[ox-en] Re: Raoul Victor * Money and Peer Production

Commerce and injustice  
[printer version: http://raoulv.perso.neuf.fr/100208_Commerce_InJustice.rtf]

Hi Diego , hi all,

On January 24^th , 2010, Diego Saravia Wrote.
"Excelent article, but I do not agree with central aspects of it."

Raoul: Thanks ;-). But, it is true that we disagree on central issues.

Diego: "Societies grow, so not all human actions are equal value 
exchange, in fact if all exchanges are of equal value (no commercial 
injustice) (if value could be defined without doubts), there are other 
acts that are not exchange."

Raoul: I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean. Your 
telegraphic style is some times too... telegraphic. But you deal with an 
important question: is it possible to have "no commercial injustice"?

The problem is that the main source of "injustice" is commerce, trade 
itself. For two fundamental reasons: the first is general and concerns 
any symmetric exchange; the second is more specific to capitalism.

1 - At a general level, as soon as you are in a logic of exchange (I 
give you the "equivalent" of what you give to me), the relation is 
biased. By definition, if you are a good "exchanger", your logic in the 
transaction has to be: "I give you as little as I can, and I try to get 
from you as much as I can". If not, you are a bad exchanger, a sorry 
trader. That is why Aristotle, more than two thousands years ago, 
condemned already "exchange" as being "a mode by which men gain from one 
another".

The idea that money, the instrument of exchange, corrupts human 
relations is as old as money itself.

One may imagine traders trying to exchange with a "fair" spirit: "I give 
you as much as I can, I take from you as little as I can". They will be 
quickly ruined... by other traders.

It is not the nastiness of traders which makes exchange a source of 
"injustice", it is the logic of trade which make traders inevitably 
nasty and grasping.


2 - With capitalism (and this is one of its most specific 
characteristics) market relations extend to the whole economic social 
life and more crucially to the relation between the owner of the means 
of production and the worker. Before capitalism, market relations 
remained secondary, some times marginal in the economic life of 
societies. The ancient slave was fed by his owner as a draft animal, the 
serf could keep for him a share of the harvest. In capitalism the worker 
gets from his employer the price/value of his labor force, the wage. His 
labor force has been transformed into a commodity which is "exchanged", 
treated as any other good in a market. The quantity, the share of the 
production which returns to the worker (when he has the chance to have a 
job) is measured by the price of that commodity in the "labor market". 
In capitalism, the main object of exchange is labor force.

Capitalists have many ways to put that price down, mainly making the 
offer of labor-force greater than demand. Since the 80s, for example, 
western economic managers calculate the NAIRU, "an acronym for 
Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, and refers to a level 
of unemployment below which inflation rises." (Wikipedia in English) In 
fact, below which *wages* rise. Governments entertain not only a level 
on unemployment which feds the new needs of labor-force due to the 
growth of production, but also, in addition, a level of unemployment 
which creates a relation of force in the market permanently 
disadvantageous to the workers.

But even when the labor-force is paid at its value it remains an 
exploitation, an injustice. Injustice comes from the market itself, from 
the fact that a human being cannot eat if he does not find an exploiter 
disposable to buy his labor-force, from the fact that what he will be 
paid depends not of the value he creates but on the price of his labor 
force.
What is the price of a marginal farmer's or a farm-worker's labor-force 
in some places of Latin America or Africa? In regions of the world where 
unemployment is endemic and massive, where the education standards are 
extremely low, the market price of human effort is close to 
physiological minimum. That is the logic, the "justice", of the market.

Initiatives like "Fair trade", may try to push a little up the value on 
human effort, of course within the limits of profitability, when they 
are not a sheer advertising argument to transform the generosity of 
(feeling gilt) consumers in Northern countries into greater profits for 
corporations. But the result can only be the equivalent of alms at the 
gate of a church. Some may say: alms are better than nothing, but alms 
have never been a solution to injustice.

Raoul

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