Raise the Hammer

The first thing I would like to stress is that I never claimed ALL economic value comes from labour. I think much economic value comes from ecological processes that originate outside of human activity. That's an important point for petroleum. But it also applied for soils, forest products, clean water, etc. This is probably a more central point to me.

I like this blog for the civic focus. But I'm often turned off by the endless economic debates: does "free market" capitalism or "regulated" capitalism create more growth. Yawn... Both arrangements are adept at producing growth. Capitalism under fascist regimes produced growth. Stalin's 5-year plans produced tremendous growth, transforming Russia from agrarian to industrial virtually overnight.

The point is that all of these systems are based on social relations of hierarchy and domination. None of them have produced a free society. All of them have contributed to destruction of the biosphere.

I think ALL economistic notions of value are deeply problematic; I think value is relative to your social purpose. I merely invoke Marx's labour theory of value for the limited question of who's getting ripped off in society. I think too much ideological focus is put on taxes. Too much attention is paid to the salaries of public sector execs while the much bigger spoils of corporate execs are conveniently ignored. These two groups do the same work. Meanwhile, it's entirely possible to do away with both: any time a large-scale example worker self-management (aka, soc'ialism) has been allowed to thrive, the workers perform the same coordinating function - just fine - through democratic processes.

Ryan: I appreciate your thoughtful comment and your article. There is much to think about there. Yet I'm rather unclear on what you mean by "knowledge embedded in labour". Is "embedded knowledge" knowledge that has been created in the past? If so, let us assume that it was created through thinking, reading, experimenting, researching, tinkering, teaching, writing, etc. Are these activities not forms of work? If so, and if they contribute to profit and capital accumulation, are they not just a specific form exploited labour? I'm a little rusty on labour theory these days. But I know the marxist tradition has had a lot to say about intellectual work.

As a friend of mine in the labour movement likes to say: "workers aren't just white guys in overalls."

So I generally agree with you that intellectual and technical work creates a great deal of economic value. And I would say that white collar workers are often NOT given a fair salary for the hard work they do. (I should know.) But you seem to be suggesting that ONLY intellectual workers create surplus value. If so, I would have to disagree. The mere notion seems to carry technocratic implications, as if giving skilled workers an exclusive stake in the system would bring about social justice. This is not surprising. One of the weaknesses I find with the new urbanist and Green Party type scenes is a strong technocratic streak that hasn't been held up to enough scrutiny (at least not on this site.) Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's an easy fallacy to make in these days of the "knowledge economy," when the economy of advanced capitalist nation-states has been "de-materialized." But knowledge, as far as the property system is concerned, is essentially a form of CAPITAL. Like any form of capital, living where knowledge has accumulated to a great degree allows even working class people to have a higher standard of living. But that goes for any form of capital. It's the basic reason why a coffee farmer in Ethiopia works a lot harder than a steel worker in Hamilton, but makes less money. (Check out Immanuel Wallerstein's World Systems theory.)

You're right that knowledge and information are harder to control than more material forms of capital. (Hence the strenuous legal effort to artificially maintain entertainment products as a scarce commodity.) In that sense, the creation of non-proprietary software is potentially revolutionary. So is file sharing. That's why I'm concerned about the "net neutrality" debates.