Theft of alien labour time is a miserable foundation
Theft of alien labour time is a miserable foundation
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In the early 1980s, I was riding home from work on a bus and looked out the window at a Toyota pickup truck alongside. I was overwhelmed by the realization that I could never in my life make such an object by hand, even if I had a well-supplied metal workshop. From that perspective, how could I hope to own such an item? I did own a Volkswagen Rabbit but somehow the pickup truck made more of an impression on me at the time.
I was experiencing a severe burnout from work in those days that manifested itself in unbearable fatigue. I would sleep for two days and feel I could go into work and make it through the day. I would have to go home by 11:00 A.M. I had a “cushy” government job that was pointless and it was all too cushioned with paychecks and benefits for me to think of throwing it away and stepping out into the void.
The epiphany of the Toyota pickup convinced me that my mental health was worth more to me than the paycheck. After a hot fudge sundae quitting celebration and a week or two at the beach, my draining fatigue began to lift. That is how I imagine the miserable foundation that the “theft” of my labour time laid down. It hardly seemed to me that what I “produced” during forty hours behind a desk had much value worth stealing. A cynic might point out that real production takes place in the private sector and government jobs are not productive. But that is just the point. There wouldn’t be bullshit jobs if there wasn’t a surplus population needing to be pacified.Forty years later, I am still living beyond my means, especially taking into account the carbon dioxide footprint that I will never be required to pay for. A miserable foundation, indeed. Many people are not interested in what Marx wrote because they can’t swallow the labour theory of value. I have news for them. Marx was not a big fan of the labour theory of value. He called it a miserable foundation.
What does the labour theory of value have to do with the price of a house in Vancouver anyway? Well, I will tell you.
Forty years ago, somebody with a decent income or a two-earner couple with average incomes could afford to buy a house in Vancouver. Today, you can only buy a house if you already own a house. There is no “ground floor” to get in on. The reason is neo-liberal labour policy. How does the government enable business to cut real wages without cutting real wages? Asset inflation. Let’s not call it asset inflation, though. Let’s call it “wealth effects” and the “ownership society.”
A terrible, no good, miserable foundation.
Sammich
but a good foundation for a much longer essay on the subject.
i will only note that i have been reading a lot about political “debate” and “economics” lately. ALL of it is self referencing fantasy. None of these people know or care about what happens to real people.
That said, I had a good job witht the state, in which I produced a good deal of value, and got paid about 75% of what a private sector worker got paid for a nominally equialent job. But after working alongside those private sector workers, I could see that I was responsible for a lot more money than they were, and I was better at the job. But after my boss retired, a new boss turned my job into a nonsense job like you described. I also quit after holding my breath long enough and saving long enough so I could barely expect to reach retirement (pension) age without having to live under a bridge.
From what I hear, things are not much different in the private sector. It may be that the jobs are bullshit, but its the kind of bullshit absolutely necessary under modern conditions of big business and big governement… which it is impossible to change.
I think there are ways to humanize conditions, but they would involve working fewer hours and earning less..perhaps allowing more unemployed to find work. At least when my job was meaningful I would not have been glad to share it with someone else. I think even the unmeaningful jobs would be hard to share with someone you were afraid would mess it up.
“Asset Inflation” sounds to me like a product of the Boskin Commission.
Coberly,
Incompetence is ubiquitous. Government has no exclusive claim on it. The sovereign state can make its own money and make its own wars, but its own stupid is a gift from God that contrasts the few producers from the abusers, users, and destroyers.
The labor theory of value made sense when labor was hard and resources seemed infinite. The capital theory of value makes cents rather than sense. The resource theory of value is existential, but without technology resources were priced according to the labor cost to exploit the resources, which seemed rational in a world where labor availability and ability restricted the rate of resource exploitation.
Ron
I think you are saying that labor has become so cheap it has no value. I don’t think that is quite what Marxists (?) mean by the labor theory of value (though I am told that Marx did’t much like the labor theory of value..I really need to get educated about all this if I am going to talk about it.)
I would suggest that we need to start valuing a people theory of value, or at least a time theory of value…any work deserves to be paid according to the time any person, however rare or un-rare his skills…takes to accomplish it. I am not sure the time theory would hold up in the end, so I hope we can learn the people theory of value. suspect that in the end we would have to allow something for the competitive theory of value…labor is worth what someone will pay for it….but not to the extent of destroying the value of persons or time.
Currently we value the most important labor the least, because important skills are more common than less important. for example, a Manchin has skills of a sort that make him “worth more” than a coal miner who has skills that are more important but more common.
Coberly,
Sure, I agree in general, but not to say that labor has no value rather more as you would put it about the coal miner. A lot of manufacturing workers in China are underpaid, which is essentially the whole point of offshoring. As is my habit then I lead with an intentionally provocative segment of this discussion to begin conversation.
Competency and productivity abilities are distributed among the full population of workers in any related set of roles along a typical bell curve where the top and bottom 5% to 10% (more or less) are outliers, with the lower outliers trimmed from the full data set by attrition per means of managerial discretion (i.e., fired, laid-off, or promoted to dead-end) and the upper bounds outliers are mostly trimmed from the full data set by career advancement. In the full data set those at the top are usually about 10 times as capable as those at the bottom of the distribution and in the trimmed data set then those at the top are usually about three times as capable as those at the remaining trimmed bottom of the distribution. Ten to one ratio of capability in any trade or professional role would be untenable to maintain adequately accorded by either assignments or compensation, but three to one happens regularly with the crest of the bell curve containing most of the total population capability being median, average, and numerous. The upper bounds of capability is where the leads, experts, and specialists contribute beyond their own individual labor and the lower bounds provide the gap fillers when better workers are on vacation and also take up the more menial busy work chores. I doubt Karl Marx ever had a real job or certainly not for long, so he probably was unaware of the obvious. I understand that Engels may have earned himself a few callouses at some time though.
However, the dilemma with real productive labor now is bots and offshoring. Neither retail nor banking is self-sustaining. My window from anthropology looks at social roles in the hunter-gatherer context. When considering society’s placement of value and cause, then I find a primitive analogue. This is to say that hunter-gatherers did not kill the stag just because they could nor just because someone paid them to kill it, but rather because their people were hungry. This is to say that the twain shall meet at demand side economics. Demand side economics is one of many things that I liked about Keynes. Ordinarily though, if I need to dig up dead bodies to make my point then I am digging deep into graves that are tens of thousands of years old. How’s that for social Darwinism? To me friend Keynes was more of a fellow traveler than an authoritative resource. Humanity and reason are each older than Keynes.
I will post link and excerpt below for a counterpart to Marx on social economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899) is a book by Thorstein Veblen about how the possession or pursuit of wealth affects human behavior.[1] More specifically, it is a treatise on economics as well as a detailed, social critique of ‘conspicuous consumption‘ as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor, which are social institutions of the feudal period (9th–15th c.) that have continued to the modern era.
Veblen asserts that the contemporary ‘lords of the manor‘, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society, Meanwhile, Veblen argues, it is the middle and working class who are usefully employed in the industrialised, productive occupations that support the whole of society.
Conducted in the late 19th century, Veblen’s socio-economic analyses of the business cycles and the consequent price politics of the U.S. economy, as well as of the emergent division of labor, by technocratic speciality—scientist, engineer, technologist, etc.—proved to be accurate sociological predictions of the economic structure of an industrial society…[2]
Cob,
Full disclosure: I have not read Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, but have had it on my list of books to read if I ever have time for years now. Its basic premise rhymes with mine, but I have abandoned any idea of writing a book myself in order to have a life with my wife while there is still time left. So, my autodidact pursuit of higher ed is effectively over now.
Homo sapiens in the form of cro magnon man were cooperative and lived in larger groups than neanderthals giving them both a survival and adaptive evolutionary advantage. IOW, the social economy is as old as mankind itself. OTOH, the political economy as we know it was an innovation of dominant individuals banning together to retain their dominance over dispersed breeding groups.
Ron
I wouldn’t worry too much about autodidactery if I were you. You seem to have done pretty well by yourself. Even I have reached the point where I don’t get much of value out of reading famous books. Which is to say they don’t tell me anything I don’t already know..or haven’t heard before, perhaps at third hand from those same books. The value of those books is to give you a place to start if you haven’t aleady found one, and to enocourage you if you have. But mostly to give you a place to start talking to other people using Familiar Names and vague ideas..but a start.
I will say in passing that the ones “on the left” at least strike me as honest, if not too familiar with the factory floor. While the ones on the “right” are so palpably dishonest you have to avert your eyes not to throw up.
Cob,
Yes sir, exactly (on famous books and such).
Ron
The navy did a study many years ago. They found that the difference in abilities for any given task was about thirty to one.
When I said labor was cheap so it had no value, i was trying to say that because business could buy labor so cheap they gave it no value. [if that is any easier to understand], than that labor, or laborers had no intrinsic value.
I have not found that management promotes the more competent…or even notices the less competent, so while I agree in general with your bell curve analysis I suspect that it has limits.
I would say that some work at least is hard, and those who can do it better or faster “deserve” to be paid more for their time. I don’t think ordinary hammerers would object to John Henry getting paid more than they did..as long as they were not paid less. Less than what? Less than who? On the other hand, I don’t think John Henry’s shaker would quite agree that he deserved to be paid less than his hammerman. A telent for holding a big stick while someone else swings a sixteen pound hammer from the hips on down past your head may be more rare than the same man’s ability to bargain for wages would lead you to suppose.
it’s not the differences in ability within a trade or occupation so much as the difference in compensation for different trades. A book i read once by an advertising executive who had escaped from some communist country complained that he had been assigned to clean out the sewer by his communist bosses. I suggested to him (got no answer) that someone else would have been assigned to clean out the sewer if not him..meaning that he was calling what happened to him an injustice which he would not call an injustice if it happend to someone else. We pay the sewer worker less because we can always find someone else desperate enough to take the job. Advertising executive takes a different set of skills, probaly a set that a communist country doesn’t place such a high value on.
I don’t mind calluses so much as I mind having my time wasted by either a job that has no value or “managers” who have no talent for management. Of course, looking back on it, when I was in a job making calluses I felt I ought to be working at mathematics or something else i wa good at. Looking back, I think I may not have been so good as I thought, and the “talent” of being a useless manager but holding the line in the chain of command might require talents I did not have.
I don’t know that chinese laboreres are paid less than they “should” be. Their rents and groceries are cheaper. But they are paid less in Yankee Dollars than American workers so it is almost a law of nature that “capital” will find a way to use them instead of Americans. [for what it’s worth, i suspect the chinese worker IS paid less than he should be, but sois the America. It seems to be one of those “iron laws” that capitalist apologists are so fond of citing. Which don’t appear among hunter-gatherers, or even small-village farmers…but that is a world we can’t go back to.
Coberly,
30:1 — Wow! My 10:1 was by IBM for software developers back in the 70’s.
Otherwise, good discussion as usual with you. Questioning one’s assumptions is necessary maintenance of good mental health.
Sure there are limits, but exceptional performers can go elsewhere to seek advancement as I did a few times, but poor performers can run out of places to go although sometimes are fortunate enough to get a free ride to a better, but less demanding job.
Otherwise, we are mostly on the same page although trash collectors and sewer workers may be getting relatively higher pay these days than when you were young. The part of the skill set that is harder to find now is the nose holding part. We can no longer just pay black men to do these things with no consideration of the working conditions. This is not to say that these workers are not still underpaid for what they do, just less so than when we were kids. Nursing home staff is also really underpaid still.
As long as casino capitalism rewards securities traders exorbitantly then everything else will suck, just in a matter of degrees more or less than we have become accustomed.
well, the modern navy is a better workplace than the british navy in 1797 or 1793 (Nore, Spithead, Bounty).
America (the idea) had something to do with that. you know, that country founded in racism we keep hearing about. (I am reasonably sure there were black sailors in 1776 that were not treated any differently than white sailors.)
but that’s another topic.
i think software developers were in a different position wage-leverage-wise than ordinary, even talented-ordinary, workers in “mature” industries.
i don’t think you and I disagree at all, just different starting places, different perspectives. other voices, other rooms.
Indeed.
30:1 vs 10:1
i sispect there was more severe preselection of the study set among software developers than among sailors.
wecould go back to the values of the hunter-subsistent farmer, but it would take political willpower to impose on a a capitalist…or socialist…mass production world.
left to itself free market capitalism (and socialism) descend into law-of-the-jungle, with a choice of top predators.
Meanwhile “workers” are too dumb to see that a dollar per week to keep social security out of the hands of the top predators is a very small price to pay.
because, if we could only bell the cat…
Yep, but I am burning daylight now.
burning daylight is a mortal sin.
Got my outside work done until Monday afternoon now. Putting on my chef’s hat for the weekend. Raisin walnut oatmeal cookies for wife after brunch today and then sugar free high fiber brownies for me tomorrow after brunch, then a four day pot of cabbage and potatoes for dinner.
Back on topic though, the book $20 per Gallon by Chris Steiner gives a peak at the future when global resource constraints begin to dominate global economics. Of course, predictions are hard, especially about the future. Still, inevitability has a way of controlling events even if we cannot precisely perceive them before they occur. The game will not end soon even though we may have only a few more hands to sit in on. Peak oil will stack the deck even if we refuse to listen to climate change.
actually it is impossible to burn daylight on the Left Coast. too wet to burn until allowed to season in southern California for two years.
just a coincidence, my daugher said something about it being hot chocolate and cookie weather, so i have been thinking about, but not doing about, making cookies since. couldn’t tell if that was what Orbison was singing about.
People do not go to China, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, etc. to avoid Direct Labor costs. The difference between such places and the US as a percentage of the Cost of Manufacturing is not that great. Indeed the cost of a 52 foot container coming out of China or the other countries would negate much of the advantage. Companies relocate or source to those countries for other cost reasons.
As my one Japanese master would point his crooked fore finger at me and say;
And you should by now know this.
Coberly, even your antagonist at another site agrees with me on this topic. And I lived it.
Not ONLY direct labor costs, but even that is lower. Many NC furniture makers produce offshore now because of the labor costs of making furniture and harvesting hardwoods are both lower and they have fewer environmental restrictions and no OSHA and they made a deal with their offshore partner that allowed them to sell to offshore markets that they previously had no access to. OTOH, Foxconn particularly benefits Apple because they have no OSHA protecting their workers.
Run
I don’t even understand you on this topic. Can you explain it in more detail?
Roy Orbison – Only The Lonely
Run
it is hard for me to believe the labor cost embedded in a 52 ft container is less than the cost of loading that container on a ship. (yes, i know i should be thinking about labor cost differential, but that’s still hard for me to believe. no doubt because i do not know anything about this…are you counting in with labor costs all the costs of meeting safety and pension and insurance and other labor-protection costs mandated by bad old government?
Ron
I dunno. I hear the moons of Jupiter may be made out of frozen methane.
i will be out for the rest of the day.
meanwhile the “America spends more on the elderly than it does on children!! !!” meme is back.
for extra points explain what is wrong with this idea. (“meme” is a better word for it than idea, actually,)
Cob,
I picked up some contradictory age demographic data from different sources that I need to resolve, but from the link at bottom then I got about 40% of the US population under 20 years old and about 30% of US population over 65%. My first guess considering the probable source of the meme alongside the source of this question about what’s wrong with this meme informs me that most likely most of what America spends on the elderly was money that the elderly had spent when young and working on their future elderly selves; IOW, Social Security and Medicare. Of course that is just a SWAG.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/
Ron
you’ve got the important part of it right. but the idiocy of the whole thing, and maybe i didn’t give you enough information, is that they say the old have more wealth than the young (and that’s terrible) not allowing for the fact that the old have had a lifetime to build up wealth, much of which was in order to have a house to keep their kids in. and second, that kids are mostly taken care of by their parents, while the old poor have mostly run out of parents and may depend on Social Security, which they paid for, or other government spending…which they paid for indirectly by paying ordinary taxes (not SS) for their wole lives while building the infrastructure that enablles the young (not children) to make more money than they (the old) did when they were young… so now the young (not children) have the money to take care of their own children. and i don’t know if (i think they do not) they are counting the property taxes that pay for schools..whic is “government” paying for the young at a much higher rate than my regular taxes (federal) taxes pay for the old.
in other words it is a complete lie…a damned lie complete with statistics, and apparently “the left” is now buying it.
add or seubtract (detract) at your pleasure.
my out for the day turned out shorter. was looking at some real estate this greedy granny could buy for his overburdened young with my huge wealth because the young are not able to aquire wealth in the new ownership society.
funny how that worked out.
i am too old to be a boomer, but not so old that i will be dead before the boomer parents have left their children the “greatest generational wealth transfer in history.”
why is it so much easier to tell a lie than to tell the truth?
Coberly,
Two Things Are Infinite: the Universe and Human Stupidity
Albert Einstein? Frederick S. Perls? Anonymous? A Great Astronomer?
Dear Quote Investigator: I saw a comic strip titled “Baby Einstein” that contained three quotations that are usually attributed to Einstein. Are these quotes accurate? I am particularly interested in the second quotation:
Did Einstein really say that?…
*
[The bottom burner on my wall oven went out a few weeks ago. I have an electrician coming in on Monday to estimate the work to swap the old wall oven with a new wall oven sitting in a crate in my living room. A better more permanent fix will be to replace my current range top which sits atop a cabinet with an ordinary stove that has a full size oven, but that requires demolition, new tile and backsplash, and wiring an outlet. The only wall oven that fits in the corner cabinet’s void is tiny (2.8 cubic feet). I will have to split a turkey breast in half to cook it for Thanksgiving in the new oven which is still better than cooking it under the broiler element. Recall that wife’s work office is our kitchen corner nook. It was tricky enough just cooking oatmeal cookies under the broiler, but the second pan full turned out great while the first was more soft and chewy than I would like. Standard wall oven sizes have changed a lot since my house was built in 1959, but then so has a lot of much more important stuff.
In any case, Hanlon’s razor is the adage that you should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. Even where forethought and intent of malice do exist, the perpetrators are often ignorant of the consequences or too cowardly or ignorant to consider better choices. It is also easier to believe that there are that many stupid people instead of imagining a colossal right wing conspiracy and way easier than imagining a colossal left wing conspiracy. Will Rogers said that he was not a member of any organized political party and the Democratic Party has not gotten any more organized since his time.
Well I have to warm up leftover shepherd’s pie soon after I feed the feral cats and shower. Life goes on. I have been out of solutions for fixing the political economy since Obama’s first term. As we have now seen since then, things are not likely to get better, but they can certainly get a whole lot worse. ]
BTW Coberly,
Have a great rest of the day. My wife is working on a production implementation today since 9AM and her office is in my kitchen, so I can’t get my cookies this way even though they are her cookies.
Ron
Einstein did not say that. I did. It is completely out of character for Einstein’s (public) statements. Though I am not sure it isn’t true about the writer linked to this who thinks we have proved the Universe is not infinite.
Now, on a more sensitice subject. I learned, perhaps subconsciouly from someone I thought (subconsciously) was wise. To avoid complexity, and to be very leery of new products.. in his case, the latest engine for international harvester truks. He was a physics teacher, not a very good one, who did not like me… called me a “philopher” meaning impractical, and not, at first, wary enough to see the traps he set in test questions.
That said, and I guess you already know this and know why it won’t work in your situation: new elements for old stoves are cheap. you can probably fix the old stove yourself… if it is not cemented into the wall with the last cask of Amontillado. All the rest of that stuff you paid for when you bought, built, the most modern house you could afford… way more than i could… might as well be yanked out, platered over, and replaced with the oldest, most reliable, cheapest to fix, technology you can find.
Build your wife a new office with the money you save. Unless you like her company in the kitchen… which I would if I had a wife who liked mine.*
*I am pleased to be able to say that my stupidity is infinite, but not about everything every time. And the conspiracy against Social Security IS a conspiracy…one that arises out of a kind of stupidity caused by evil (and not, I think, the other way around). But it is carried, as intended, by people who are not very evil themselves and not in on the conspiracy, but are stupid, Maybe not infinitely so, but badly so about things that their job does not depend on, Politicians and Pundits don’t know a damn thing about SS, They know how to win elections in the first case, and how to turn a cute phrase in the second, or at least repeat one they heard the other day. again and again.
need to say i don’t count my typos against my stupidity quota. brain is aging badly, but not=stupid can overcome brain lapses up to a point. I hope i know when i have passed that point. and there is someone else to carry on the fight. If I was really not-stupid, I would win the fight and no one would have to worry about carrying it on. ran into another article today (in Politico) that out supided the one i ran into in AlterNet. guy thinks old people are the cause of all evil.
Coberly,
If others were as practical as us then we would not be having this talk. The only fit between our cabinet shelves for a new wall oven years ago was a Bosch. At least the one that came with the house was as old as hell already when it had to be replaced. When the service guy came in to diagnose and fix our much younger Bosch oven then he looked up the replacement element and it was discontinued. Later I contacted Bosch myself to verify the service guy and he was correct. So, I ordered yet another smaller Bosch wall oven. You might say it is built in obsolescence for built in ovens. That conversation with my wife about where her home office would be is an argument that I lost over a decade ago and it still stings.
yes, I think I know how that can happen.
all this talk about cookies made me unable to think. but after looking at the cookie recipies and my kitchen I decided the only thing to do was to go out and buy a cookie. That seems to have worked.