For the most part Marx's discussion of the technical, value and organic compositions of capital seem to have refered to the shop floor organization of production, though this need not be the case. At any rate the issue of the division of labor is most clearly related to the technical and organic compositions of capital given that it is implicit in the former and the later changes only as the former changes. Any technical composition designating some combination of machinery and living labor power must, concretely, involve some given division of labor; any change in the technical composition (or the associated organic composition) is likely to involve a change in the division of labor --though marginal changes may not, e.g., substitution of a more productive computer for a less productive one in a secretarial pool.
The concepts of class composition, political recomposition and decomposition add to the analysis by emphasizing the structure and dynamic of power relations associated both with given divisions of labor (or technical compositions) and with changes in it. The class composition looks at the division of labor in terms of how it is associated with vertical hierarchies of power both among workers and between workers and capital. Political recomposition refers to the processes of struggle through which those hierarchies are altered, undermined or bypassed in such ways as to strengthen the workers as a class against capital. Decomposition refers to the processes through which capital may introduce new divisions of labor through new technologies or other forms of reorganization with the aim of breaking down such acretions of power among workers and reestablishing its own command over them more securely.
It is easy enough to see how the analysis of the division of labor can be extended to the sphere of reproduction: who does what in housework, schoolwork, and all other work in the production and reproduction of labor power. The applicability of the concepts of technical composition, value composition and organic composition to the sphere of reproduction is not so obvious because the commodity being produced (labor power) is not one on which a profit is realized in its sale. However, we can reason analogically and see that, for example, the modern household (at least in the developed world) has a much higher technical composition of capital than its more ancient counterpart, e.g., it has more "capital" per worker --washingmachines instead of scrub buckets, food processors instead of knives, vaccuum cleaners instead of brooms. Or, students now use computers instead of slide rules, use on-line catalogs rather than card files, use sophisticated laboratory equipment instead of simpler such tools, and so on. Similarly, the analysis of class composition can be easly applied to the analysis of the hierarchies of power in the home or in school --to the analysis of patriarcal/wage domination over unwaged women and children, to the analysis of professoral/wage domination over unwaged students. Thus too the concept of poltical recomposition focuses our attention on the struggles which challenge such hierarchies: women's movement, child rights movement, student movements. Finally, we can see capitalist interventions into such struggles, such as Reagan's social agenda calling for an end to abortion and the return of women to their traditional role in the home as a kind of social decomposition designed to restore the subordination of consumption and life to reproduction.
2. In the discussion of relative surplus value, for the first time Marx allows the "intensity" of labor to vary. Why does he do this and what are the consequences for our understanding of relative surplus value and of value itself? Do you think there is a long term trend to the movment of intensity, akin to those of the length of the working day, or of productivity? If so, what is it? If not, why not? What might be the consequences for surplus value of dramatically increased intensity in the work of reproducing labor power?
No, I do not think there is a long term trend unless there be two: a general rise during the period of early capitalism up to and including the period of rapid industrialization, and then a long term, but often reversed downward trend since. From the evidence Marx gives of exhaustion and death from overwork I think we can conclude that during the height of its power capital was able to push people to the human biological limit of intensity. Since then the success by workers in shortening the working day has probably been associated with some success in reducing the intensity of labor. Never the less, the periods of decomposition when new technologies have been introduced and workers' power undermined have probably been periods in which intensity has increased, periods which were brought to an end by new processes of political recomposition.
Dramatically increased intensity in the production of labor power --serious and successful crackdowns at school (anti grade inflation campaigns) or in the home (intensified homework and parental discipline)-- might produce a more productive labor force, thus raising relative surplus value and a less combatative one thus lower costs in general. Where reproduction includes subsistence production it could finance a reduction in wage costs made up by increased subsistence output. The first examples might be seen as the object of capitalist attempts to solve the "crisis" of education of the last twenty years. Of course the dangers to capital are two: they may fail and deepen the crisis or they may be too successful and produce a working class which by not struggling undermines the dynamism of the system (as in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe until recently).
3. Explain how Marx's analysis of relative surplus value, when understood as the basis of long term, secular trends within capitalism, can lead to his theory of the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall." Cleaver's interpretation of this theory sees it as an analysis of how the class contradictions of capitalism produce changes that make it increasingly difficult for the capitalists to impose work. Explain this interpretation and then discuss what empirical evidence could validate or falsify this theory.
The other side of this phenomenon is that the amount of investment required to create a job has risen enormously. Few Third World countries where unemployment is high would think to introduce American agricultural methods in order to provide jobs. It is done, but is counterproductive in terms of employment.
Now Cleaver's interpretation of the effect of a rise in the organic composition and a fall in s/(c+v) goes like this: the rise in c/v implies a rise in c and perhaps even a fall of v toward ø so that s/(c+v) goes toward s/c at the limit. But while there is no upper limit on c (that is to say the introduction of wealth producing new machinery) there is an upper limit on s given by the length of the working day and the limitations on intensity (plus of course there are also political limits which operate more often than those). Therefore as c rises and s is limited, s/c must fall. All of which is to say that the amount of investment in c required to get s gets larger and larger as machines are substituted for labor. If it is getting harder and harder to extract s, then it is harder and harder to put people to work at all because capital only puts people to work where it can extract s.
The empirical evidence of such a trend winning out over counteracting influences would be a secular rise in the unemployment rate, not a fall in the monetary rate of profit. Such a problem was forseen, and to some degree experienced in the late 1950s during the period of rapid automation in manufacturing. The solution was the rise of the service industry which was able to absorb the growing labor force expelled, or unabsorbable by, from manufacturing. The theory could be falsified by empirical evidence that in any given industry machines could replace workers in production (over time) with no displacement of laborpower. In such a case the theory's applicability would be restricted to those industries where it held and only true for the aggregate to the degree that such industries outweighted those which did correspond to the theory on the whole. But since Marx thought that the theory applied in the aggregate, he would be proved wrong. However, it does seem difficult to find any such industries that don't fit.
4. Peasants in the Third World and small farmers in the United States do not earn their income primarily in the form of wages (though they may do part time work off their land for wages —say during harvest time). Rather, their primary income derives from the sale of their products on the market (whether an open market or to government purchasers). As a result those agricultural producers, as well as many academics who write about them, think of them as small businesspeople or petty commodity producers. Yet some Marxist theoreticians and some small farmers, at various point in time, have argued that such producers can usefully be thought of as part of the working class. a) What arguments can be put forward as to why such a view should be taken seriously? b)What are the political implications of accepting such a view for working class strategy?
b) The political implications are that the struggles of peasants and small farmers are akin to those of urban workers, that because of that a little reinterpretation can show the communalities of their situations and the possibilities for collaboration, for the linking of the struggles of the former groups with those of the latter. Such were the insights of the farmers in the American Farm Movement a couple of years ago as they calculated their net revenue, divided it by their hours of work and determined their "hourly wage" and with it went to the waged working class for support. Similarly, they shipped truckloads of food to striking miners in Appalachia to create class solidarity between two groups which had long been separated. In the Third World the implications are great. Traditional, narrow Marxist interpretations of who is a worker and who is not buttressed a down right exploitative attitude toward peasants, a lack of appreciation of their own situation and goals, and ultimately their repression. From the period after the Russian Revolution (through collectivization) through the Sandinista mistreatment of the Atlantic Coast Indians we have many examples of how blindness to the content of the social relations of different groups has led to separation and hostility between such waged and unwaged workers.
5. a) Explain the argument that grades given to students in school are proxy wages or IOU's on future income. b) Construct a counter-argument, i.e., one that disagrees with this analysis. c) Evaluate both perspectives in the light of your own university program of schoolwork. To What degree does the first argument apply to you? To what degree does it not? Give concrete evidence both ways as well as theoretical reasons.
b) Counter-argument: whatever business’ desires, professors and the teaching profession as a whole has its own agenda and traditions which involve the passing on of the results of past scholarship and creativity, the transmission to the following generation of the received wisdom and experience of human history. Moreover, not only does the professorate have such goals, individual students, indeed many students, perhaps even students (and their parents —who historically demanded the right to an education for their children) collectively have their own autonomous goals which do not necessarily mesh with those of business. They want to learn about the world, its past, its literature, its art, its philosophy for their own reasons, to enrich their lives, to figure out how to live their own lives. Faced with such a diverse array of objectives and methods for achieving them it is clearly a gross oversimplification to think that business merely shapes schooling according to the whims of its own needs and desires.
c) When I look at my own program of study I see the composite result of all the forces mentioned above. I have to work within a program of required study, but the content of that study is determined not by "business" but by the ideas and proclivities of my professors and their colleagues. Moreover, within that program there is choice —which, although it may be circumscribed, gives me opportunities to follow my own desires. Moreover, not being in a "professional" school —where perhaps Cleaver’s analysis may be more appropriate— I have considerable space for completely free "electives" where I can follow my own intellectual nose, seek out answers to my own questions. I should add, even in those courses which are set and required, while I must meet certain criteria I also have leeway to determine what I get out of them. I am not limited to looking only at what I am given, I can explore outside and beyond, I can make links. As to future wages, whatever my course of study may be, whatever jobs it aims to prepare me for I can still make choices, I can still choose not to follow the programmed path. It may be more difficult to avoid the wide and easy prepared route but it is possible to explore alternative "ways of being" as Cleaver likes to say. Thus I conclude there is truth to both sides of the argument, but as the first is stated it is oversimplified and misleading.
"Productivity in the U.S. has been in the doldrums for a long time —but now, its poor performance poses a threat to the economy. Output per hour in nonfarm industry rose at a paltry 1.2% annual rate during the 1980s —no improvement from the 1970s. . . . For the coming year, poor productivity growth has a number of implications for the outlook —all bad. The sad performance in 1989 has already lifted the cost of doing business, because wages and benefits of workers grew much faster than productivity. It has also squeezed profits margins, kept inflation stubbornly high and cut into America’s international competitiveness."
a) In what sense and to what degree would you interpret the above information as evidence of a "crisis" in the accumulation of American capital? b) What circumstances might you expect, on theoretical grounds, to have been responsible for such a lackluster productivity performance? c) How do those theoretical expectations fit with what you know about the evolution of class relations and capitalist accumulation strategies in the 1980s in the U.S.?
b) Circumstances? A combination of factors which would result in low investment in technological changes which could raise productivity together. Worker (or even community, i.e., environomental group) resistance might inhibit the introduction of new machines or new processes with dangerous side effects (see answer to question #1 above), or low wages might reduce the incentive for change, or higher rates of return on other investments, (e.g., moving overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, investing in deregulated speculative financial assets) or lack of government support for R&D and so on.
c) Fit with the 1980s? The most obvious answers are the existence of higher rates of return on deregulated speculative financial assets and low wages. Reagan-Bush Administration policy implemented widespread deregulation of industry, including financial deregulation, that allowed interest rates to rise above the rate of inflation (making real rates positive). When Volcker came in under Carter and continued under Reagan interest rates shot up to over 20%, much above many expected rates of return in industry. As deregulation took constraints off many parts of the financial sector, such as the Savings & Loan industry, speculation exploded (along with considerable corruption and theft) making such high return investment attractive relative to investment in new technology in the real sector. Thus business diverted the money it was making by driving wages down —with considerable help from the Reagan-Bush Administration— into such speculation. Help? Yes, starting with Reagan’s attack on PATCO the air controllers union, the administration undertook just about every anti-union, anti-wage action it could get away with, including deregulation which was used in the airline industry, for example, to bust union power. At the same time it must be said that there was also continuing opposition to some technologies which continued to be effective in preventing their adoption. Most obvious is the case of nuclear power, an industry whose development was brought to a dead stop in the mid 1970s by widespread opposition. Not even Reagan-Bush’s efforts to revive the industry were successful.
7. In chapter 25 of Vol. I of Capital, Marx presents a theory of crisis which resembles a theory of the business cycle. As we have also seen, he also has a theory of crisis which concerns the long run "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" which grew out of his analysis of the class dynamics of relative surplus value and was further developed in Volume III. a) What empirical evidence do you think would [or has] tend to confirm the insights of each of these theories? b) How can the two theories be interpreted as complementary.
a) Empirical evidence? In the first case, evidence that increases in labor costs brought reductions in profits and reductions in investment which contributed to a down turn in the economy as a whole. Also evidence that rising unemployment lowered wages and such a reduction in wages was associated with rising profits and an upturn in investment fueling an upswing in growth. It might be that other factors play a big role, factors Marx doesn’t deal with —such as the fiscal and monetary policies of the Keynesian (or post-Keynesian) state, but such factors would be expected to modify not entirely displace the relations he depicts. There is, in fact evidence, at least of the first part of this from the late 1960s when wage growth outpaced productivity growth and dropped the rate of profit; there is also partial evidence from this spring and summer (see quote in question #5 above). In the second case, setting aside an interpretation of the "tendency" as concerning the monetary rate of profit and looking at it in terms of the long run tendency for capital to displace its own ability to put people to work by raising the organic composition of capital, we would look for evidence of growing difficulty in creating jobs, of putting people to work. For example, the worries over automation in the late 1950s, the cancelations of life-time job guarantees by Japanese firms in recent years, ILO worries over finding 1 billion jobs by the year 2000.
b) Complementarity? Periodic downturns and subsequent up turns can be seen as a regulatory mechanism of the long term management of the class relation which is dominated by a long term tendency to increase the organic composition of capital. In other words, in upturns investment brings about increases in C/V, downturns wipe out opposition to it (increasing unemployment falls most heavily on workers who have struggled most powerfully on the basis of the new higher C/jV) and failures to manage it (firms which can’t handle the situation fail or are taken over by those who can), setting the stage for a renewal of the long run tendency in the next upturn.
8. Among the documents of the Zapatistas are those which discuss the transformation of Mexican society, beginning with democractic organization and legel forms (e.g., grassroots organization of a national dialogue about new forms of democacy and changing the constitution) but also specifying the directions of change being demanded by the indigenous peoples whom the Zapatistas represent. Discuss some of those direction of change and evaluate to what degree, and in what ways, are they compatible with Marx's own views on the revolutionary transcendence of capitalism.
Many kinds of answers are possible here. The object is to show some thoughtful familiarity with both the Zapatistas and Marx's ideas on these subjects. The main things I talked about in class vis a vis the Zapatistas were: 1. the notion of replacing non-party forms of democracy with new forms of direct democracy, 2. the indigenous desire for autonomy in pluriethnic regions, ie. that they be allowed to develop and apply their own laws and traditions in their own ways without being subject to the general laws of Mexico --at least with respect to local particularities. With respect to Marx I talked about the orthodox notion of transition --capitalism-socialism-communism-- overthrow the state, create a workers state, then transform society. Then critiqued that talked about seeing self-valorization as communism developing in the present. Thus with indigenous and Zapatistas their methods deployed today are templates for more general social relationships tomorow. The object of revolution is widening the opportunities for their elaboration.
9. In his essay "Anarchist Communism" written in 1887 the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote: "As to the method followed by the anarchist thinker, it entirely differs from that followed by the utopists. . . . He studies society and tries to discover its tendencies, past and present, its growing needs, intellectual and economics, and in his ideal he merely points out in which direction evolution [of human society] goes." Examine this passage and explain whether Kropotkin's position is consistent or inconsistent with that of Marx —who died four years before this was written— and with that of the Zapatistas writing 97 years later. What, if any "tendencies" did Marx identify within capitalism which might be taken by Kropotkin (or someone sharing his views) as indicating the directions of the future evolution of society? What about the Zapatistas writing today?
Consistent or inconsistent? Marx also rejected the "utopian" approach to the politics of struggle and revolutionary transformation of society. Like Kropotkin he argued that while utopian dreaming was perhaps an amusing and even stimulating use of the imagination, the only way to know in which direction society was moving, both before revolution and after it, was to to examine the tendencial social forces at work within society. Now for Marx the "tendencies" which Kropotkin speaks of were first and foremost those of class struggle. What were the objects of working class struggle? What was it fighting to eliminate as elements of society? What directions was it striving to create? Therefore, he would not speak, as Kropotkin does, of "society" but rather of class forces.
What tendencies? Well, certainly the the struggle against the subordination of life to work was one such tendency —one Marx described in some detail in Chapter 10 of Capital. The struggle to make work just one aspect of human life, so that it can be an interesting one, an unalienated one would suggest that after a successful revolution workers would seek to shape society so as to include this element. Another tendency was the development of human cooperation which he dealt with in chapters 12-15. Yet at the same time, while describing that tendency he also divided the forces at work into the capitalist tendency to shape cooperation for control versus the workers collective cooperation in their own interests so the actual shape of cooperation and technology embodied both and the two tendencies would have to be disintangled to liberate athe one and eliminate the other. Certainly in general, Marx saw workers struggles as aiming to eliminate all forms of domination and exploitation and to expand the scope for the free development of the individual even though there were forms of domination to which he paid much less attention, e.g., patriarchy.
10. Benedetto Croce (kroh’-chay) (1866-1952) was an independently wealthy, Italian intellectual and major figure in the struggle by European liberalism against Marxism. (There are 116 cites of his works in the UT online catalog.) For over 50 years Croce attacked Marx and Soviet socialism and developed a philosophical defense of Western liberal values. One of his recurrent themes was the negativity of the concept of "communism" and its inability to posit any real, humanly attractive alternative to capitalism. "What communism really denies," he wrote, "is the autonomy or the positiveness of the subject. . . [Marx] said that capitalism was giving birth to and educating its own ‘gravediggers’ in the working masses. But gravediggers are not, as we know, the creators of a new life, nor are they a destructive force which is also a constructive one." [Quoted from B.Croce, "The History of Communism as a Political Reality," (1945) in B. Croce, Essays on Marx and Russia, 1966.] Using Cleaver's interpretation of Marx’s analysis of self-valorization and crisis, construct a response to Croce’s argument. Discuss whether, and to what degree, Zapatista politics could be said to be founded on indigenous projects of self-valorization.
For someone who knew as much about Hegelian/Marxian dialectics as Croce did, this interpretation of Marx’s metaphor of "gravediggers" seems willfully misleading at best —given the inevitable association of antithesis/negativity(proletariat burying the thesis/capitalism) with thesis/positivity(communism), i.e. the way in which, within the dialectical movement, the negation of one moment(capital) by another(workers) always results in the preservation of the old (changes brought about by capitalism which are continued) within the positivity of the new (communism). In other words, in historical and theoretical terms the gravediggers are creative!
Less philosophically, Croce’s comments ignore the positivity, the constructiveness of living labor which lies at the heart of Marx’s analysis both of capitalism and of the working class. Living labor is a constructive, creative, inventive process even if harnessed by capital through exploitation and confined within its limits. The working class (the gravediggers) are the human carriers of living labor and that creativity, when it autonomously breaks beyond the limits of capital to define new directions is what has been called "self-valorization." Therefore, Croce is wrong to say communism denies the "autonomy or the positiveness of the subject" when on the contrary Marx conceived of communism exactly as the process of self-realization of the autonomous, (positively) self-valorizating subject! Similarly, the crisis of capital is not merely its negation by a gravedigging proletariat but simultaneously the flowering of currents of self-valorization which causes crisis in the sense of positing real alternatives to which capital has only repressive answers.