On the Economic Identification of Social Classes by Guglielmo Carchedi;

Author:Guglielmo Carchedi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

See M. Godelier, ‘Rationality and Irrationality in Economics’, London, 1972, p. 75. Godelier’s book provides also an excellent demonstration of the limited, or better, non-scientific usefulness of these theories and disciplines.

The fact that he provides both concrete and abstract labour in the sense just mentioned must not be confused with the fact that, e.g., the machine he buys is both a use value and exchange value; he does not provide concrete labour by buying a use value an abstract labour by buying an exchange value as we will see.

This seems to be implied also in the following quotation: ‘no business will be founded on the principle that it can sell its products with greater difficulty than another. If this resulted from the smaller size of the market, then not a larger — as presupposed — but a smaller capital would be employed there than in the business with a larger market’. ‘Grundrisse’, p. 521.

The implications of this analysis for a truly radical sociology of labour are important. Let me hint at only one example. When Marx was writing The Communist Manifesto, it was quite clear who was a labourer and who was a non-labourer. The former was a wage earner, while the latter was not. Nowadays, with the extension of the wage payment also to those who perform the function of capital (e.g. the managers, the new middle class inasmuch as it performs the function of capital) , there is no immediate identification between being a wage earner and being a labourer, a worker. Nowadays, the labourer is every agent who performs the function of the collective worker, while the non-labourer is every agent who performs the global function of capital. Having provided an exact definition of the two types of functions (definition worked out on the basis of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist production process) , it is now possible to prove scientifically that the manager, even though he expends human activity, does not work. The capitalist of individual capitalism and the manager of monopoly capitalism, irrespective of under what form they get their payment, have this feature in common: they both do not work because they both do not take part in the labour process. Thus the concept of work must be distinguished from that of activity. Under capitalism, the concept of work coincides only with the performance of a definite function, the function of labour, either of the individual or of the collective labourer.

Something which has nothing to do with the ‘multiplicity of criteria of definitions’, a favourite bourgeois criticism of the Marxist standpoint, as T. Dos Santos correctly points out, in his The Concept of Social Classes, ‘Science and Society’, Summer 1970, pp. 166-93.

This formulation can be confusing. If we consider only the functional element of the production relations, then the non-labourer (the agent performing the global function of capital) cannot be oppressed. However, as shown in the Introduction, an agent, whenever performing the global function of capital while not owning the means of production, is both oppressed and oppressor (or exploiter).

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