In the first examples, the specific “fuel poverty” was a consequence of consumption decisions – food or kids – whereas, in these latter examples, its a consequence of inadequate income, to cover the cost of the reproduction of labour-power. In Capital, Marx sets out the objective basis of the value of labour-power. But, as with any such commodity value, it is based on what is socially necessary labour. A yarn spinner might, as Marx describes, use gold spindles rather than steel, but cannot, thereby, recover their value in the yarn they produce. Labour-power is no different. Given the standards of the time, workers need a certain quantity and quality of food, clothing, shelter, education and so on to reproduce their labour-power. If some choose to eat more, they can do so, but it does not change the value of that labour-power, reflected in their wages. It simply means they must consume less, or cheaper types of other wage goods.
Similarly, to reproduce labour-power, parents need to produce two children. If they choose to have three, four, six or twelve children, is also up to them, but does not increase the value of their labour-power, or entitle them to have it compensated in benefits paid for out of the taxes levied on other workers' wages, who make different consumption choices. The moralists protest that that means the right to have more than two children is, then, restricted to the rich/affluent. Well, yes,just as the right to live in a mansion, to own a yacht, jet or new Ferrari is restricted to those that can afford these consumption choices! That is the way capitalism works, and as Marx set out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, it is also the way Socialism would, initially, have to work, as it emerges from bourgeois society.
“Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”
(Marx – Critique of The Gotha Programme)
But, Marx notes the points set out above. Besides the fact that one worker is stronger, fitter etc., and so doing 8 hours of labour is easier for them than for another worker who is not so strong, or fit (i.e. whose ability to labour is less) one worker may have two children that need feeding clothing and so on, whilst the other does not. Yet, both workers would receive back from society the same equivalent of 8 hours labour, meaning that one worker has contributed less, in terms of their ability to labour, whilst the other also, receives less, relative to their needs, because they need to also provide for two children. This is only something that can be addressed, as a socialist society so raises social productivity so that an increasing proportion of the social product can be distributed on the basis of need.
Until that time,
“... it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
(ibid)
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