Loss and Risk

[erudito]

In social science and humanities academe, and in much of the wider Left - even amongst those who would not describe themselves as any sort of Marxist - the base economic intuitions and presumptions are quasi-Marxian. Either because they were the only economics they have been directly exposed to or as pervasive contagion effect. The legacy of

Comments

Differentiation

[erudito]

contractual obligations and job descriptions are there in order to make the sacking of someone fair (ie, there are "objective" pre-set criteria, rather than post-hoc fire at will scenarios)
Not quite how it works, either in theory or practice. All the a laws making hard to sack folk essentially put the onus of proof on the employer. However "fair" that sounds (or can be made to sound), in practice it raises the risks of hiring folk, which have predictable effects. Particularly on small businesses. Essentially forcing a small employer to continue to employ someone they really don't want to employ is a nightmare scenario for any small businessperson.

profit under Marxism involves perceived exploitation
No, under Marxism all value comes from labour. So any surplus (one is permitted to consider costs) which does not go back to labour is exploitation. By which logic, if the company makes a loss the owner is "contributing" rather than "extracting".

The temperature analogy doesn't work, since one has to ignore the range of the term "cold" to make it work and there is no relevant transfers.

Re: Differentiation

[sacred_chao]

I'd be inclined to say there are degrees of profit involved here. The CEO of a company hiring employees at bare minimum wage while pocketing a few million a year could be reasonably described as exploiting those employees. The CEO hiring employees at a rate commensurate to market and including reasonable allowances for indexed increase in pay, sick pay, incentives for good perfomance, opportunities for advancement and so on while pocketing maybe $150,000 pa (ish...figure plucked from arse) I would not describe as exploitative. These things are seldom all or nothing and attempting to make them seem so doesn't usually result in a particularly good description of what's actually going on.

Really, I think a lot of the financial inequities we see are the result of states of wealth being divergent rather than convergent. Below a given level of wealth one tends to live hand to mouth and not have anything which can be leveraged to generate more wealth. Above a given level of wealth your assets more or less self-propagate. Now along the Marxist "all profit is exploitation" lines, you could argue that this self-propogating wealth doesn't magically appear from nowhere, it has to derive from labour *somewhere*. I do wonder if this is part of what's behind some religions' prohibition on usury. This is all completely ad hoc and I certainly don't claim to have any notions on how to redress he balance without being hopelessly crude about it.

Re: Differentiation

[erudito]

The problem with Marxism is not that it has a concept of exploitation -- the notion that people can be, and are, exploited is hardly exceptional in itself. Because folk can be and sometimes are.

The problem with Marxism is it makes the concept of exploitation mechanical and absolute. If an enterprise produces any surplus which does not go to the workers, that is "exploitation".

But labour is not the only thing that produces value, even in economic terms.

Teasing out what we mean by "exploitation" is a worthy exercise. Coercion, fraud, deliberate denial of information seem to be constituent features.

And, with overpaid CEOs, it is not the workers who are being exploited but the shareholders.

Also, Western societies are highly mobile, income wise. Particularly the US, the Western society with the most unequal incomes.