Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 121-131

  Laycock, Henry ^a  

^a QUEEN S UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Appearance and reality; Capitalism; Commodities; Employers and employees; Exploitation; G.A. Cohen; Labour power; Ownership; Property rights; Slavery

Indexed keywords

EID: 12844285119     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009859332595     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 72.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), p. 165.
3. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Ibid., p. 65.
4. Another symptom of unclarity on this matter is that assertions of proletarian ownership of labour power - a basic factor of production - commonly coexist with claims such as that capitalism's "propertied marketeers exert power over propertyless producers" (Ibid., p. 333, italics mine).
5. Karl Marx, Capital, Ibid., p. 70.
6. As it stands these are, of course, juridical portrayals of certain differences - and so, from a classical Marxian standpoint, hardly fundamental - but they are not so much, perhaps, the worse for that: for typically, relations of legal ownership are, it is said, "a good guide to relations of effective control." Cohen considers certain seemingly marginal cases which are said to constitute counter-examples to the standard Marxian account - cases for which, as he puts it, "relations of legal ownership are a poor guide to relations of effective control" (italics mine), p. 71. Marx would seem to disagree on this point; his opinion of the status of juridical concepts, as a guide to extra-juridical reality, is poor.
7. Marx, Capital, p. 165.
8. Cohen also writes that "subordinates have superiors, and in the case of slave, serf and proletarian these are the master, lord and capitalist..." (op. cit., p. 69, italics mine). There is some tension between this comment, and the claim that "no superior has rights" over the proletarian.
9. Marx, Capital, Volume One, p. 507.
10. "The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid. In the corvee, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working day in which the slave...works for himselfalone, appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus... unpaid labour appears as paid. There the property relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer. Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists
11. (Marx, Capital, Volume One, pp. 505-506, italics mine).
12. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Peter Laslett (ed.), Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 307.
13. It is perhaps of some importance to distinguish the question of what is paid for from the question of how it is paid, whereas Marx appears to conflate the two. The "illusion of being paid for one's labour" is tantamount to the illusory wage-form of pay by, for instance, the hour. But it seems to be consistent with the notion that the worker is paid for (the use of) her labour power, that she should be paid by the hour, for example.
14. On that account, there is no more reason to treat capitalism as sophisticated slavery than to treat slavery as primitive capitalism. Marx identifies a further (superficial?) difference in the mobility of the worker; he states: "The Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and by the fictio juris of a contract
15. (Marx, Capital, Volume One, p. 538, italics mine).
16. Karl Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Volume 20 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 164.
17. The point is reinforced by Marx's telling question: "How does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them save land in its crude state the products of labour, and on the other hand a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains?
18. (Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," p. 128, italics mine).
19. I have argued for the hopelessness of an economic "value- incorporating" concept of labour power in "Exploitation and Equality: Labour Power as a Non-Commodity," in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 15 (1988), pp. 375-389.
20. Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," p. 172.
21. Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," pp. 224-225.
22. Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," p. 188.
23. Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," p. 207.
24. "The minimum limit of the value of labour power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy" (Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," p. 169, my italics).
25. See John Roemer, "Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?" in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 260-282.
26. Marx, Capital, Volume One, p. 547.
27. G.A. Cohen, "The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation," in History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 209-238.
28. It is essential to introduce [b], since benefits to the sick or the infirm, for instance, need not be reciprocal.