: Joe is a proletarian as he does not own any of the means of production. So, he goes to work for a capitalist who pays him $10 per hour. If he were to work without this individual's capital he would only produce goods priced at $2 per hour. Thus, Joe steals $8 for every hour he works for the capitalist. Further, he extracts this $8 by threatening to not show up for work. This is called blackmail or coercion. If Joe does not work then the capitalist might be forced to work. Joe's physical/material action (for Nikhil: this is definitely subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics) was the causal action that forced the capitalist to labor using his own means of production.Right, there are a number of errors in the above:
1:Basically it revolves around presenting teh capitalist side of the wage 'contract', and purports to show how workers blackmail employers- and indeed, this would be true, however, only if teh POWER relations were different.
i) Could the worker find a means of living in any way other than working for, or in service of A.Capitalist(tm)- without starving?
ii)Could he access the tools and means of production for working by himself, without funds, from the capitalist?
iii)Could other workers do the same job?
iv)Converely, is tehre any way otehr than through capitalist structures for teh worker to find a means of living...
The answer is no- so the worker enters the contract at a power disadvantage- she must accept the terms dictated to her.
Further, the worker does not enter the relationship as a human being, but as a tool, as an alienated labour power to be USED by the capitalist for the period of working, a labour power which creates the end product.
It is precisely through the monopoly on the means of production, and the capacity of the capitalists to withhold it form us, that they extract their surplus value.
: Do I believe the above version? Absolutely not. Implicit in the above is the assumption that value has any relation whatsoever to price. Value in an overall sense relates solely to pure metaphysical conjectures and, while academically interesting, has no basis for any sort of social science. Value is pure metaphysical speculation.
Have you never bought something for less than it was worth? Never had a bargain? SOmewhere in those phrases lurks a value...
: The real issue here is the method by which society allocates the means of production. So, let's get off this trippy metaphysical 'value' bullshit and analyze the pros and cons of different methods of such allocation. This point, really, was the whole reason Marx advocated an objective value system based upon the price brought by workers for their labor.
No, the reason he put this model forwards was to demonstrate that in fact teh workers were getting their market value 9Since many socialists thought they were being simply udnerpaid by teh capoitalists), and to instead show teh mechanism by which teh difference occurs between teh market value of our labour, and teh work we do. SOmething must explain teh utterly unequal relationship of capitalist to workers- as you show, we need their factories as much as they need us- so why isn't wealth more evenly spread?
: Any takers on giving me a reason why the means of production should be publicly owned without resorting to some ethereal metaphysical ramblings?
1:Ecology- the capitalist pursuit solely of profits makes it utterly unable to account for social/ecological factors of production.
2:Moral- sorry to be so english about this, but there is a moral case to be made for social equality- as I laid out previously.
3:Social- poverty is rampant, society is in breakdown, something is going wrong.
Three fine reasons for you.
