clyde barrow, critical theories of the State

(6): Welfare State doesn't redistribute from rich to poor, but from lucky to unlucky [hmm]

(6): distribution of income from rich to poor is the work, instead, of Trade Union's, not the institutions of the Welfare State [i.e., unemployment insurance, etc.]. the premise, again, is that one has to work or be attempting to work to be eligible

(11): Lukacs wants to claim that Marxist theory refers to a method. But Marxism is rooted in certain concepts (relations of production, surplus value, exploitation, etc.) and should rise and fall with those concepts. [AMEN]

(17): Capitalist class is economic network based both on institutional position (managers, etc.) and property relations (i.e., ownership). Comprising about .5 to 1% of the population. A highly diversified working class comprises about 85% of the population.


instrumentalism, or plain Marxism

(18): for instrumentalists, this capitalist class escapes anarchy/achieves coherence through mechanisms illuminated by

1. positional analysis (interlocking directorates, etc.)
2. socialization analysis (ideology, schooling, etc.)

 (25): identifying ideological subsystem as part of the State [this is silly--and he raises the problem in a later chapter: this risks making the State an 'ideological' construct. we should agree on a minimal working condition, and then think about the ways it intervenes in society, sure. But not define it by its interventions]

(26): colonization studies

(26): a historical shift from the legislative to the executive branch, in order to facilitate cohesive, regular intervention

(28): challenge of explaining why State managers (mid-level bureaucrats) intervene in capitalist ways. Miliband's explanation is ideological [can't we have a 'rules of the game' explanation?]

(30): Special interests dominate on the most important issues

(33): challenge of explaining why instrumentalism doesn't culminate in the domination of the State by competing SI networks. Answer is because the capitalist class is also organized--it has 'policy planning networks'

(40): instrumentalists see reform as the product of (a) popular protest; (b) looking out for long-term interest

(44): for instrumentalists, social democracy is an example of how capturing the State executive can yield tangible gains

(46): Poulantzas' critique that instrumentalism focuses on 'agency' to the exclusion of structure

(47): Offe's is that it can't explain well enough why things don't collapse into anarchy

(48): [challenge, in general, is to specify the mechanisms by which class struggle matters, in the instrumentalist theory of the State. proximately, need to keep business going without interruption; ultimately, danger of threat to established order, etc.]

(49):  the challenge of falsifiability--but you can't rely on selective case studies, as Skocpol does, to 'alsify' the theory. especially when there's disagreement regarding the interpretation of those very same case studies.

structuralism, or neo-Marxism

(52): three sources of contradiction/crisis: (1) economic crisis; (2) class struggle; (3) uneven development

(58-59): Offe, Bridges, et. al. rescue structuralism from Poulantzian functionalism by noting two mechanisms

1. state's own fiscal functioning is bound up with the health of the economy
2. State's legitimacy is bound up with economy

(60): interesting--Best and Connolly note that this is particularly evident during downturns, as Democratic/progressive mayors have cowered in face of threat of capital flight

(61): as Przeworski has noted, these mechanisms imperil probability of a gradual road to socialism, because Capital responds

(62): soft vs. hard structuralism (i.e., do capitalists need associations?)

(68): table of pre-tax and post-tax income distribution, in US

(72): voluntarism doesn't equal methodological individualism

(73-75): imp, (alleged) problem w/ mechanism of capital flight [hmm, this is unconvincing--unclear data, untimely responses, and reliance on neo-classical wisdom. confuses the cashing out of the claims with its coherence as an argument.]

derivationist

(79): orienting claim is that State's role is to produce 'general conditions' conducive to capital accumulation. derived either from contradictory logic of capital accumulation, or from requirements of overseeing class struggle [well, obvious question is why? which it doesn't seem to answer, clearly]

(91): centralization of State authority typically seen as sign of greater autonomy

systems-analytic 

(100): see graphic

(100-101): Offe's version: exclusion, maintenance, dependency and legitimacy principles

(104): 'antipodal trouble', for WS--i.e., in moment of crisis, it risks either a legitimacy crisis (via austerity and rollbacks), or a economic/politcial crisis (continuing social program while keeping dominant power relations intact) [got to break through!]

(111-112): again, importance of labour market particiaption to WS model--and thus, the problem posed by rising surplus populations and unemployment

(122): not legitimacy that people give the state, but rather their acquiescence

organizational realist

(125): state managers are self-interested maximizers whose main interest is to enhance their own institutional power. thus, state-capital relation is understood as marriage of convenience, in a sense [but this is not different from good structuralist version--State managers can have a whole host of projects in mind. the relevant question concerns the constraints imposed upon them]

(128): at moments of crisis, State managers will make their independence known [but (a) why, what's the mechanism, if not struggle? (b) cf. 2008-2012]

(131): four ways to assess the strength of States [interesting for Pak]

(135): Skocpol giving serious weight to the importance of inherited expertise (i.e., this explains why US has agricultural policy but no industrial policy, post GDepression)

(139) Skocpol proving only what she assumed, in case of AALL

12/07/2011

readings today deal with a transitional juncture in American history.

titled “the crisis of liberalism”

typically this is identified with the late 60s, with (1) civil rights movement; (2) anti-war movement; (3) decline of American economic hegemony

but, Vivek is saying, the core institutions of the 'liberal order' begin to degrade earlier. the quick collapse of liberalism is hard to understand unless you also understand the earlier erosion of the institutions that underpinned it.

what the readings today reveal is that many of labour's gains had already been lost/squandered—through, for example, the nature of Taft-Hartley in1947. or, the break-up of the CIO and the expulsion of the Communists in the early 1950s devastates the labour movement, changing the very image of what the labour movement ought to have been (i.e., towards officialdom, away from rank-and-file).

by the late 1950s, labour is in fact structurally very weak. it's ability to defend itself against capital is weak.

this weakness is masked by two factors:

1. despite the defeats that sidelined efforts to institutionalize the shop-steward system, the shop-stewards haven't quite been displaced by the early- to mid- 1950s. this keeps alive some organizational capacity on the part of American workers, despite structural weakness.
2. more importantly, the period from 1945 to mid-50s, profits are heady and the going is good. workers win gains.

with the end of the 1950s, though, the economic downturn begins to win. the pillar supporting whatever little power labour had is taken away, and employers begin to launch an offensive against rank-and-file power. by the 1960s, the day-to-day negotiation that shopstewards carried out with management is being replaced by a bureaucratic grievance procedure.

workers find their power decreased, in short. grievances filed by workers start to pile up—unacknowleded and unaddressed.

as a consequence of this, the trade union leadership's legitimacy starts to erode. union leaders are doing nothing to defend workers through the grievance procedure.

the rebellion in the late 60s, which is the consequence of this, has the potential of reproducing the 30s. but it very quickly meets with defeat.

the rank-and-file rebellion was more the 'last gasp' of the compact.

- - -

11/30/2011

two issues

1. what was the political context for the emergence of American social democracy
2. what were the limitations of this framework (i.e., the New Deal)

the theoretical challenge, which is addressed to State theory, is to understand how to make sense of these policies.

the reason that this is a challenge, simply, to State theory is to make sense the content of all of these policies associated with the New Deal.

in the 1980s, a challenge was posed by Skocpol, suggesting that Marxists tended to collapse State power into class power. Marxists, she thinks, didn't give sufficient weight to goings-on in the State in their own right. She countered with 'state-centrism,' which was distinguished by it allowed for autonomy far more thoroughgoing than 'relative autonomy.' see 1983 article in Politics and Society, which launched the debate

she argued that the State was autonomous in two senses: (1) autonomous from class forces; (2) State managers have interests of their own, which are distinct and often independent from classes

the New Deal, for her, was an example of this.

there are two explanations of the New Deal.

the established position, against which Skocpol arguing, was called 'corporate liberalism'--brought about by far-sighted, enlightened capitalists in respose to the Great Depression, in order to rationalize the political economy. two ends: (1) revive the economy; (2) achieve labour peace.

the New Deal policy is explained as an expression of capitalist preferences, and the State more-or-less follows these dictates.

the neo-Marxist position, noting that big chunks of the capitalist class were opposed to the New Deal, asked why it was that unenlightened capitalists lost out to enlightened capitalists? both Ferguson and Goldfield make the claim that the core elements of the New Deal were opposed by capitalists. what drove them to accept the reforms was driven by the labour insurgency. the key trigger being the enormous costs that the labour mobilization imposes on capital.

here, in Ferguson, those elements which could best afford the costs (foreign-oriented, capital-intensive) come around to the reforms. the textile industry, the Southern plantocracy are opposed, then, by the Rockefeller bloc which breaks away and supports the reforms.

Goldfield's argument is more-or-less consistent with this. he's more interested in directly rebutting Skocpol, of course. the claim is that Skocpol overlooks the fact that it wasn't until the labour movement reached its zenith that the Roosevelt administration came around to the Wagner Act. the intensification of the labour movement, in other words, gave the administration the wherewithal to approach the capitalist class pleading for concessions, and it gave them the support of a powerful fraction of the bourgeoisie. the State found a political base within the ruling class.

the Lichtenstein reading was meant to convey some sense of the limitations of the power that labour achieved. in Chp 7, he shows that the actual powers that labour was able to wrest away from management remained quite limited—the key thing was the system of institutionalized negotiations that was put into place on a day to day level, between the UAW and management. the instrument for negotiation in the 20s and 30s centered around a very powerful shop-steward culture—the shop stewards were in a constant state of negotiation/challenge over the conditions of work. plants were run through constant negotiation between management and shop stewards.

the UAW tried to initially institutionalize this power on the part of shop stewards. rank-and-file constantly pushed shop stewards to represent their militancy. the union was always a union movement, even in day to day reproduction.

Auto industries found this intolerable. in 1940 there's an epochal stand-off between GM and the UAW. GM demands that an arbitration system replace the shop stewards system. Reuther concedes, which is remembered as an act of betrayal. one reason that he did this, of course, was to marginalize the Left within the UAW, as part of his alliance with other elements against the Communists/Socialists, who were arguing for a system of institutionalize shop-steward power.

this had the effect of de-mobilizing the rank-and-file. the shop-steward was replaced by a Committeeman. workers had to wait for days/weeks/months. over time this transformed the structure of the union—the whole point was that grievances were to be handled without disruption of production. what this did was it took the rug out from any possibility of wildcat/extra-contractual action. the union quickly became a guarantor of labour peace.

Lichtenstein emphasizes the importance of this turn. it incapacitated the unions for later decades—this was an important step towards the enfeeblement of the labour movement. obviously it wasn't exposed in the boom years, but as the crisis set in, so did the movement's rot.

- - -

shop-steward counterfactual is not just imaginary—England and Sweden had strong shop-steward movements.  

10/11/2011

botwinick, oct 11^th

new left falsely understood lack of labour organizing as failure of Marxism; in fact, it's consistent with a more clearly reconstructed version of Marxism, and an appreciation of the obstacles to organizing.

these are internal constraints on the organization of labour.

today we'll discuss external threats.

even when workers get organized, even once the overcome the constituent, internal obstacles, their ability to win concessions is constrained by the logic of accumulation—the context set by captialist competition.

the central conclusion is that its not only economic outcomes that are governed by the logic of accumulation, but also political outcomes.

this is why Marx spends thirty years on DK.

first limit: profitability—capitalism has in-built, system-wide mechanisms which repel improvement of working-class life. if wages rise, rate of investment declines, which means employment generation slows down, the reserve army of labour rises, and wages are brought down. this is the constraint of full employment. in contemporary capitalism, bringing the State in, there exist institutions that guarantee a baseline level of unemployment—the Fed's job is this, basically ('profit-squeeze' theory of crisis would fit here).

this is a limit on the system as a whole; wages as a whole, and profits as a whole.

but capital doesn't exist as homogenous units that are identical. the level of heterogeneity is important.

there are firms that are very capital-intensive, some with better techniques, etc.

workers, when they engage in bargaining, confront capitalists with different degrees of productivity and capital intensity—which will mean that they will incur different costs, when they concede to workers.

now, there are three limits

(1) 'costs of obstruction'--as soon as employees take up demands, employers have to decide whether it is worth it to heed the immediate impulse to repress their demands. where the costs of obstruction are sufficiently high, the capitalist will not say 'no,' but will relent.

workers have to impose costs sufficient to bring the employer to the table.

now, it will depend on two things

(2) do you work for the regulating capital?

reguating capitals are those plants operating with the most widely available, more-or-less widely available techniques. we're not talking about those plants with unique, and impossible to replicate techniques.

otherwise, workers are employed mainly in subdominant capitals.

the limits to wage demands are greater in subdominant capitals than in regulating capitals. an employer's ability to stay in business will depend on his ability to re-adjust to these costs. regulating capitals have a greater ability to recoup the losses that come from wage increases. either they'll raise prices, or, more likely, some will leave the sector, inducing higher prices through reduced supply.

after regulating capitals have raised wages, subdominant capitals can be organized—this is because they run the risk of going out of business, if they raise prices before regulating capitals. but if they do it after those have been successfully organized, workers have a better shot.

(3) the capital intensity of your sector

when wage costs are high as a portion of total costs, wage increases are very difficult for capital to accommodate.

in the history of the US, this theoretical framework has purchase. it's at least part of the reason that organizing in the South was less effective than organizing in the North—it's not just racism, nor is it mainly racism.

labour unions targeted the 'price-leaders' in auto, rubber, etc. there was an understanding that if we can organize these firms, the rest will follow. Weinberg, research director at UAW, said (1) success at better firms is important; (2) less efficient firms shouldn't be rewarded for being less efficient by being allowed to avoid unions—in essence, trying to replicate Sweden's efforts (though, w/o active labour market policy, you're fucked).

it's as the crisis sets in, and US industries cease to be regulating capitals on a global level, they become less accommodating to wage increases—this, at the same time that the labour movement calcifies into the bureaucratic monolith with which we're familiar. hence, concession after concession after concession is the story of the 1970s and 1980s.

- - -

difficulty is that business unionism breeds in the context of declining industries

- - -

(1) getting rid of labour-intensive jobs?

10/04/2011

today, the issue of class formation

among historians, class formation refers to the structural process by which a class emerges. this isn't our concern, today—not the emergence of social structures, but rather the formation of class political capacity. its organization as a coherent actor.

you would think that nothing is more important in Marxist theory than the question of class formation. but, as a theoretical issue, the issue has been sidelined; it's been central to political debates, without being heavily theorized.

the questions were always dealt with concretely, in context, but not cashed out in abstract terms.

the Second International is full of this kind of stuff; deserves to be mined for insights. we don't have 'data', because—unlike then—we're nowhere near power.

this issue is dealt with, theoretically, by the 'New Left'. it didn't last long, unfortunately—partly because the New Left gives up on class, but also because not many of the individuals on the New Left were embedded in organizing and struggle.

central to Offie and Wiezenthal's argument is the claim that there's a systematic link between class structure and class formation—the structure sets the constraints on actors' ability to organize around their interests. importantly, this is a story of differential constraints.

the argument is made at a very high level of abstraction. a strength of the theory, insofar as this suggests that certain barriers to organizing are intrinsic to the structure of capitalism. descending levels of abstraction, introducing race and whatnot, will not erase these basic barriers.

why do classes organize, at all?

indeed, Offie and Wiezenthal argue that only one of capitalism's two constitutive classes has to organize. capitalists do not need organization, in order to advance their interests. the very fact of capitalist reproduction ensures that capitalists keep the upper hand.

workers, however, cannot advance their interests except through organizing. if left to themselves, workers are at the mercy of capitalists.

thus, for capitalists, political organization merely amplifies an already-existing structural advantage. in effect, capitalists can devote their energies to breaking workers' organization.

it is workers that have to expend their resources on forming organizations.

thus, first, the facts about the class structure explain why some actors have to organize themselves.

the second part of the argument concerns the question of what makes workers successful. for the New Left, the failure of workers to organize was an indictment of Marxism, exhibiting the irrelevance of 'class' to social structure, etc. hence the flight from class.

the power of Offie and Wiezenthal's analysis is that it undermines this, at its root. they suggest that the 'infinite divisions' argument presupposes a world of interest groups, not of classes. this is pluralism—politics comes out of the contingent clash of interest groups.

(agency is an 'elixir' that dissolves all social structures)

Offie and Wiezenthal reject this. centrally, their argument is that the structure of capitalism doesn't just distribute interests differentially, but it also distributes capacities unevenly. the organization of workers is continually undercut by the structure of capitalism.

the inability of workers to organize is not a refutation of Marx's theory, but a confirmation.

why? what are the mechanisms?

when capitalists and workers undertake their exchange on the market, they do this as class actors.

when they organize themselves, inhibiting mechanisms appear.

the first weakness, for workers, is the uniqueness of labour-power as a commodity. capital is a fluid, malleable substance, that can be detached, split up, and also amalgamate. it's never attached to a person. workers cannot become bigger and bigger workers, individually—they can only become bigger associations of workers. this is associating (for workers), versus merging (for capital).

critically, this fact has differential consequences. when you try and form bigger and bigger associations, workers will be more effective—BUT, you have to combat the problem of its constitutive heterogeneity.

three problems emerge.

first, the problem of trade-offs—different workers will attach different valuations to different issues/demands, in a campaign. associations will have to prioritize demands. the issue of interest aggregation.

second, different workers have different bargaining positions. for some workers (the least-skilled, the poorest, etc.), collective organization is everything; for others, though, there are workers for whom individual survival strategies are practicable. [here we've descended a level of abstraction, of course].

now, the task for organizers is to convince some workers to redefine their interests.

third, for every worker who is employed by a capitalist, he cannot avoid the problem that he can't escape his employers' interest. workers depend on the employer for their livelihood. the viability of the employers firm has to be one of the constraints that the workers take on board, when aggregating their interests. this is not true for the employer.

this is the structural root of business unionism (the philosophy that says labor and capital are partners in an enterprise). it's rational, all else being equal. this is where Bob Fitch goes wrong.

fourth, all union organizing takes place in the context of managerial power. once you see reason for some employees to resist association, employers have the power to repress all organizing efforts. William Z. Foster's essays, on this score.

these are all the dilemmas that enter into the formation of organizations.

the next dilemma, Offie and Wiezenthal argue, regards organizational sustainability. unions need to be large, but largeness begins to entail trade-offs that lead to bureaucratization. unions, also, have to exert control over their membership—they have, after all, promised their employers labour peace. they have to squelch the internal life of the union. as this happens, the union is less likely to generate feelings of solidarity, and thus less likely to induce members to act. workers are more likely to become free-riders, seeking to minimize the costs they will bear in the course of collective action.

thus, if despite capitalism's continual generation of antagonisms, it remains stable, this is why: it is exceedingly difficult for workers to effectuate the strategies required to defend their interests. capitalist dominance is built into the structure of capitalism.

this is the cruel irony of capitalism—the agents that most need organization are those who are least able to effectuate it.

- - - - - -

09/28/2011

class structures generate rules of reproduction.

in capitalism, capitalists have to find and utilize labour to produce commodities that they have to sell, competitively, on the market.

workers have to find employment, and submit to the authority of capitalists for a given period of time (to some extent).

this process pits these two classes against one another, generating antagonisms.

'labor and monopoly capital' virtually started labour process theory. this was an enormously influential book.

the labour process is common to all social structures. defined as the way in which workers and means of production are put together, to produce goods. has a validity across MoP. in class societies, this can always be divided into necessary labour, and surplus labour.

but there's something distinctive about capitalism. prior to capitalism, the weight of the surplus component is limited by the necessary component; the surplus component is a residual. this is because of (1) weakly developed productive forces; (2) in all pre-capitalist societies, the guiding motif is use-values—what is produced is geared to 'needs' of producing classes [is this the best way to cash this out? shouldn't it, instead, be in terms of what producers can be forced to do? because there are always imperatives to increase surplus]

in other words, the surplus is not driven by the immediate needs of the surplus class to produce a profit—they will need military expenditure, and they will need things to consume—but neither of these imperatives place a significant weight on the direct producers. [a 'weak compulsion' argument (which is different from Brenner's arguments about feudalism, which is more of an 'incapacity to compel' argument]

in capitalism, all the emphasis is on the valorization process—the labour process is now subjugated to it.

these carries two consequences

1. now, the capitalist is not merely trying to extract surplus labour—but he's trying to extract it to the maximum level possible.
2. moreover, the capitalist wants to extract surplus at levels of efficiency that enable him to compete effectively.

in other words—capitalists try to get workers to work as long and as hard as possible in order to successfully compete.

once the capitalist takes control of the labour process and tries to extract labour at a competitive level, it generates a conflict. the drive to rationalize the labour process invariably induces a response, to resist.

this is the crucial precondition for the resort to managerial authority. managers exist for one basic reason—workers don't do what capitalists want them to do, absent being told to. workers are not fundamentally driven by the competitive logic that drives capitalists.

managers have to find ways to reduce workers' resistance to the change of the labour process and technological change—and the way they do this is by removing their control over work. one example of this, of course, is through the breaking of the monopoly of knowledge that workers have over their work (vivek arguing that breaking monopoly of knowledge is an instance of a more generic drive to seize control; otherwise unduly highlighted in the literature, instead of this more important fact of seizing control).

this is the source of 'de-skilling'. in some ways, this isn't the best term—what he means, more, is the 'breaking down' of tasks, within a workplace. as tasks are broken down, workers will require less skills, of course. BUT, this should not be mistaken as a secular tendency towards de-skilling, at the general level of the economy. Braverman's argument is cashed out at the level of the job/task, not the level of the economy.

the issue of resistance—Braverman is often accused of ignoring resistance of workers to technical change. (1) this misundertands the object of Braverman's work—he isn't predicting an inevitable outcome. he's simply trying to theorize capitalism's drive to break down the labour process. resistance introduces ineterminacy, OK; (2) moreover, empirically—the basic fact is that capitalism has won.

the goal of theory is not to make you feel better about the world. one has to understand how capitalism works; except in very exceptional circumstances, for short periods of time, capitalists win. 'if everything was contingent, we wouldn't need socialism.'

is Foucault like Braverman? first, Foucault doesn't have a theory—no explanation of where a 'disciplinary' drive comes from. for Braverman, its Capital; for Foucault, doesn't exist. second, Braverman's normative/descriptive framework has some understanding of what human flourishing is, what human interests are. this is what it means for this to be a 'degradation' of work. Foucault's entire project is driven by the denial of human interests.

in Foucault's ontology, the human agent is the consequence of power structures. whereas for Braverman, we are confronting humans, with interests, stuck in power structures.

re: racism, two distinct claims: (1) capitalism everywhere generates racism; (2) race/racism is integral to capitalism, when describing it at the highest level of abstraction.

it doesn't follow that you can abstract away from gendered/racialized identities to understand the real world. although, of course, we are staking importance in our abstract model—we think capitalism's drives exist everywhere and importantly independent of any given culture. we think it explains the world—re: race, we think it explains the terrain that generates racism (in other words, we don't give it theoretical priority—its not the 'base'), and on which we will have to fight our anti-racist struggle.

see Jane Humphries RRPE on women's oppression

abstract labour is not a different kind of labour, from concrete labour—labour is always and everywhere concrete.

09/21/2011

EO Wright's fundamental contribution is that class is not 'income', but the conditions under which people labour in order to acquire a certain income.

today, we'll see the way the class structure generates strategies for capitalists, and workers.

fundamental fact is thtat everyone has to sell in order to buy—capitalism generalizes market-dependence (preferred, by Vivek, to the idea that what defines capitalism is 'generalized commodity production. the two go together, but the former is preferable as a succint conceptualization of capitalism).

what distinguishes workers and capitalists is what they have to sell.

w-class sells labour-power

capitalists sell goods produced by labour-power. this, of course, presumes that they have bought labour-power (so they must buy labour-power in order to be able to sell commodities).

M – C – M is a description of what capitalists do, but it's at too high a level of abstraction. because this also describes what merchants do. and that's not what we're after. merchants sell goods that others have produced; but capitalists sell goods whose production they have supervised.

C – M – C is the logic in which the worker is entrapped, he/she is after use-values. his/her main concern is the reproduction of oneself.

(1) so, in order for the capitalist to begin the production process—the capitalist has to 'mobilize' labour. this is not historically trivial, at all; the existence of a large mass of wage-labourers is historically specific to capitalism required the creation of a 'doubly free' body of workers.

when capitalists 'first' incorporated workers into the production process, they were found with the skills of artisans of feudalism—an accommodation of the skill-set with which workers were found. they, first, were working at the behest of capitalists, but not at the command of capitalists.

this, of course, is the formal subsumption of labour, to be contrasted to the real subsumption of labour.

(2) the second thing that capitalists must do is exploit labour – they must produce a surplus. workers will have to work long enough to produce enough stuff, over and above costs, to be worth it for the capitalist. here, of course, we get the struggle over the length of the working-day. the struggle, for the capitalist, is to make the surplus part of the day as relatively large as possible.

there are two tactics

(a) extension of the length of the working-day—increase of surplus-value by absolute means

(b) decreasing the duration of the portion that goes into necessary labour-time, which is effected by productivity improvements in the production of the means of subsistence—increase of surplus-value by relative means. by and large, this latter fact will be an 'unintended consequence' of capitalist competition.

in general, the formal subsumption of labour is co-eval with the production of absolute surplus-value. the real subsumption of labour, on the other hand, is typically co-eval with the production of relative surplus-value.

but the pursuit of absolute surplus-value lives on, of course, in advanced capitalism.

historically, the achievement of the 8-hr working day initiated the 'shift' to the production of relative surplus-value. (1) there's a question, here, of course about collective irrationality being the result of individually rational action. (2) moreover, why isn't competition sufficient, in this stage of capitalism? it's not clear that modern manufacturing begins, really, until the 1870s. economic historians are clear that machine innovation was in quite specific parts in England till much later than is commonly understood.

why do you need to control the labour process if you're producing relative surplus-value? this is Braverman, of course—you need the power to fire workers, and you need authority to shape the labour-process.

(3) the third thing that capital has to do is reproduce the labour supply. but do capitalists, as a class, possess the rationality to do this, if they're pursuing their individual self-interest? there are a lot of radical/left theorists who have argued that sections of capital have been 'more rational' in this regard; Marx's arguments, around absolute surplus-value, suggest differently. if the latter is true, you obviously need a third actor (the State).

the reproduction of workers has to occur in a way, of course, that also reproduces their dependence on capitalists. if you were to give everyone an 'opt-out' that also reproduces them (a guaranteed living-wage), capitalists will oppose it.

here introducing general law of capitalist accumulation.

as capitalism grows, you might well get tighter labour markets. wage is bid upwards.

however, the law of accumulation also brings with it technical change (at a faster rate, when wages are high), which expels workers into the reserve army of labour. this maintains a baseline level of competition amongst workers, for jobs. all this is an unintended consequence—captialists don't necessarily design the existence of a reserve army.

one can capture the balance by thinking about the competing effects of the 'labour-shedding' effects, and the 'labour-incorporating' effects.

(4) the last step of this argument, of course, is to explain why the competitive drive amongst capitalists exists. why is it the case that capitalists have to compete against each other?

what makes capitalists attempt to maximize surplus-value, of course, is the fact that they are pitted against each other. if they don't behave ruthlessly, they go out of business. the structure of capitalism compels capitalists to innovate.

- - -

the 'historical/moral' component of the value of labour-power—there are certain needs which come to be understood as necessary.

productivity defined as stuff produced/variable capital

in that case, productivity increases as 'organic composition rises'--i.e, when technology is labour saving. that's built into the definition

capital productivity vs. labour productivity vs. land productivity?

rationality has two dimensions: formal rationality, which means that individual pursue strategies consistent to given ends; substantive rationality, which means that individuals pursue strategies consistent with their well-being.