Re: More on the labor theory of value

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Gil writes: 
> But Michael, "number of pages produced" is a measure of labor 
> performed, not labor power. 

I was going to say something similar, but held off, since Michael doesn't seem to like discussions of Marxian value theory. Note that "number of pages produced" isn't a very good measure of labor performed, because it doesn't measure the expenditure of brains & brawn (labor-power) well. Among other things, it misses the quality dimension. (And my student know how to produce a "5 page paper" by changing the margins or the font size!)

>And in Marxian terms, "the value produced by labor" is to
> some extent redundant, since to Marx labor *is* the substance 
> of value, no?  

it's not completely redundant (as Gil notes, by using the phrase "to some extent"). Similar amounts of concrete labor-time may produce different amounts of abstract labor (because of differences of skill or effort). Similar amounts of concrete labor-time may also produce different amounts of abstract labor (i.e., value) because society attaches different values to the use-values produced by expending brains and brawn. 

> It would be more accurate to say on the basis of your example that the
> British paid by, ahem, the value marginal product of the author's labor.

It's only the value of the marginal product if the product market is perfectly competitive. Or maybe you mean the extra value produced per extra labor input (i.e., there's no typo). But piece rates only pay for extra use-values produced, not the extra value produced. 

In any event, the workers in question are being paid piece rates, something quite familiar to Marx and many others. It's a management scheme, aimed at increasing the intensity of labor, which may or may not work very well. (It partly depends on one's perspective: paying salespeople with commissions may work well for managers, but it produces obnoxious salespeople. But it also may create the wrong incentives from management's point of view.) As Marx discusses in volume I, chapter 21, of CAPITAL, piece rates don't abolish class domination and instead typically intensifies it. 

Jim D.