large scale at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century."

Further:
    
The present situation of society - this is now pretty generally conceded - is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings.

Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and acti!
ons even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.

Now, in what does this conflict consist?

Before capitalist production - i.e., in the Middle Ages - the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor - land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool - were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day - this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically !
worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I !
made that; this is my product."

But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organiz!
ation upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labor.

The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.

In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.

Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before - i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and !
production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation, which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2]

This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.


end part 1


Melvin P.