All that insurance does, whether it is a social insurance, or a house or car insurance, is to cover the purchase of commodities/services in aggregate, via a collective payment, an aggregated fund from which the specific, individual payments are made. If a group of friends go to a restaurant, and agree to pay for their meals out of a pool into which they all contribute a given proportion, it does not change the fact that what they have purchased, collectively, is a commodity with a given value! Marxists should be familiar with this concept, because it has been usual for the aggregated travel costs of people attending a meeting, somewhere in the country, to be funded via a “pooled fare”, for example. The fact that each individual, thereby, does not pay an amount equal to the actual value of their own transport costs, does not change the fact that each individual purchased a commodity (travel in various forms) with a given value, and that, in aggregate, all of these individual purchases, also represented the purchase of commodities with a value.
So, if workers organised their own welfare provision, under their direct, ownership and control, and, so employed other workers in their schools, colleges, hospitals, care homes and so on, would these employed workers be producing new value? Yes, of course they would, because they are producing commodities and services, required by workers, just as much as if they were producing sausages in a factory. Indeed, Marx says so, himself.
“If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value.”
In the case of a school owned and run, as a cooperative, by the workers in a given community, they would pay the teachers, the value of their labour-power (wages), just the same as if those teachers were employed by a private capitalist, or the state. But, as with all other labourers, the value of that labour-power would be less than the new value created by the teacher, it would, thereby, create a surplus value for the co-operative. If, instead, the teachers established the cooperative, this would not change the value of their labour-power, nor the value created by their labour. The value of the education provided would remain the same, and the workers in the given community would, then, act to commission the services of the school, paying for it out of their collective funds. The only difference, here, is that the teachers, as collective owners of the school, would appropriate the surplus value produced by their labour, as with any other worker-cooperative.
In whichever case, the cost of the provision, as with healthcare and so on, is a part of the value of labour-power, and the workers, to cover this cost, require an equal amount in the payment of their wages. This is not, then, a deduction from surplus value, in total, any more than the element of wages to cover the cost of the workers food, clothing and shelter is a deduction from surplus value. But, this amount, is, also, not some arbitrary amount. In just the same way that if a spinner uses gold spindles to spin yarn, rather than steel spindles, they cannot expect to be recompensed for this unnecessary expenditure, so too with the value of labour-power.
If workers, operating their own welfare system, decided to have lavish schools, and a pupil teacher ratio lower than that at Eton, for example, this would constitute unnecessary expenditure in relation to the labour-power required by capital, just as much as if any given worker decided to eat twice as much as required for their reproduction or decided to have ten children, rather than the two required for the reproduction of the parents' labour-power. There would be no reason why capital would reimburse this excess spending, in the wages paid to the worker, or workers in aggregate. There is an important point, however, which is that having this provision under their own direct ownership and control makes it much more difficult for capital in general to reduce this provision, or to reduce wages to cover its cost.
No comments:
Post a Comment