Office Workers

[DarkNation]

We know that the value of the labor put into the product is equal to the products value, but what about services?

How do we define the value of the labor of someone who works in an office doing spreadsheets, or people who fix plumbing?

[DarkNation]

Is anyone going to even attempt to explain this to me?

[Victus Mortuum]

Patience.

The amount of labor put into the sum output product of the business they work in is the same as the value of the output product in Marxian economics.

[ckaihatsu]

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In an earlier day we could talk more straightforwardly about one's objective relation to the means of mass production -- but in an era of *post*-industrial, *debt*-based economic activity it makes more sense to speak in *subjective* terminologies, such as those that look to see who are the major players in the realms of political and economic influence. So, overall, it's still the bourgeoisie at the helm, with the result that the "wages" that "professionals" receive are more akin to "political payoffs" since the work done is in the *service* sector -- much more amorphous a type of work than physical, blue-collar *manufacturing* work is.





http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1904519&postcount=21

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1904520&postcount=16





I have to take on these "greed" and "laziness" arguments head-on here, because they're popping up on a couple of threads now.

I am absolutely *against* this moralistic stance of argument, because by using the terms 'greed' and 'lazy' it invites the creation of a self-appointed social moral authority that is then tasked with *defining* and *enforcing* these arbitrary definitions -- possibly in vigilante-like ways.

These moralistic arguments have *zero* real, material basis, since everything that is produced in *any* kind of economy is either a [1] good or a [2] service -- if it's a service then the person providing the service should have full, unobligated, duress-free self-determination over whether the compensation provided for that service is adequate enough, considering all factors regarding the providing of that service, whatever it may be.

And if the labor is for producing a good of some kind then we need to acknowledge that there is *no* objectively definable material standard for a ratio of mental / emotional / physical effort, to the production of one unit of that good. (This is because of mass industrial production methods that leverage and interleave various types of labor into processes that combine hydrocarbon fuels and machine efficiencies -- *very* complex!)





These liberated laborers may very well find that producing quality objects and consumables for their own usage -- without being exploited -- is *not* a linear, one-to-one relationship of work effort to productive output, especially once they've taken collective control of the means of mass production. Sure, some may continue to do handicraft-type work as self-selected artisans, but I'd say that the bulk of the population would *not* go in that direction with their lives and would be altogether comfortable using the outputs of *industrial* manufacturing processes -- and these are *not* dependent on increasing amounts of human mental / emotional / physical labor power.


So -- after easily dismissing the *capitalist* method of material valuation -- we're left with one implication of this fact of modern material production: That no one can draw a direct line from the *products* (goods and services) of mental / emotional / physical labor efforts, back to their solely existing *sources* of labor in any kind of definitive way. (For example, how many people, and which ones, exactly, should be credited for all of the knowledge contained in all of Wikipedia's pages, and for how many hours of their time, respectively? Or, how does a new owner of a used chair properly back-compensate the artisan who produced that chair 50 years ago that's still being used today?)

If even labor-conscious *Marxists* can't arrive at a definite system of quantification of material labor effort into finished goods and services, for the purpose of setting up a valid system of ratios, then we sure as hell know that the *capitalist* system of labor-*exploiting* valuations is even *further* from reflecting an accurate correlation of labor effort to abstract value.

Without an *objective* measure of quantified abstract values there's really no good way to say what goods and services are worth, *especially* by the yardstick of capital. So we have to conclude that there's no *standard* for saying how much *value* -- especially labor value -- one person is consuming versus another. Sure, there are some generalities, as with bigger items versus smaller items, but we *still* don't have a solid standard for definitively saying that 'x' person has contributed 'y' amount of effort into the common good, and therefore can receive 'z' amount of goods and services back without being "lazy" or "greedy"...(!)