Exploitation (according to the Cambridge Companion to Marx)

t. Richard W. Miller

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Lol

The Cambridge Companion to Marx is probably one of the most convoluted and worst written collections of essays ever. I mean, jesus christ, look at the above text. This is David Harvey levels of obfuscation.

So, what do you think? Is it any accurate or a hot take? This isn't something I've encountered in reading Marx in any of his volumes, and iirc the "exchange of equivalents" is somewhat out of context, but I'll need to look that up.

Meanwhile, here's something I found post by a communist on /liberty/, lol
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm


Is Harvey bad? I was intending to read him. This is somewhat disconcerting.

No, not necessarily bad. He holds a number of very odd views on Marx and the LTV, which prompted a flurry of criticism that he had grievously misrepresented the work and was building a theoretical structure with no basis in Marx, at all. Whether this compromises the remainder of his work for you, is a personal revelation; however, I very much enjoyed The Limits to Capital, so it's not as though one must be a dogmatist and discard everything

So is the joke that Miller doesn't understand what Marx means by exploitation? From what I recall, Marx literally defines exploitation as the appropriation of surplus labour. This is what separates the exploiting class from the exploited, the exploiting class profiting from unearned labour. Did I get this wrong all along?

It's exactly the same impression I've got. I'm not sure if Miller is just practicing academic masturbation to be bring some novel reading or maybe he really is onto something.


Is his Companion to Marx's Capital worth reading?

your very existence exploits other people, so just kill yourself.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not to read the book, itself, as I've not read his Companion. I read this review, however (libcom.org/library/companion-david-harveys-companion-marxs-capital-chapter-1-critisticuffs), which shows some of the concerns held about his commentary and representation of Marx in this book that mirror closely the critiques that have emerged elsewhere.

The author is deliberately obtuse and dumb. There's nothing hard to interpret about Marx's idea of exploitation. Marx wrote that the nature of wages hides the relationship of labor and value but it's effectively the same as in feudalism. A serf worked X days for himself and Y days for the feudal lord. The wage-laborer works X hours to pay the cost of his own subsistence and Y hours to provide the capitalist with surplus, and therefore profit. The unpaid labor Y was called exploitation by Marx.

"The rate of surplus value is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital." -Marx, Capital volume 1.

When Marx takes exception to people misinterpreting him as saying that profits are "theft" or that workers "aren't paid the full value of their labor" he's being nitpicky but clear. In Marx's model, workers are paid the full value of their *labor-power.* But the value of that labor-power is the value needed to reproduce it, i.e. to provide for the subsistence of the worker. They're still being exploited due to the fact that they create surplus value but it accrues to the capitalist. This is the point Marx is alluding to with Wagner.

I honestly haven't read any of his books and I'm not really interested in them right now considering the wacky statements he's made. A number of different people have criticized him on various points, even Cockshott.


Bingo. Appropriation of the surplus = exploitation of labor.

Things like this are why I always tell people to just read Marx if they want to understand him. If you consume secondary works you're going to be confused beyond your imagination with all the mental somersaults that people do

This is remarkably garbled writing. No surprise that the writer is a professional philosopher. The structure of the sentence suggests a comparison between two magnitudes measured in the same way, so when one reads "difference" and "time spent by a worker", one expects a comparison again measuring something in terms of how long it takes. Value in Marx is indeed closely related to that, but why would somebody reading this text as an intro to Marx know that?

The word value has many meanings. In the writing of Marx, when value is mentioned without any qualifiers, it usually refers to how long it takes to produce something. And the focus is almost never anecdotal, so when Marx says a capitalist does this, a worker does that, this or that product takes this or that amount of work, it's almost always not really about a particular person, but about what happens usually, what happens on average.

A commodity has direct use value, which are not abstract happiness points like what somebody who has only studied neoclassical economics might think, but a plain description of what the commodity is useful for due to its known physical properties. And a commodity has exchange value, the exchange ratios with other commodities, which strongly correlates with value (in Capital volume 3 this is modified due to a tendency of profit rate equalization between sectors with low and high capital intensity).

Commodities are bought for their use value. Commodities usually sell at value (roughly). Marx says it's not different with workers. So their payment has to do with what it takes to keep them alive. Their use value is their ability to work.

I have the entire Marx-Engels Werke in German. Would you mind giving an actually usable reference?

What the fuck? How can you read anything Marx has ever written and unironically come to this conclusion?

Value of labor power in Marxonese is what it takes to keep the workers alive and reproduce, so that's the one thing the philosopher is right about.

Well it actually is possible to pay wages that are less than the value of labor power. The same applies to other commodities too, since price and value are different. However, Marx is very clear that this is NOT what he means by exploitation. Exploitation is what happens when surplus value is created and expropriated.

It is possible to reduce the price and value of reproduction of labour below the generational price and below the daily reproduction. Truck wages are historically common. For an example below the daily reproduction read Primo Levi.

Actually that is correct. However you have to understand that the value of labor power is tied to the ability of the worker to reproduce himself. Surplus value is still created by the workers but it is different than the value of labor power.

that's where you fucked up

The author means the collected works of M&E, tome 20, page 130. It's chapter 8 of "Value, Price and Profit."

Can I have a source for that quote?

Cambridge Companion for Marx, Chapter 3

Ah, Lohn, Preis und Profit, chapter 8, so MEW volume 16, page 132–134.