Then, as Marx sets out, these independent commodity producers, still based on handicraft production, are brought into the handicraft workshop or manufactory. They continue to operate as individual producers, within it, and, as with The Putting Out System, sell their end product to the workshop/factory owner. Again, it appears, superficially, that they have sold their labour, or product of their labour, to the capitalist. That is enhanced by the fact that they bargain individually with the capitalist over the prices paid. This is why a lot of the early analysis focuses on the prices paid for that labour, and the explanations/justifications for the existence and extent of profit, as discussed in Capital I. In fact, the explanation for the existence of, and large amount of profit resides in this fact that what is being bought is not labour or the product of labour, but labour-power.
The next stage comes as the division of labour takes place inside the workshop/factory. The culmination of this process is that each individual worker, now, forms merely a cog in the production process, responsible, only, for an increasingly small part of the end product. The product is, now, that of a collective labourer, so that it becomes manifest that the individual worker does not sell their product to capital. The capitalist appropriates the product of the collective worker, and the collective worker, therefore, negotiates the wages paid, via their trades unions. Yet, it still appears that these wages are the payment for the labour supplied by the collective labourer, leading to all of the delusions of social-democracy, and calls for workers to be paid the full fruits of their labour, a fair day's wage and so on.
Engels notes that the prices of commodities continually fluctuate, apparently on the basis of pure chance. One of the first tasks of economic science, therefore, was to show that these prices were not all the product of chance, and that the appearance of chance was itself the product of economic laws. The fluctuations in prices that appear the product of chance are merely fluctuations around a given point (equilibrium price) whose determination can be discovered on the basis of those laws.
“Classical economics then found that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour contained in it, requisite for its production. With this explanation, it contented itself. And we, also, may pause here for the time being.” (p 7)
In fact, as Marx sets out, in A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, and The Poverty of Philosophy, and, in more detail, in Capital, this notion of embodied labour was also wrong. Engels summarised why in his Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy. The labour embodied in a commodity is concrete labour, whereas the labour that creates and measures value is abstract, universal labour, and it is only that labour required, currently, to produce the commodity, i.e. socially necessary labour that creates value; it is also not the labour used to produce existing commodities, i.e. their historic cost that determines their value, but the current cost/labour-time required to replace them, i.e. their current reproduction cost.
“Marx was the first to investigate thoroughly into the value-forming quality of labour and to discover that not all labour which is apparently, or even really, necessary to the production of a commodity, imparts under all circumstances to this commodity a magnitude of value corresponding to the quantity of labour used up. If, therefore, we say today in short, with economists like Ricardo, that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour necessary to its production, we always imply the reservations and restrictions made by Marx.” (p 7-8)
No comments:
Post a Comment