Perhaps I shouldn't have said it so strongly. I will elaborate on my meaning.
Within capitalism, the labour of a working-class man is dictated usually by the capitalist; the hours he works, what he works with, when he works, and what quality of product is expected of him. However the labourer working under the capitalist is forced to sell the only thing he can provide - that is, his labour power (capacity to perform labour), and in return, the labourer receives a wage, which is equal to the exact amount required to sustain the worker and keep him within the labour force and introduce new labourers.
Thus in order to survive the labourer is required to sell his labour-time to someone else, and have the products of his labour appropriated at the end.
As is mentioned in Classical Econophysics (Paul W. Cockshott et al.):
>Marx asked, where does profit come from, if all goods are exchanged at their value? The answer, Marx said, lies in the special commodity labour-power. The worker sells to the capitalist labour-power which embodies (let’s say) 5 hours; that is, the value of the worker’s means of subsistence amounts to 5 hours per day. But once he gets through the factory gates or the or the door, he finds that the working day is 8 hours. The worker therefore performs 3 hours of ‘surplus labour’ per day and this is manifest in 3 hours’ worth of surplus value accruing to the capitalist. Marx calls the labour time workers spend in reproducing the value of their wages the ‘necessary labour time’, and he calls the ratio of surplus labour time to necessary labour time at therate of surplus value. In the example just given the rate of surplus value is 3/5 = 0.6.
So here we have one element of force: the forceful appropriation of one's products of labour at the end of the production process. The next element of force is that the labourer is required to work under the direction of someone else, usually the highest bidder for the worker's labur-power commodity (if he can find such a bidder), rather than voluntarily decide with others how much or how to work. And finally the third element of force, that the worker is required to work more in return for less, despite no social need to do so as a result of increased automation, which could be used to alleviate workload rather than increase short-term profits.
What are the exceptions? When a labourer is able to amass sufficient capital so as to sustain himself from it, or become a property owner himself. This not an option for most people, as it involves too much risk and time, especially for those with families.
> ... the labourer receives a wage, which is equal to the exact amount required to sustain the worker and keep him within the labour force and introduce new labourers.
I know that's how Marx said it works, but it doesn't actually work that way. Many, many, many people get paid far more than the exact amount required to sustain the worker. Look around at what actually happens in the labor market, not at what your theory says happens.
> So here we have one element of force: the forceful appropriation of one's products of labour at the end of the production process.
That's not forceful. I signed up for the deal, and that's the deal I got. Nobody forced me into it in any way. Being kidnapped and forced to work for free, against your will? That's forced labor. Being a "wage slave"? No.
(Now, I will grant you that, in many times and many places, I could choose freely among the few, bad offers available to me. When all the mill owners collude to only pay subsistence wages, my freedom to choose is... not worth very much. Nevertheless, I deny that it is fair to paint all of capitalism with that brush.)
> The next element of force is that the labourer is required to work under the direction of someone else, usually the highest bidder for the worker's labur-power commodity (if he can find such a bidder), rather than voluntarily decide with others how much or how to work.
If I wanted to find a deal where I worked part time, I could almost certainly find it. As for the rest... I don't want to be the manager.
> And finally the third element of force, that the worker is required to work more in return for less, despite no social need to do so as a result of increased automation, which could be used to alleviate workload rather than increase short-term profits.
Has automation left us worse off? I don't believe it has. I believe that, taken as a whole, it has made us far better off.
You're giving me Communist theory (no surprise, given that your profile says "Communist"). But the real world does not work the way your theory says it does. (It works less like Marx said than it did when Marx was writing. To some degree, that might be due to Marx scaring the capitalists into behaving better. Still, Marxist theory is less applicable to the current world than it was to the world of 1900.)
>far more than the exact amount required to sustain the worker
This would appear true, if it weren't for the fact that the capitalist would be losing out if it wasn't the case; the price of labour power is indeed governed and fluctuates with supply and demand, and I would agree that government regulations have also contributed to setting this price, but to pay workers more than what is required to sustain them would be as nonsensical in a business sense as paying more for a machine than its value. I was perhaps too succinct with that point, Marx writes elsewhere:
"The lowest and the only necessary wage rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out."
> I signed up for the deal, and that's the deal I got. Nobody forced me into it in any way. Being kidnapped and forced to work for free, against your will?
This is a very short sighted and restricted view of coercion. Perhaps force was too strong a word. But the worker only works for the capitalist class on pain of death or destitution. If this isn't forced, I'm not sure what is. The prostitute must sell her body, and you can say that's a deal "she signed up for" but it won't change the fact that she's being exploited, having no choice but to sign such a deal with someone.
>If I wanted to find a deal where I worked part time, I could almost certainly find it.
That's still wage labour though, and you're still having your own labour decided its use by someone else. You don't have to be your own manager, the point is that you should have free association to choose who you want to work for and what you want to do, rather than a much more limited choice which restricts your true capabilities and creativity to merely what drives profit. This is a common complaint among programmers for example. It is a reason why workers are so alienated from the products they make; the products are made for people they'll never see, for uses they can't understand.
>Has automation left us worse off? I don't believe it has. I believe that, taken as a whole, it has made us far better off.
Automation usually means that the capitalist has been able to buy machinery which performs the same job with a lower socially necessary labour time than a worker. This means that one or more workers are replaced by such machinery, as the value of their labour is only some fraction of what it was before (going along with Marx's theory of value anyway). Marx writes:
"The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value."
Now instead of the worker being afforded the benefit of this replacement, it's used for short term profit. The savings could be passed onto the worker (rather than the "consumer") but instead the worker must be either re-purposed within the same firm or industry, or find himself out of a job. On a large scale, this usage of automation means that people find themselves having to do other labour, despite the demands of society not increasing. This seems ridiculous and wasteful to me. But the capitalist maintains that it is necessary - for if there are no labourers to pay wages to, who is there to buy back the products, unless production is for a bourgeois commodity economy?
And here is the paradoxical nature of capitalism: it relies upon inefficiency, to combat the falling rate of profit in the long run, due to less extraction of surplus and increasing number of people finding themselves without wage labour to perform, the introduction of automation is carefully controlled and indeed limited. It is not individual firms which do this limiting, but the flows of capital ensure it occurs.
Aside from this we have other examples such as the internal contradictions of capitalism[0]; one of which is the tendency to engage in constant overproduction (that is, production above what will drive a profit, not above what will satisfy human wants and needs). As [1] explains:
"For Marx, capitalist crises are crises of “overproduction”: too many commodities are produced than can be profitably sold, and too much capital has been invested in industry, in the attempt to claim a share of the available profits. This comes about because capitalism, on both the domestic and international scale, is a system of separate and independent ownerships. In prosperous times every capitalist invests as much as he can and steps up production; in particular, the periodic booms stimulate the production of “fixed capital,” the buildings and machinery which are not used up in one cycle of production and therefore do not have to be immediately replaced. When times are good, all resources are strained to bring new fixed capital into production; but once this capital starts producing, a flood of commodities is brought onto the market, and the crisis ensues. Unemployment, which falls during the boom, rises again; the high rate of profit that stimulated the boom declines, first when the low level of unemployment strengthens the bargaining power of workers, and further when the crisis forces production to slacken off.
The crisis eventually takes its toll: masses of workers are thrown out of their jobs, as a result wages are forced back down toward subsistence or below, and the weakest, smallest and least modern plants go under. But the effects of the slump enable profitability to revive: labor can be hired at low wages, factories, equipment and materials can be bought by the surviving capitalists at bargain prices. So the slump is followed by a new recovery period and in turn by a new boom."
This is no new theory, it is even recognised by the modern bourgeois economists of today. But they do not consider it something inherent to capitalism, they consider it instead merely an anomaly that occurs here and there.
This is all of course ignoring the ethical problems of capitalism, the fact of private property being acquired through barbarism (as Proudhon writes) and the concentration of the whole productive power of society in the hands of a few, leading to massive status of misery despite medical and technological achievements of capitalism which have lifted many out of poverty, as Kropotkin writes.
"rich in what we already possess... richest of all in what we might win from the soil, from our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge, were they but applied to bringing about the well-being of all"
OK, I assumed that by "sustain" you meant "subsistence". I agree that the capitalist won't pay more than needed to retain the worker.
> But the worker only works for the capitalist class on pain of death or destitution. If this isn't forced, I'm not sure what is.
Well, in the early days of capitalism, when working for the capitalist class had the alternative of staying in subsistence farming, many people chose the factories because it was better than the "freedom" of subsistence farming. That wasn't forced - there was a real alternative at the time, and in fact the alternative was the default.
> That's still wage labour though...
OK, if I wanted to start my own business, I could do that, too. I'm still not forced into wage labor.
> and you're still having your own labour decided its use by someone else. You don't have to be your own manager, the point is that you should have free association to choose who you want to work for and what you want to do, rather than a much more limited choice which restricts your true capabilities and creativity to merely what drives profits.
Well, I could work on what I wanted, rather than on what drives profits. That would be really cool. Unfortunately, I can't take that choice, because I'd starve - which is your point. But I would say, why should I be able to? Sure, it would be nice if the world gave me a living while I do what I want. But why should I expect it to? If I want to engage in the economy at all, say as an owner of my own business, I have to care about what people want to buy; I can't just do what I want. Why should I be surprised if it's the same when I work for someone else?
> Automation usually means that the capitalist has been able to buy machinery which performs the same job with a lower socially necessary labour time than a worker. This means that one or more workers are replaced by such machinery, as the value of their labour is only some fraction of what it was before (going along with Marx's theory of value anyway).
I think you're looking at this backwards. Look at it from the point of view of the society, not from the point of view of one worker, and think in terms of spending people rather than employing them.
Societies used to have one third of their people working on farms. Now they have maybe 3% of their people working on farms. That gives an extra 30% of people that can do something else that helps the society. What do they do? Well, some of them make the tractors and combines that make it so the society can feed itself with many fewer people, and some make cars and refrigerators and washing machines, and some make computers, and some program them. The whole society is far better off than it was when a third of the people worked on farms.
Now, automation can still be a problem for individual workers, or even for a fairly large number of workers at one time. Arguably, this is where we are now. But even with that, I don't think that automation is a net loss.
"Marx asked, where does profit come from, if all goods are exchanged at their value? The answer, Marx said, lies in the special commodity labour-power. The worker sells to the capitalist labour-power which embodies (let’s say) 5 hours; that is, the value of the worker’s means of subsistence amounts to 5 hours per day. But once he gets through the factory gates or the or the door, he finds that the working day is 8 hours. The worker therefore performs 3 hours of ‘surplus labour’ per day and this is manifest in 3 hours’ worth of surplus value accruing to the capitalist."
Steve Keen has a good chapter on this in his Debunking Economics (one of the best written parts of the book; the arguments in the rest are good, but the presentation is kind of spotty). He points out that this result follows from a bit of confusion in Marx's early works that is partially corrected in later ones.
The problem is the nature of value. This argument follows from Marx's original belief that the only "value" of an object was its exchange value: what the object can be bought or sold for.
Consider a drill press in a factory. The factory owner pays $X for the press, which spends its life in the factory until it is worn out; at the same time the exchange value depreciates to $0. This is a zero-sum situation: the drill press cannot add value to the products; it only transfers a portion of its value into the products. Therefore, the only source of excess value, profit, is the labor involved.
Keen points out that Marx later realized that objects have a "use value" as well as an "exchange value". This use value can be greater than the exchange value---a worker using a drill press is much more productive than a worker drilling holes by hand---and the excess use value allows the capital inputs to add excess value to the products, as well as the labor.
Keen says that by the time Marx came up with this new formulation, he was already wedded to the labor theory of value, so it got sort of buried and no later Marxist economist noticed it.
>Keen points out that Marx later realized that objects have a "use value" as well as an "exchange value". This use value can be greater than the exchange value---a worker using a drill press is much more productive than a worker drilling holes by hand---and the excess use value allows the capital inputs to add excess value to the products, as well as the labor.
Marx mentions the concept of use value right before exchange value and Value in Chapter 1 of Capital; the whole formulation of Marx's concept of the LTV takes use value into account: "The labor embodied in labor power is the labor value of the means of subsistence which the worker requires to reproduce his labor power. In other words, the value of labor power is the labor value of "necessary consumption" used to maintain the workers. The use value of labor power is the labor which the capitalist can get out of the worker. The difference between the number of hours which the worker works and the labor value of labor power is the source of profit under capitalism."[0]
Not to mention that Marx probably read Smith before starting on Capital, and Smith had introduced the concept before him. I don't think it's an oversight (unless he had drafted Capital without use value beforehand) as much as it is the fact that English translations of the book and decades of explanatory volumes have read Marx in a myriad of ways, all admitting that Marx simply wasn't very good at writing. Althusser for example suggests to skip the first few chapters. There is even debate now among for example Zizek and Wolff about the different forms of value elucidated by Marx. On the whole, I don't consider Marx's values to be muddle-headed as Russell says, I consider them hard to understand, and I can only hope that I am understanding them semi-correctly.
As to the worker using the drill press, the labour embodied in the machine is coupled with the labour of the worker (who operates the machine) being transferred to the products, labour being the creator of the use value in the sheet, but its combination in totality with the press counting as the exchange value, as a portion of the total societal mass of abstract labour, reduced to unskilled labour. That's my understanding, anyway.
I don't think it makes sense to compare use values and exchange values, though, despite the fact that they are both products of labour.
"This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,
“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value ... An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”[8]
As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value."[1]
I must admit though that I'm really quite sketchy on this. When it comes to Marx's theory of value, I'm a novice, having only started to read up on this a couple of weeks ago. There are alternatives to Marx's conception of the LTV, found within Post-Keynesian Economics though I haven't read into that.
Within capitalism, the labour of a working-class man is dictated usually by the capitalist; the hours he works, what he works with, when he works, and what quality of product is expected of him. However the labourer working under the capitalist is forced to sell the only thing he can provide - that is, his labour power (capacity to perform labour), and in return, the labourer receives a wage, which is equal to the exact amount required to sustain the worker and keep him within the labour force and introduce new labourers.
Thus in order to survive the labourer is required to sell his labour-time to someone else, and have the products of his labour appropriated at the end.
As is mentioned in Classical Econophysics (Paul W. Cockshott et al.):
>Marx asked, where does profit come from, if all goods are exchanged at their value? The answer, Marx said, lies in the special commodity labour-power. The worker sells to the capitalist labour-power which embodies (let’s say) 5 hours; that is, the value of the worker’s means of subsistence amounts to 5 hours per day. But once he gets through the factory gates or the or the door, he finds that the working day is 8 hours. The worker therefore performs 3 hours of ‘surplus labour’ per day and this is manifest in 3 hours’ worth of surplus value accruing to the capitalist. Marx calls the labour time workers spend in reproducing the value of their wages the ‘necessary labour time’, and he calls the ratio of surplus labour time to necessary labour time at therate of surplus value. In the example just given the rate of surplus value is 3/5 = 0.6.
So here we have one element of force: the forceful appropriation of one's products of labour at the end of the production process. The next element of force is that the labourer is required to work under the direction of someone else, usually the highest bidder for the worker's labur-power commodity (if he can find such a bidder), rather than voluntarily decide with others how much or how to work. And finally the third element of force, that the worker is required to work more in return for less, despite no social need to do so as a result of increased automation, which could be used to alleviate workload rather than increase short-term profits.
What are the exceptions? When a labourer is able to amass sufficient capital so as to sustain himself from it, or become a property owner himself. This not an option for most people, as it involves too much risk and time, especially for those with families.