Jonathan Black

IN A SERVICE ECONOMY, where most workers are readily replaceable or completely superfluous, the old idea of wage claims arbitrated through the state is an increasingly hopeless proposition. The labor theory of value still holds but wages are artificially propped up, within definite limits,1 to maintain the consumption of commodities, especially the consumption by the capitalist class of the wealth creating commodity labor-power (we need jobs and any jobs will do). [Read More]

CAPITALISM IS IN A MOVING CONTRADICTION in that it presses to reduce labor employed to a minimum and yet posits wage labor as the only way for 99 percent of people to make a living. People may recognize this as a simplified (or bastardized, if you like) version of a section of Marx’s contentious “Fragment on Machines.” At first glance, substituting “wage labor” for “labor-time” may appear to dilute the problem. [Read More]