wat0n wrote:Indeed, I wasn't referring to AirBnB (which is just an intermediary and advertiser, very much like posting an ad in a newspaper was back in the day) - I was referring to the property owner in this case.
I guess its a question of whether the payment AirBnB takes is equivalent to paying for advertising. My impression was they skimmed off the top where as an advertiser doesn't get a cut out of your services but is paid for specified services.
However, very much unlike a mere advertiser, Airbnb regulates how people work and thus can discipline the workforce.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdfAlthough workers are told that they are independent, they are often held to a series of behavior and responsiveness requirements that are set by the companies. For instance, Uber drivers are expected to maintain at least a 4.6 rating (out of 5 starts) and to accept at least 80% of ride requests; failure to do so can result in deactivation (Hullinger, 2015). Airbnb host must respond within 24 hours or their account will be temporarily deactivated. For those sites where the client gets to pick from various services providers - such as Airbnb and Taskrabbit - complex algorithms determine who is shown, when they are shown and what is shown. And companies can and do make changes at will, often leaving workers scrambling to keep up. These sudden changes to platform design, service offerings and algorithms leave workers feeling less like independent small business owners and more like beleaguered employees of a capricious boss.
And the gloss for marketing purposes is that its a sharing economy rather than just a different business model in which the major benefactor is Airbnb which has made billions.
https://www.uu.nl/sites/default/files/iwse_2015.28_microentrepreneur_or_precariat_workshop_abstract_ravenelle_march_2015_0.pdf. Airbnb, worth a comparatively paltry $13 billion, is the second most valuable private company in Silicon Valley (Lorenzetti, 2014).
Where clearly a lot of those who work under Airbnb in the precarious form of contract workers is exactly that they are quite easy to let go as easily as they're picked up which is part of the appeal of contract labor over and above long term labor.
Yet even with this explosive growth and investment, these companies are not creating full-time jobs with benefits, but short-term, gig employment where, in the words of one CEO, "you can hire 10,000 people for 10 to 15 minutes. When they're done, those 10,000 people just melt away" (Associated Press, 2013).
The sharing/gig economy is one which is precarious, puts greater onus on the worker in taking the risk, providing services and so on while someone steps in and skims off the top.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htmThe rise of the self-employed “gig” worker, in this respect, mirrors the rise of the zero-hour contract. It is a return to the “time wages” and “piece wages” that Marx describes in Capital. As the New York Times comments in the same article as above:
“Piecemeal labor is hardly a new phenomenon. But as expedited by technology and packaged as apps, it has taken on a shinier veneer under new rubrics: the sharing economy, the peer economy, the collaborative economy, the gig economy.”
High unemployment, competition for jobs, and the downward pressure on wages have served to intensify the race to the bottom for workers, creating even more precarious terms and conditions. A new term has even been coined to describe those suffering under the emergence of such extremely precarious employment: “The Precariat”. As the NYT goes on to explain:
“If these marketplaces are gaining traction with workers, labour economists say, it is because many people who can’t find stable employment feel compelled to take on ad hoc tasks. In July, 9.7 million Americans were unemployed, and an additional 7.5 million were working part-time jobs because they could not find full-time work, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics…”
“With piecemeal gigs easier to obtain than long-term employment, a new class of labourer, dependent on precarious work and wages, is emerging. In place of the ‘proletariat,’ Guy Standing, a labour economist, calls them the ‘precariat’…”
“…The companies essentially channel one-off tasks to the fastest taker or lowest bidder, he says, pitting workers against one another in a kind of labour elimination match.”
Whilst the benefits of the on-demand economy for consumers have been lauded, it is the benefits for the capitalists that are far clearer to see. No need for businesses to provide sick pay and holiday pay, or to contribute towards national insurance and pensions. Indeed, this tendency towards classifying workers as “self-employed” has already been seen in Britain, where the number of self-employed workers has been on the rise since the onset of the 2008 crisis, and unions have fought against “bogus” self-employment by companies in the construction industry, who are trying to cut labour costs by outsourcing and employing “self-employed” workers through agencies.
Basically they're polishing a turd, oh it's so free, when it is clearly part of an undermining of the position of workers, fragmenting them further.
I also think it's interesting to see how there is a conflict over AirBnB's public relations campaigns in how they present themselves primarily as people who are sharing a private room of their homes and those who assert that it is infact simply a way for property owners to bypass regulation and laws in doing short term rentals of their other properties.
Which to me communicates that even if we think of the average worker selling a room for short term use, this is simply the encroaching commodification into one's personal life, the logic of capital becoming more pervasive. WHen I speculate the situation of such a worker, assuming they're not lying to a land lord and at least have a mortgage, the money functions as another means to pay for subsistence such as the mortgage on the home, assuming they have a property that is even that desirable. Which speaks to my intuition of the working class as in a structural relation of maintaining up payments on their needs to survive such as paying off the property regularly so as not to default and be made homeless.
And I see the characterizations of this 'sharing' or gig economy is precisely that it reflects the instability of labor, and has been dubbed the precariat, people who cannot find suitable long term paying work.
And as such, there is still a distinct difference between the working making a few bucks as they labor to maintain the room like a hotel with cleaning, amenities, wifi and so on, unlike that of those who own multiple properties and hire services and eventually may cut out airbnb as the middle man who are petty bourgeois proper.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdfIn contrast to the entrepreneurial ethos, workers generally do not view their app-driven work as entrepreneurship, but simply as a tool to make money. When asked if they viewed themselves as entreprenuers, many participants workers laughed and responded with an overwhelming "no":
No. No. (laughs) .... I fell like an entrepreneur would be if I inveted this idea, but it's really just like I am doing this because somebody else created the infrastructure that makes it possible to do this (Ramona, 28 Airbnb host).
I don't really. (laughs) 'cause I don't feel like I'm doing anything. I'm not really going out and trying to promote myself as a Taskrabbit. I'm just, you know, putting in the hours that I'm free (Christina, 30 Taskrabbit).
No, not at all. I would need to come up with something original or at least like, if I was doing this on my own and getting my own customers, maybe (Francesco, 29, Kitchensurfing chef).
Perhaps because Airbnb is less time consuming than Taskrabbit - most hosts mentioned spending less than a handful of weekly hours on their hosting efforts - many more Airbnb hosts had side business than Taskrabbit workers. However, even though they often considered their side of work to be entrepreneurial, they often did not consider their Airbnb work to qualify as entrepreneurialism or small business management. THis is perhaps best illustrated by James, who works for a social media start-up, and rents his apartment on Airbnb. He does not view his Airbnb work as entrepreneurialism, but he descries himself as an "ebay junkie" who is constantly seeking the adage of "buy low, sell high." His description of his ebay efforts clearly demonstrates that he has an entreprenerial mindset, it is just not applied to Airbnb...
This contrasts with those who actually own multiple properties and hire others to do the cleaning and so on, as they aspire to have a passive income, they basically are petty-bourgeoisie unlike the 'hustlers' i.e. workers who are little different than anyone else who simply provides a direct service, except with the mediation of Airbnb, someone takes a slice and sets certain rules while avoiding a lot of the costs of start up and risks. Airbnb loses nothing if something terrible happens to a person's home and rarely helps a lot of people in spite of their asserted protections unless it hurts their public relations.
In the case of the chefs, I have already shared the example of the tailor and so on where they directly sell a service in the form of their labor, they aren't receiving a wage but receive compensation for the work done, like the tailor going around working people's cloth.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdfThere were two major exceptions to the non entrepreneur mindset among participants: successful Airbnb hosts with multiple listenings they have turned into de facto hotels, and Kitchensurfing chefs who had food-related side business such as serving as a freelance personal chef. For the chefs in particular, the service platforms were often used as an introduction to prospective clients. Workers then market themselves to clients directly by demonstrating their skills and distributing personal contact information, cutting out the platform as "middleman"
...
... Successful Airbnb hosts who had multiple units or who felt that they treated their listings as a company - often by hiring others, incorporating as a business or otherwise professionalising their work - also described themselves as entrepreneurs. Of the 23 hosts interviewed, two used Airbnb to maintain second apartments where they didn't live, and three others maintained multiple apartments. One individual, Yosef,27, who was publicly active in the Airbnb campaign, attended a highly prestigious and expensive hotel and hospitality college in New York. With plans to one day become a professional hotelier, he was not letting his age or lack of degree deter him in the meantime. With assistance from his family, he rented two three-bedroom apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that he listed for 30-night stints as qausi-hotels, with up to two people per bedroom. He also manages 10 listenings owned by associates and rents the spare bedroom of his two-bedroom rent-stabilized West Village apartment.
When asked if he views himself as an entrepreneur, Yosef is quick to detail his exploits, including time spent selling spare video games as a child. He describes Airbnb as his biggest entrepreneurial effort in part because of the financial risks involved, but also admits that the platform made it easy:
I don't feel I did much because the platform was already there. But taking on a lease... paying a deposit, monthly rent, furnishing an apartment, - so putting down almost eight or 10 grand, assuming the risk of a yearly lease...
In addition to running his Airbnb listings, Yosef incorporated his venture, registering it as a limited liability company in 2014 and launching a company website. He even organizes events for his guests, such as a party on the rooftop of his home in the West Village.
I own a hotel. I'm a hotelier. I just have a room here and an apartment there, but I currently have 25 guests in this city staying in my places. They all have my phone number. Anything happens, I'm in charge of them. That's the exact same thing as in a hotel.... Until I have that chain of hotels, I just have a chain of different apartments over this island.
Likewise, Josh, 32, had a self-described Airbnb "syndicate" involving eight separate apartment listings when I interviewed him in may 2015. The eight listings were split between three profiles in order to avoid drawing attention from the authorities or from Airbnb. Originally a small-timer user who rented out his apartment when faced with an overlap between leases, he is now firmly established in Airbnb and hopes to one day write a book advising others on how to be successful hosts. He explains, "This has become a business. I have lots of places, I have cleaning people I have to pay. I have - you know - responsibilities. If I stopped paying attention to it, it would collapse, right?" For Josh his entrepreneurialism was so successful that he hired his fiancee's undocumented immigrant mother to manage the listings, turning it into a family business and pure investment. In his words:"We want to do a little manual labor as possible and turn it into passive income."
Josh was not the only host who talked about outsourcing. When self-described entrepreneurs in the sharing economy workers become successful, they begin to resemble mainstream firms. Ryan, 27, maintains multiple AIrbnb listings with a business partner, as his company has grown, he has started hiring assistants to manage the day-to-day business. Unlike most workers in the sharing economy, he gives his employees full benefits, including health insurance.
However, rather than embrace these individuals as role models for the rest of the Airbnb community - after all, these are th workers who have taken Airbnb's entrepreneurial messaging to hearts - these are the New York City hosts that Airbnb tries to ignore or disclaim. Although New York is one of the largest Airbnb markets, with more than 25,000 active hosts (Airbnb in the City, 2014), since 2010 it has been illegal in New York State to rent out entire apartments in multi-unit dwellings for less than 30 days. A Scatching report in October 2014 from the New York Attorney General found that 72% of Airbnb listings for entire units from January 2010 through June 2014 ran afoul of this and other codes (Airbnb in the City, 2014). Although AIrbnb has taken the stance that it is helping hosts to keep their homes in teh face of escalating rents, the report found that large scale operates dominated the service: only 6% of the hosts made 36% of the revenue earning in New York ($168 Million), and these corporate users offers anywhere from three to 272 listings (Streitfeld, 2014). Even though Airbnb's host marketing emphasizes users' ability to make money, AIrbnb does not hold these users up as role models but has described them as "bad actors" and stressed the need for "sensible rules that stop bad actors and protector regular people who simply want to share the home in which they live" (Streitfeld, 2014).
The above are clearly different from those who rent out only a room and are doing all the leg work as they own multiple properties and employ people or hire people to maintain those properties. They are small business owners and one could perhaps imagine pitching the path to being a successful small business, i.e. the American dream, but small business is always limited by any pushback by dominant capitalists who establish monopolies and so on and simply outcompete them when it comes to competing in the same market.
The later part being that those who actually succeed in Airbnb are basically petty-bourgeoisie property owners and part of their success is that just like Uber, they're basically unregulated and undercut the costs of the old industries that are already regulated. These are people who have the financial means to actually use money as investment and not in subsistence terms like paying off the house or what ever, hence the ideal of one fo the interviewees seeking a 'passive' income.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-regulatory-obligations/Property owners do benefit from Airbnb’s capacity to lower the transaction costs of operating short-term rentals, but the beneficiaries are disproportionately white and high-wealth households. Wealth from property ownership is skewed, with higher-wealth and white households holding a disproportionate share of housing wealth overall—and an even more disproportionate share of housing wealth from nonprimary residences because they are much more likely to own nonprimary residential property (such as multi-unit Airbnb rentals).
You usually need to ask your landlord if subletting is allowed... Landlords often don't like it because they want to be in control on who lives in the property.
The issue in the case of New York is that it not only undercuts the hotel industry and undermines zoning laws and so on, is that it impacts the housing market as people are making money off multiple properties for tourists and stuff, people don't actually live in the houses. So it undermines what could be actual homes and thus diminishes the available property for as such, which in New York is already expensive as shit which is why those people who own such desirable locations can make a decent buck compared to those who can't afford to even own such a property to live in for themselves.
So overall, I'm not seeing the breakdown of class distinctions and in fact the romantic view of Airbnb marketing of we're helping people to keep their homes, providing jobs when it reflects the encroachment of commodifying one's own living space to get by because of the precarious of work for many, this just further emphasizes a cynicism around the 'alternative' of the sharing or gig economy. It's simply part of the seemingly decentralization of work but actually it simply decentralizes workers themselves while Airbnb or Uber still calls the shots and assumes less liability than a traditional business. And the best one can hope for is to become a small business owner which is a distinct enough class position rather than a simultaneous one of being a worker and small business owner. The intuition being about the role such money serves, where clearly the earliest quotes exemplify workers who work to meet their personal needs and costs, they are labouring, to try and make some extra money to get by. They aren't expanding value in the way the capitalist does or even the small business owner who employs a few people.
So after all this I have to say I am worried that you're not actually looking that close enough perhaps and are trying to emphasize ownership in a way that distorts the structural relations of class which can be see as an ideological front in undermining class consciousness. Because that gloss quickly wears off if one is bullshitting themselves they're small time business owner but it's just them cleaning and so on a private room for some extra cash.
Why would it make such a significant difference? Wouldn't a petite bourgeois still be bourgeois despite busting his ass running his business?
Petty bourgeoisie are not bourgeois though, so I find this confusing.
But I raised the point because I wanted to appeal to not a definition but an intuition you might have that if workers work to reproduce their subsistence (not physical but all modern needs they may have), even if they save a bit extra, how would you put this on par with a capitalist? Who employs others en masse?
A capitalist may in some sense work hard, also, but what is the structural relation of themselves to the company and how it functions. A small business owner does a lot of work but they also unlike the person who directly sells their labor, manage other people. Basically, the definition of class isn't whether you work hard or not and as such isn't necessarily the essential part in exemplifying the structural social relations of class.
Why wouldn't acquiring skills through training or getting degrees be a form of capital accumulation in this view, if this is being done to achieve earnings? You can actually approach the decision of whether to get a degree (e.g. a masters) from a financial point of view, and I'm guessing plenty of people do (I did at least, it wasn't the only criterion but it was a major factor in the decision).
It still seems like you're equating enhancing the cost of your labor-power in the form of wages with that of capital under the pretense of investment to expand its value.
But there seems to be no real examination of the cyclical process in which money exists as capital and expands in value based on surplus labor thus producing a greater sum of money in direct comparison with simply being able to earn higher wage.
I just don't think it's making a very precise comparison but a very superficial one in order to equate them. To find similarities in a vague sense can be a poor manner of abstracting and flattening things out so as to be equated but completely ignored their distinctions.
Not quite, in this case I'm trying to stick to something closer to how Marxians see class rather than simply a bunch of income strata. My point is that the same person can both be a worker and behave like a capitalist depending on the context, owing to how the labor markets have changed in the last few decades. After all, no one stops you from driving an Uber after work or renting a room of your house (or a second dwelling) to have some extra income. Likewise, making your career decisions is more sophisticated than it was in the 19th century and it is also easier and more common to switch employers than it used to be in the mid 20th century.
Class distinctions are just not as strong as they used to be.
Except here you seem to equate earning income with like profit as the added value compared to what one invested.
Indeed it is much more common to switch careers and the chaos of the labor market is itself presented as a kind of freedom. To view oneself in such an abstract and individualized way that there is no real relation to broader dynamics.
https://www.lacan.com/freedom.htmWe are here at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology: the freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the "psychological" subject endowed which propensities s/he strives to realize. And this especially holds today, in the era of what sociologists like Ulrich Beck call "risk society," 3 when the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change jobs every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay? Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern or "second modernity" ideologist will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom, of the "escape from freedom," of the immature sticking to old stable forms... Even better, when this is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies, then it's as if I were to automatically interpret all these changes as the results of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by the market forces.
The other view of things being:
It is different because contract laborers have more freedom to decide how they work than wage workers do.
Do they? What specific freedom does it entail? Is this not following the above example of freedom merely as choice, freedom in the formal sense. Maybe there is choice in some clients depending on how in demand one is. But it seems a lot like the idea that in a workers coop the increased decision making from workers on the direction of the company while a positive attribute, doesn't negate it being capitalist production simply because capital isn't personified by a capitalist.
It seems to me that contract labor in fact reflects instability, insecurity, and puts all sorts of increased risk not he worker as he can be denied benefits and tossed at a notice. It has been my impression that
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-quietly-fired-hundreds-of-contract-workers-im-one-of-them/For 13 months, I worked full-time as a contract copywriter on a social impact initiative at Airbnb—and before that, for four months on a marketing project for the company. My office life resembled that of any full-time employee: I snacked on charcuterie boards and fresh ahi poke bowls, rejiggered my calendar to accommodate conflicting meetings, and cheered for employees on their work anniversaries (a peculiar Silicon Valley ritual that celebrates equity accruing).
Unlike full-time employees, contract workers aren’t entitled to Airbnb’s premium health care, generous 401(k), unlimited paid vacation time, transportation coverage, and stock options. I was employed by the temp agency Pro Unlimited, but my only contact with the agency was to file time sheets and to inquire about accrued sick-day hours.
On April 21, over a sterile one-way video call, a representative from Pro Unlimited read from what appeared to be a script to inform me and hundreds of others that our contracts would be cut short, effective the following week. In a blog post, Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky claimed that the company would “optimize for 1:1 communication” regarding layoffs, a curious promise given that the ratio for communicating with contractors was more like 1:500. For a company that prides itself on cultivating human connection, Airbnb’s approach to laying off 534 contractors with its partner agency was remarkably callous. (In May, 300 additional contractors were laid off; employed by agencies like California-based catering company Bon Appétit, they filled food, facilities, and security roles.)
Two weeks later, the company laid off 1,900 employees. They received at least 14 weeks severance pay, four months of mental health support, and health insurance coverage for one year for US employees, in addition to receiving equity. Forbes lauded Chesky for giving “a master class in empathy and compassion,” and Business Insider praised the company’s approach to layoffs as “uniquely generous.” This glowing coverage failed to reckon with the full picture of layoffs, which includes an invisible workforce of contractors locked out from accessing those benefits.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch20.htmIf the hour’s wage is fixed so that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s or a week’s wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the hour-wage, or the unit-measure of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio
daily value of labour-power
working-day of a given number of hours’
it, of course, loses all meaning as soon as the working-day ceases to contain a definite number of hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid labour is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the labour a certain quantity of surplus-labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the moment, make the most enormous overwork alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can, under the pretense of paying “the normal price of labour,” abnormally lengthen the working-day without any corresponding compensation to the labourer. Hence the perfectly rational revolt in 1860 of the London labourers, employed in the building trades, against the attempt of the capitalists to impose on them this sort of wage by the hour. The legal limitation of the working-day puts an end to such mischief, although not, of course, to the diminution of employment caused by the competition of machinery, by changes in the quality of the labourers employed, and by crises partial or general.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htmContract labour is a form of wage labour in which the worker is treated by the employer as an independent proprietor “providing a service”.
This form of wage labour, however, denies the worker any continuity or security of employment because every contract, be it for a day or a month, is a distinct contract of sale. Since the pretence is that the labourer is an equal economic agent, the worker is usually responsible for their own social-security payments, and must put aside money to pay tax and for their own retirement etc. It may very well be the case that the worker “hires” some fellow workers and lifts themselves up to the position of a kind of leading-hand or overseer, and indeed there may be a continuous scale from the most oppressed day-labourer up to a small-scale capitalist providing day-labour and earning a good living, not unlike the Triads who supply day labour for the Japanese corporations (see Toyotism). Small service-providers, consultants, self-employed “change managers”, etc. who are hired on contract are not generally referred to as “contract labour”, since in their case they are genuinely petit-bourgeois engaged in the sale of private labour.
Not only does contract labour, like casualisation, serve to force the price of labour power down to a minimum and maximise the insecurity of life for the worker, but contract labour is used to undermine the class-consciousness of the workers and intensify competition between workers, as the pretence is actually sustained that the contract worker is not a proletarian at all, but a proprietor.
The term ‘contracting out’, a form of commodification, also referred to as ‘out-sourcing’, first entered the English language in the 1890s in relation to the manufacturing industry. While contracting-out constitutes a further extension of the division of labour, it also invariably involves a reduction in the quality of work and a further alienation (or distancing) of the worker from his or her labour.
And when thinking what such freedom is entailed in this kind of work I immediately think of how lbierals conceive of freedom as freedom of choice where as I am not so attached strictly to having a multitude of choices, as they can all be shit, limited even whilst seemingly infinite but all opposed to a more radical choice of not wanting the very conditions of that choice.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htmThis is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice WITHIN the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates.
It's a bit like talking about the freedom to choose employers, but never to really question the very nature of the system which makes one dependent on an employer.
[URL]https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/notes-on-karl-marxs-wage-labor-and-capital-decdc49b566b/url]
Sure, the workers can quit his job whenever he wants, but this is merely an abstract freedom. Yes, the worker can quit his job and find another one. But can he really choose to quit wage labor itself or the “whole class of buyers” (20)? If he quits wage slavery altogether, then he faces the perils of unemployment (hunger, poverty, low social status, etc.). True freedom would entail not having to sell one’s labor power to any capitalist and still be fine. So while the wage slave is not owned by any capitalist in particular he is, in fact, effectively owned by the capitalist class.
Indeed, technological change is a necessary condition but I would also not say it's sufficient for such a change to take place. And yet... It's precisely technology what often introduces the disruption necessary to shake the system and make the leap to one that is more efficient.
As for how Marx saw the production of services, thanks for pointing that out. It's just that most examples mentioned in these discussions apply to the production of physical goods for the most part, and most of the terms used by Marx also lend themselves to think mostly in terms of physical production.
Indeed, you might find some sympathy in Marx here where he considers the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production as a kind of driving force in human history.
https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/production.pdfThe manner in which the development of the forces and relations of production occurs, and the effects of this development, have been the subject of one of the main controversies in Marxist thought. The most straightforward interpretation of the celebrated passage from the Preface is this: within a mode of production there is a correspondence both between forces and relations, and as a result of this, between the relations of production and legal, ideological and other social relations (the second correspondence being one between BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE). The correspondence appears to be one where the forces of production are primary, the relations of production are determined by the forces, and they themselves determine the superstructure. These respective positions of the three elements in the chain of causation acquire significance from their implications for historical development. Thus, the development of the forces of production leads to a contradiction between them and the relations of production (which 'turn into their fetters'), and the intensification of this contradiction leads to the breakdown of the existing mode of production and its superstructure. One problem with this interpretation of the central historical role of forces and relations of production turns on the central question. Is it valid to conceive of the forces of production as the prime movers?
The above being a kind of mechanical structuralist interpretation but the idea isn't wrong, just limited in it's lack of agency for a social subject which enacts the changes, engages in the struggles in so on, as it is people who make history.
Yeah, I'm taking a broader meaning of the term here. If you stick to the definition of "profit" a business would use, then you'd of course be right (except for some particular cases such as some state-owned enterprises).
Well this is kind of a point as to why the state owning things isn't necessarily an advancement except to the ideal extent that the government is answerable to it's people more directly than a company perhaps.
But the same relations may still prevailed as things are nationalized.
I just think profit used as an equivalent to wage loses all specificity and is a colloquial usage which muddies the waters on what are distinctions in the economy where there are specific relations which underpin the distinction of money as profit and money as wages which are in part tied to one's class position.
Where even if you don't want to focus on more industrial examples because the industrialized world has largely shifted it's massive industries offshore for cheap labor for greater profit, the general position of workers is that of having to work to reproduce their own means of existence. They have to regularly consume food, pay for rent, maintenance of appliances, the car and so on, all sorts of needs for the modern person which if they lose they job, they can readily lose.
Where the opposing intuition is that for the capitalists, they can make money all without actually doing something that very day. Jeff Bezos was still making millions even if he went on vacation, and it wasn't like he was at risk of losing his subsistence should he continue to do so. Shit he can clearly retire with the wealth he has, similarly for a lot of other even smaller capitalists who aren't billionaires.
So in a nutshell you don't really disagree with my example? I'm asking because one problem with organizing production under a commune would indeed be that more productive members may be getting (or believe they are getting) less than what they are contributing to it. More generally, it would seem that there would be an incentive not to work "too hard" if living in a commune because there will be a point in which you will not benefit from it.
I agree with the sentiment that if someone is slacking that it can create a demoralizing effect, in the same way that it occurs in the workplace when someone on your team isn't pulling their weight it creates more work for everyone else.
However, I imagine such a diffisuion of responsibility and having to implement means in which to put the boot up someones ass has to exist no matter what kind of production.
But I can't go to deep because I don't really give too much thought to communes as they're a kind of prefirguative politics that I don't really care for but I won't bore you with further details as to why.
I see, although not aiming to fully compensate workers kind of undermines the criticism that the capitalist mode of production fails to... Fully compensate workers.
Well I'm not sure how much that Marx's criticism is directly aimed at the point of paying workers in full.
Again, this is a Ricardian Socialist notion, Marx is a more encompassing criticism of the entire basis of commodity production and exchange as alienating, culminating in capitalism. That is it was Ricardian Socialists who had not yet the concept of labor power and considered that labour simply wasn't being paid it's equivalent, thus demanding better wages.
Can see Engels mock such an attitude:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm#:~:text=A%20fair%20day's%20wages%2C%20under,and%20to%20propagate%20his%20race.Marx would actually say that by the standards of the political economy, that there is no contradiction in the equivalent exchange principle, as workers are simply paid the equivalent to their labour-power, which is justice under the current economic system. Marx of course is critical of exploitation but not under the notion that workers should simply be compensated in full.
My impression of Marx is that the socialization of production, that is, workers coming together rather than as independent workers subsisting, requires the socialization of it's ownership such as to undermine the basis of workers exploitation by depriving them of their means of subsistence. However, not as a return to individual workers subsisting, but at a new kind based on the socialization of labor.
However, in the initial stage of socialism/communism, it does seem that Marx proposes that there be some kind of compensation of labor in an equivalent form.
But I can retort with my discussion across the thread in which I don't have much of a grasp on the kinds of proposals that seek to achieve as much. Only a few resources of those who claim some outlines.
I agree both are not literally the same thing, but they do share some essential traits (in particular, both include foregoing present consumption to be able to earn more in the future by becoming more productive - that is, the profit motive is relevant to both). One difference is that the capitalist is actually investing in a physical object, which of course has its own consequences (it can be resold, it can be expropriated, etc) and unless production is fully automated it also requires hiring labor to generate a profit (although it should be noted that for human capital, you would need to be hired, work under contract or start your own business to generate a profit too).
Still, I think the similarities are at least as relevant as the difference between them. Both for theoretical and practical reasons.
I do not readily buy into the abistnence approach, as it seems to equate the capitalist to that of the worker who works for subsistence but capitalists are in no such position.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/Time-preference theory, usually associated with Bohm-Bawerk, attempts to work dig its way out of this hole by explaining profit not through the physical/technical aspects of production but through the differences in subjective time preference between those who want things now (workers desire wages) and those who are willing to wait (capitalists who wait for their profit).
But here too we can’t really understand a period of production time without recourse to the very social features that time-preference theory wants to abstract away. A production period is dependent on the rate of profit and of wage rates, both social phenomena that can’t be reduced to time preferences. Clarke argues that concepts like ‘marginal productivity of capital’ and the ’roundaboutness of production’ have no meaning abstracted away from the social relations of capitalism since the aim of capitalist production is to produce value, not physical quantities. We can’t measure productivity or roundaboutness in non-value terms because without value we have no standard of unit that all of these diverse inputs and outputs can be reduced to. Also, what reason do we have for being so sure that time preference is always positive and not negative? Sometimes, in conditions of uncertainty for instance, we prefer to delay gratification. This absolute assertion that we prefer present goods over past goods seems an indefensible assertion. Even further, capitalist investment strategies have nothing to do with delaying gratification or measuring investments against consumption. Capitalists constantly invest in production in pursuit of profit for profit’s sake, compelled on by competition not their subjective preferences.
To emphasize the bottom point:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/12641/33292_1.pdf?sequence=1Most governments that I have spoken to have no understanding of private capitalism. Now I have heard people say that you should feel privileged to be committed to invest in Australia. Really! The whole world is our oyster so what is so special about here? New Zealand is the same! Their attitude is we are permitting you to invest. So what! The whole world is on offer to us so what is so good about you? They think that they are the pearls in the oyster of the world. Australians in Canberra are remote from the real world. They don’t understand why you invest. It isn’t something that they have ever been involved in and they say, ‘We have improved the conditions — so now you do your bit’. What do they mean — my turn? We don’t have turns; we put our money out when we think that it’s good for us. That’s all we do. We don’t look for any other reason — it’s not a turn. Not when …Keating or Howard or other politicians say we have made all the conditions right, now it’s up to you to go and do it, unless we can see the market we are not going to invest.14
So I'm not sure how well the delayed gratification fits with the capitalist as their wealth isn't the same as the worker who deprives themselves of pleasures in order to save that bit more.
Which is in fact one of the alienating features for Marx, that money comes to posses the power, the authority to allow one lives needs and pleasures as if it were inherent to currency itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htmMarx recognized that the science of capitalistic economy, despite its worldly and pleasure-seeking appearance, "is a truly moral science, the most moral of all sciences. Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house [ Br., pub], and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt -- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theatre. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power; and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you, can purchase everything; it is the true opulence. But although it can do all this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subservient to it. When one owns the master, one also owns the servant, and one has no need of the master's servant. Thus all passions and activities must be submerged in avarice. The worker must have just what is necessary for him to want to live, and he must want to live only in order to have this." [51]
One can indeed create the miser out of such a fixation on money as the representation of wealth in general, not living now under the pretense of living tomorrow.
That one can find similarities doesn't mean they are essential features of those things.
I can find two objects of the same color, but this holds not relevance for the concept of a thing. As was found with the classic issue of claiming a universal that all swans are white and discovering empirically that there exist black swans in Australia. This being because their color is inessential to the concept of being a swan. When considering what is essential, it must capture that which makes it impossible for it to exist in reality if it were without that feature, that it would simply not be that qualtiiatively distinct thing which makes it what it is.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra5a.htmThe proposition ‘All swans are white’ does not present any difficulties for comprehension from the point of view of logic precisely because it does not express the necessity of the connection between the two definitions. The proposition ‘All objects of nature are extensive’ is quite a different matter. A swan may just as well be non-white, whereas the proposition ‘All objects of nature are extensive’ implements a necessary synthesis of two definitions. Unextended objects of nature are non-existent – and contrariwise, there can be no extension that would not be an attribute of an object of nature.
In other words, a theoretical proposition is a linking of abstractions each of which expresses a definiteness without which the thing ceases to be what it is, it ceases to exist as a given thing.
swan may be painted any colour other than white – it will not cease to be a swan. But extension cannot be taken away from an object of nature without destroying that object itself. A theoretical proposition must therefore contain only those abstractions which express the forms of existence of the given object necessarily inherent in it.
TO make another example of how one can find similarities, and flatten out things in order to equate them...
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htmThe fundamental feature of these approchements and similitudes lies in their completely ignoring the material foundation of the various currents, that is, their class nature and by that token their objective historical role. Instead they evaluate and classify different currents according to some external and secondary manifestation, most often according to their relation to one or another abstract principle which for the given classifier has a special professional value. Thus to the Roman pope Freemasons and Darwinists, Marxists and anarchists are twins because all of them sacrilegiously deny the immaculate conception. To Hitler, liberalism and Marxism are twins because they ignore “blood and honor”. To a democrat, fascism and Bolshevism are twins because they do not bow before universal suffrage. And so forth.
Undoubtedly the currents grouped above have certain common features. But the gist of the matter lies in the fact that the evolution of mankind exhausts itself neither by universal suffrage, not by “blood and honor,” nor by the dogma of the immaculate conception.
I emphasize the class basis as I think while you try to consider the worker not in terms of their money, but how they work and relate to a means of working, you seem to think that the class distinction collapses in the role money serves a distinctive role based on one's class position.
Such that the worker who spends money on something may vaguely be thought to investing in something in order to have a return considered profit. But I do not readily see the same relations that make them belong to the same class or simultaneously to both classes and thus destroying the very concept of class and thus implying a classless society.
Thanks for the response. So what you are saying, basically, is that while Marx makes the distinction between use and exchange values, in reality neither corresponds to the broader notion of "value" and that use values aren't all that important in practice. Am I correct?
Yeah, Marx can sometimes be confusing in his use of the term value, and he seems to see it as a concept which entails the unity of opposites of use and exchange value within the commodity.
Use-value is still important because the reason a commodity sells would be it's use in the majority of cases, that I wish to pay for something because I want to use/consume it being a motivating factor and it's particular use is of prime importance for me as the buyer. But there is the sense that exchange-value is clearly distinct from use-value and this is the issue where there can be a conflation and jumping from these aspects in production and commodities themselves.
But yes, neither in themselves represent "value", but they do in some sense seem to underpin it. Value is seen as a metaphysical and unreal, but it is for Marx something very real but is suprasenous, represented through the relations and activity of people in often tangible means.
Think like how a written word has its physical form which you're reading now, but the concept which it evokes is distinct, it isn't physically the word, it is something in the mind.
However, there are things which are suprasenous, that is that can't be found upon examining the tangible and physical properties of a thing but seem to coincide with that object. Typically these are simply stated to be subjective, but there are suprasenous things which are independent any individual consciousness because they're (philosophically defined) material, they're objective.
Value is this kind of objective thing.
But I don't really have much of a concept of it having not studied Marx enough to get a sense of his concept.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics