Week 2 Flashcards
Labor-power
A commodity, exchange value of labor-power, i.e. the wage, it its price. We can only speak of labor-power when the worker uses the human capacity. The ability to work.
Labor
The essential life-activity but in capitalism it’s sold off merely to sustain existence in an alienated way, it’s no longer the laborer’s.
How is the value of commodities determined?
By fluctuations according to supply and demand around a base value determined by the embodied labor value. If people start losing systematically due to oversupply, people will drop out of the industry which leads to a decrease of supply, and if undersupplied people fill that gap, making revolve around this base value.
How is the value of labor power determined?
By the amount it takes to reproduce that labor, so food and housing but also education for the next generation. Surplus value extracted by exploiting discrepancy between the amount it takes to reproduce labor and the amount of labor embodied within the eventual commodity.
What is capital?
Capital is a system of commodity production; Capital is accumulated labor that serves as a means to new production. Thus all capital is a sum of commodities of exchange value, but not vice versa. It only becomes capital when it is constantly multiplying its value through the addition of labor power.
What is the product of labor?
The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification.
What are the 4 types of alienation?
- Alienation from the process of labor: The act of working is not self-directed but dictated by external forces, making it unfulfilling.
- Alienation from the product of labor: The worker does not own or control what they produce at the end of the production process.
- Alienation from others: Alienation turns social relations into competitive, exploitative interactions rather than cooperative ones.
- Alienation from oneself - “species-being”: Labor suppresses human potential and creativity, leads to identity crises and (now) climate crises.
What is meant by “species-being”?
A universal and therefore free being.
What are wages?
Wages are not a direct share of the goods the worker produces but rather the price paid for the worker’s labor power, and it is fixed (by a contract/agreement). Wages are the monetary equivalent of the cost of maintaining and reproducing the worker’s labor-power.
What is the minimum of wages?
Minimum of wages represents the threshold below which workers cannot maintain their capacity to work or reproduce themselves as laborers.
Exploitation
The crux of the capitalist economy considered as a social relation, is to get the worker to produce more than the value of their labor power. The value of labor power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.
What is the general formula of social organization?
Dominant and dominated.
What is domination under capitalism?
Under capitalism, domination is based on the relation to the ownership and control over means of production. Not an income group, and not a professional group.
Class conflict
Class conflict is not due to the inequality of incomes. It is a struggle to control the distribution of capital and its valorization (the creation of value; Verwertung).
What is economy and what is its purpose?
Economy is a social relation and its purpose is to obscure two related processes:
1. the separation between the “political” and “economic” that is unique to capitalism;
2. the actual process of domination and expropriation that happens beyond the sphere of “equal” exchange.
Reproductive labor
