Keith Hart on Thu, 5 Aug 2004 17:51:28 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> The Art of Sweatshops |
It's funny how some threads run past their sell-by date, especially in summer time. I know it's old-fashioned, but we can do better than dictionaries, anecdotes and introspection. Karl Marx has a theory of sweatshops which he lays out in a long section of Capital Volume 1 on 'absolute and relative surplus value' which contains the famous chapter on machines. It's a rollicking read, but also a few hundred pages. One of his reasons for making surplus value the focal point of his analysis was to show that capitalism is really feudalism in drag. Under feudalism, surplus labour is extracted from rural workers in a naked way -- they toil for nothing on the lord's estate or they hand over a big chunk of their harvest. The system is geared to extracting rent on threat of force, without any thought to the well-being of the peasants who work long hours for a miserable and precarious livelihood. Capitalism looks to be different, since workers are paid a money wage for producing commodities that can be represented as fair exchange. But Marx aimed to show that they were handing over an unfair portion of the value of their labour, under a similar threat of coercion, just like the serfs. The point of his analysis is that 'absolute surplus value' is a primitive form of capitalist extraction, as naked in its own way as feudal rent. The capitalist squeezes as much profit as possible from the workers, by paying them less, making them work longer hours, imposing hard and dangerous work conditions on them -- without worrying much about the efficiency of their labour which is often performed on outdated equipment. Anyone can see what is going on in this 'sweatshop capitalism' and it is easy to denigrate capitalism as a whole by reference to such examples. But this was not Marx's main point. There is a more progressive route to expanded profits and that is by 'relative surplus value'. There are three ways of raising the productivity of workers -- economies of scale, division of labour and deployment of machines. Of these by far the most important is the last and Marx was the first major economist to notice this. When labour is made more efficient by substituting machines for human effort, it is possible to raise their pay, education and work conditions while still making super-profits. Indeed he believed that this was the progressive route for capitalism, since more surplus value could be squeezed out of workers this way than by the sweatshop route. Higher paid workers are often exploited more in the technical sense of the ratio of proftis to wages, even as they may feel superior to the victims of sweatshops and organize themselves to resist being undercut by competition with them. Of course the process appears to be more benevolent. But Marx looked to mobilize the high productvity workforce, not to the emiserated peasants in the sweatshops, through a revolutionary critique of capitalism. That is why he wrote to the book. This dialectic has played on and on through all the phases of modern capitalism. I doubt if China could account for 40% of world economic growth last year by sweatshop methods alone, any more than Britain could in Marx's day. The principal moral of the story for me is that a focus on sweatshop conditions elsewhere diverts attention away from the exploitation of the higher paid workers producing relative surplus value in the so-called privileged centres of capitalism. Emphasizing sweatshop conditions in poorer countries is usually a way of cranking up support for more protectionism at home. Maybe artists are not immune to this tendency. Keith Hart # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net