Llco

[Positivist]

Hey I was recently on the leading light communist organizations website looking for the web-host because I like the format and I came across an article where it was asserted that a direct tie to material production was a necessary feature of a proletarian. It then went on to suggest that western workers who are not involved in direct material production are not actually proletarian because their occupation is merely targeted at assisting the realization of surplus by the borurgiose, or in other words that western wage-earners are just "middlemen."

Now I have difficulty taking an argument seriously from a site which describes itself as third-worldist and which proposes the seige and "reeducation" of the "first world", but this argument has struck me. From the standpoint that value can only be produced through the application of human energy and intellect to raw materials, and that all other forms of compensation can only come from distribution of the surplus of this production, then any employment other than that of the industrial worker cannot be exploitative.

Here is the article I am referring to; http://llco.org/revisiting-value-and-exploitation/

[The Jay]

A proletarian is anyone who works for a wage, whether that worker produces a surplus or not. There are first-world productive (surplus-producing) workers btw. Maybe this article will help: Not Perfect but Relevant Enough (http://www.democracyatwork.info/articles/2012/07/cooperative-vs-wsde/). Enabler workers are exploited too. I would like to continue this discussion after I finish a podcast, but I'm distracted right now lol.

[Raúl Duke]

I'm going to appeal to lived experience...
go ahead and tell a "service industry" (waitress/waiter, shop clerk, etc) wage worker that they're not getting fucked over/"exploited"/etc.

I think LLCO is making a simplistic argument and appealing to orthodoxism. Look, we may no longer be living in Marx's world where industrial capitalism was an every-day reality but I don't think the changes to a consumer society has made the proletariet (wage workers) here any less exploited. Some people here, many who are basically neighbors of mine based off where I live in Ft.Myers, have a hard time "making it." I mean, they're getting by but not saving much money and any thing like car breaking-down, late fees, etc will bring hard economic hardship.

Sure, they're not exactly making the commodity where the "surplus value" is extracted from via point of sale in the classical sense but they're part of the long-chain of exploitation that is engaged by the capitalist class plus it's usually this segment of the working class that provides service to the wealthy whether by preparing/serving their food in fancy restaurants and cafes, helping them shop, etc.

I feel these 3rd worldist critiques about the non-existence of a "1st world" proletariet is mostly penned by middle-class/upper-class elitist 1st world "leftists" with no bearing on the lived experienced of the actual "1st world" working class. I don't believe the "3rd world" proletariat and their leftist allies entertain these silly ideas themselves, they're probably too busy focusing on their liberation whether from class society or just imperialism to be dreaming about "re-educating" and "mass gulag" for the so-called first world.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I'm going to appeal to lived experience...
go ahead and tell a "service industry" (waitress/waiter, shop clerk, etc) wage worker that they're not getting fucked over/"exploited"/etc.

I think LLCO is making a simplistic argument and appealing to orthodoxism. Look, we may no longer be living in Marx's world where industrial capitalism was an every-day reality but I don't think the changes to a consumer society has made the proletariet (wage workers) here any less exploited. Some people here, many who are basically neighbors of mine based off where I live in Ft.Myers, have a hard time "making it." I mean, they're getting by but not saving much money and any thing like car breaking-down, late fees, etc will bring hard economic hardship.

Sure, they're not exactly making the commodity where the "surplus value" is extracted from via point of sale in the classical sense but they're part of the long-chain of exploitation that is engaged by the capitalist class plus it's usually this segment of the working class that provides service to the wealthy whether by preparing/serving their food in fancy restaurants and cafes, helping them shop, etc.

I feel these 3rd worldist critiques about the non-existence of a "1st world" proletariet is mostly penned by middle-class/upper-class elitist 1st world "leftists" with no bearing on the lived experienced of the actual "1st world" working class. I don't believe the "3rd world" proletariat and their leftist allies entertain these silly ideas themselves, they're probably too busy focusing on their liberation whether from class society or just imperialism to be dreaming about "re-educating" and "mass gulag" for the so-called first world.
As a corollary, I would argue that waiters/waitresses are as much a part of the production process as cooks. They handle the logistics side, getting the food to the customer, as well as providing a comfortable experience to ensure the stream of revenue continues in the future. Combined, they generate an income for the owner(s) and are paid a wage below the value that they produce. Tips are tantamount to charity, and considering the existence of the tipping system in the US as a negation of prole status would necessitate anyone receiving any kind of assistance to no longer be considered a proletarian, ex. food stamps, section 8, etc.


As far as other industries, take a look at Geek Squad, for example. They don't 'produce' a physical object, but the cashiers generate sales in services and are paid a wage below the income they generate (ex, a low-level employee may make $8/hr selling virus removal services or 'tune ups' while they are generating $100+/hr in revenue). Surplus value is extracted in both situations as both workers are used to generate more wealth than they are paid.

Same mechanics as sweat shops, different situations.

[Positivist]

The mechanics of service labor is certainly very similar to industrial production but here the article approaches surplus from a purely material perspective. If the definition of exploited is to be deprived of the surplus you physically produce, than only those responsible for producing a physical surplus are exploited and everyone else by living off of that surplus is exploiting.

I do not really agree with this view seeing to it that there are essential forms of labor which are 'immaterial' but I'm just trying to elucidate the thought process here. I suppose the counter to this view would be that the allocation of physical surplus to non-industrial workers still requires that the capitalists first exploit it, and then distribute as necessary to attract further surplus from other avenues. While service workers may be recipients of exploited surplus, so are industrial workers from different industries.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

The mechanics of service labor is certainly very similar to industrial production but here the article approaches surplus from a purely material perspective. If the definition of exploited is to be deprived of the surplus you physically produce, than only those responsible for producing a physical surplus are exploited and everyone else by living off of that surplus is exploiting.

I do not really agree with this view seeing to it that there are essential forms of labor which are 'immaterial' but I'm just trying to elucidate the thought process here. I suppose the counter to this view would be that the allocation of physical surplus to non-industrial workers still requires that the capitalists first exploit it, and then distribute as necessary to attract further surplus from other avenues. While service workers may be recipients of exploited surplus, so are industrial workers from different industries.
I get what it's saying, it's just ridiculous




Thus, as Eleanor Marx points out, the value that is obtained by all classes has its origin in the direct producers. This is true not just of true of the traditional ruling classes, but also of those who are employed but are not direct producers or part of direct production. These workers may help realize value but they do not produce it as the direct producer does.
Capitalist starts with Raw Material A, which is a warehouse full of previously produced and packaged tupperware sets. Capitalist pays wage workers to put them into stores, interact with customers, to sell the tupperware sets at a profit. The employees must be able to sell much more in tupperware sets than they earn in wages. They are taking a raw material, adding labor (by moving them to stores, arranging them nicely and selling them at a profit), and extracting surplus value (by paying the poor guy in the housewares section $7.25/hr as he and his fellow employees sell much more than that). Replace tupperware sets with iron, and setting up the tupperware on a shelf with welding bits of iron together to make a widget. Same thing.



“The sum thus entering the pocket of the capitalist Marx calls surplus-value. It is not all profit, but includes the employer’s profit. He has to share it with others: with the Government in the shape of rates and taxes, with the landlord for rent, with the merchant, etc… Thus, all of the classes of society not composed of actual and immediate producers of wealth… all classes, from kings and queens to music-masters and greengrocers, live upon their respective shares of this surplus value. In other words, they live upon the net producer of the surplus labor which the capitalist extracts from his work people, but for which he does not pay. It matters not whether the share of surplus-labor falling to each member of society not actually a producer is granted as a gift by Act of Parliament from the public revenue, or whether it has to be earned by performing some function not actually productive. There is no fund out of which they can be paid, but the sum total of the surplus value created by the immediate producers, for which they are not paid.” (2)
Taking this to its logical conclusion, even "classical" proles in the US, workers in the manufacturing sector, are no longer proles because they benefit from services provided by taxes (others' surplus value), such as well maintained roads which allow them to get to work reliably and earn an income, along with fire stations that would deploy if his house were to catch on fire, or in the case of, say, the UK - recipients of NHS services.


This probably sounds pedantic - I'm drunk

[Hiero]

Capitalist starts with Raw Material A, which is a warehouse full of previously produced and packaged tupperware sets. Capitalist pays wage workers to put them into stores, interact with customers, to sell the tupperware sets at a profit. The employees must be able to sell much more in tupperware sets than they earn in wages. They are taking a raw material, adding labor (by moving them to stores, arranging them nicely and selling them at a profit), and extracting surplus value (by paying the poor guy in the housewares section $7.25/hr as he and his fellow employees sell much more than that). Replace tupperware sets with iron, and setting up the tupperware on a shelf with welding bits of iron together to make a widget. Same thing.

That makes no sense. What do you mean by 'adding labour'? The capitalist does buy the service employee's labour time, but that labour time does not do anything to raise surplus value or the value of objects, surplus value was created back when the product was made. The capitalist exploits workers to make for example mobile phones at a socially determined rate of pay. With the finished product he has the problem of selling it. He buys the labour time of service employees, which he then exploits to create profit. Profit is not the same as surplus value. For instance moving a set of Tupperware from storage to display does nothing to the object, it doesn’t create surplus labour but it will help raise profit. Because in what sense do the service employee own the products being sold, when their labour did not go into making it? If someone sells $11 000 of electrical goods in one week, do they deserve $11 000 or the people who made the product?


When people have tried to explain on this forum that the productive worker and the service worker experience the same exploitation, it come across that the former relates to structural exploitation and the later to a metaphysical exploitation. I don’t know why modern Marxists are so keen to be inclusive and lump everyone who works for a wage into one super group of ‘proletariat’.


I believe Marx conceptualised exploitation of the proletariat, through the source of surplus value created through unpaid time. The solution in Marxist terms to the exploitation through commodity production would be the socialisation of the means of production. The objective solution to the employee at the service level is to bargain for commission price on sales plus an hourly wage, or a collective ownership of the store. The only form of socialisation that could go on at the service level would be a cooperative of service employees who buy finished goods to sell, with a division of profits and collective ownership of the store. But that is still a market economy.

[Raúl Duke]

I don’t know why modern Marxists are so keen to be inclusive and lump everyone who works for a wage into one super group of ‘proletariat’.It has to do with the conditions of the economy in certain regions.

Here in Ft.Myers, I know almost nobody who has recently worked in an industrial/manufacturing workplace; I don't think those even exist in this region.

Also, than you got that in the first world, thanks to unionism, many factory workers get paid more/get more benefits than the average "service industry" worker...which makes the idea that "they're more exploited" seem farcical in the context of the US to the average person.

If the proletariat, the "revolutionary class," was just exclusive to manufacturing job wage workers rather than wage workers in general, than we leftists (who live in places where the "service" industry is the majority) might as well give up.

[Mr. Natural]

The concept of class has been a minefield for Marxism. I'll insist that it always refers to one's relation to the means of production, but beyond that, Marx researched and perceived class dialectically, and not in rigid, reductionist, stuck-in-place terms. After all, life and society are systemic processes, as the materialist dialectic recognizes.

Here is Bertell Ollman in his essay, "Marx's Use of 'Class'," taken from Ollman's Social and Sexual Revolution (1979): "Marx's only attempt to present a connected account of class appears at the end of Volume III of Capital, but unfortunately, he never completed it. From these few paragraphs, we learn that wage laborers, capitalists, and landowners constitute the three large classes of modern society. Yet, he admits that, even in England where capitalism is most developed, 'the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form'. (emphasis mine) .... He believes that developments in capitalist society are speedily reducing all such strata into the capitalist or proletarian class .... With the growing divorce between the means of production and labor, Marx sees all workers eventually becoming wage laborers." (emphasis mine)

I'll go even further and state that the entire human species now works for capitalism, and that all of our lives are humanly immiserated and that we all face imminent extinction. This seems obvious to me.

Back to Marx, Society and Economy in History (a letter commenting on Proudhon): "And is not the division of labour under the system of manufacture, which in England begins in the middle of the seventeenth century and comes to an end in the last part of the eighteenth, also totally different from the division of labour in large-scale, modern industry?"

So labor and classes change in a dialectical process. Marx, Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured, and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers."

In Marxism, the proletariat makes the revolution, but what and who is the proletariat? Capitalism, labor, and the proletariat constitute a dialectical, dynamic process. What is the modern proletariat?

Hiero, you are partially correct when you deny "the productive worker and the service worker experience the same exploitation." I would say, though, that different workers and "classes" experience the same exploitative capitalist relations differently.

You state, Hiero, that you "don't know why modern Marxists are so keen to be inclusive and lump everyone who works for a wage into one super group of 'proletarians'."

In reply, I suggest that it is capitalism that has lumped the human species into a form of "super proletarianism," and that a truly modern Marxist approach must take this into account. We need to find some open doors to human minds that are currently closed to any consideration of global capitalism's ugly realities and any thoughts of revolutionary processes.

My thesis is quite simple: The labor of the entire human species has been captured by global capitalism. The human species thus constitutes a "new proletariat" of sorts that is faced with imminent ruin and/or extinction, and modern Marxists can find ways to radically engage people and revolutionize their minds on this basis.

I believe Marx and Engels would approve this message, although they haven't been saying much lately. What do some of their living heirs think?

My red-green best.

[Hiero]

Also, than you got that in the first world, thanks to unionism, many factory workers get paid more/get more benefits than the average "service industry" worker...which makes the idea that "they're more exploited" seem farcical in the context of the US to the average person.

I don't think I said 'more explioted', I feel that service workers can be more explioted, in the sense they can often be forced to do as much work in a shift and often to due things outside their scope of duties. I am just saying I don't beleive that to be a Marxist conception of exploitation.