ALB
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Subheading to an editorial in today’s Times (of London, that is):
“Democrats seeking the presidency must do better than promise a workers’ paradise”
Is that what they’ve been doing.
You will be pleased to know that the relic of the crown of thorns god’s alleged son wore at his crucifixion was saved.
I wonder what god’s representative on Earth has done wrong to provoke his master to devastate the so-called “Notre Dame” (more accurately “Leur Dame” as its their not our lady) building in Paris? It’s a pity it wasn’t the one in Montmartre build to celebrate the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune.
The saga continues:
This time Jehu has changed tack — what workers are paid is not wages let alone the value of their labour-power, apparently because it’s no longer possible to calculate how many troy ounces of gold what they are paid is the equivalent of.
I’ve also come across a new word “to gaslight” which seems to be all the vogue in America as a criticism of Trump’s behaviour. It seems a bit of nasty accusation. Anybody know exactly what it means?
Here is Corbyn recycling VincentM’s favourite quote from him:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-47916058
I like the quip from the other guy about May being the first prime minister in history to fall on their sword and then miss it. I wonder how long it took him to think that one up.
You are right. When introducing the concept of labour-power and its value in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital Marx explains that, unlike other commodities, the value of labour-power contains “a historical and moral element” that varies from country to country and depends “to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country”. However, “at any given period” this is fixed. What this suggests is that the value of labour-power can change over a longer period, either up or down. In other words, as you point out, the value of labour can change through this historical and moral element coming to be reduced.
Marx is also fairly explicit about what paying workers less than the value of their labour-power over a long period would mean:
The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable. If the price of labour-power fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state. But the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time requisite to turn it out so as to be of normal quality.
It also means that reducing wages below the value of labour power is not likely to increase profits in the long run, as is being suggested, but rather to reduce them as a sub-normal quality of labour-power won’t be able to produce as much surplus value as labour-power of normal quality would.
Revealing tweet yesterday on the EU Brexit summit:
Too bad that the European Union is being so tough on the United Kingdom and Brexit. The E.U. is likewise a brutal trading partner with the United States, which will change. Sometimes in life you have to let people breathe before it all comes back to bite you!
Maybe this should have been posted on the Trade War thread but maybe it also provides a clue as to where the dark money to finance the media campaign for No Deal might be coming from, e.g. capitalist interests who want to weaken the EU by detaching the UK from it and drawing it into the US orbit instead.
Not quite sure, though, what the cryptic comment in Trump’s last sense means.
So Assange was right all along as to what might happen if he didn’t seek political asylum somewhere out of the US government’s reach.
I can’t understand how it would be possible for workers to be paid less than the value of their labour-power for a period of some ninety years. Wages are supposed to cover the cost of maintaining a worker’s skill and health, i.e to reproduce their working skills, and the cost of doing this is the value (in the Marxian sense) of their skills. So, if they are paid less than this they can’t reproduce their labour-power properlt and their working skills and health will deteriorate, which would be detrimental to the capitalist class by reducing their productivity. The capitalists would be weakening, if not killing, the golden goose. The whole idea is preposterous and hasn’t been the case because it couldn’t have been.
More likely, yes, but still not definite. May’s plan seems to be to reach a deal in the next few weeks and certainly before 22 May and then cancel the elections.
The countdown to the elections has already begun, with the Notice of Poll being published on Monday and nominations closing on Thursday 25 April and voting on 23 May (in fact postal voting even before that). So all parties, including us, will have to get their lists in by then. But what happens if the elections are cancelled half way through? Presumably all the parties will get their deposits back, but what about the money spent on leaflets?
Neither the Tories nor Labour want to take part in these elections, especially not the Tories who know they are going to be decimated. Perhaps this will be an incentive for them to come to some agreement on the UK capitalist class’s trading arrangements and jointly push a deal through. Then there’d be no Euroelections..
On the other hand, a delay till the end of October also allows time for a general election and/or a referendum, an incentive for those MPs who favour one or the other an incentive to prevent an early deal.
I said it was going to become a saga:
He makes some odd claims here. First, that workers have been paid less than the value of their labour power since the 1930s and, second, that the labour-time content of most commodities has not been falling. Hardy dealt with this last point in this article from 1957:
ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1957/risingprices.htm
For those would might be interested, here is Jehu’s reply in what is promising to be a saga:
