By the way, how is transfer value calculated? When creating material wealth, does it necessarily involve transferring value?
The transfer of value is due to the dual nature of labor, which also transfers past materialized labor to new commodities when creating new value. If the original object of labor has no value, then it cannot be transferred, but this situation generally does not occur, because even if the object of labor is a natural object (without value), the production tools are all human-made and have value.
Actually, I want to ask why washing dishes doesn’t transfer the value of water to the plate, or condense the active labor into the plate.
Is washing a dirty plate clean not productive labor, while purifying dirty water is productive labor? The former’s use value of the plate doesn’t change, but the latter’s use value of the water changes?
Water changes from useless sewage into useful purified water, of course, this has some practical value, just a humble opinion.
The more you wash the plate, the more expensive it gets, right? In reality, this doesn’t hold at all.
How should the labor of washing dishes be explained
Washing dishes is not productive labor; nothing new is produced in the process, and dirty dishes can still hold food.
Water has no value; value is only generated when water is transported to a plate. The process of washing a dirty plate transfers the value of transporting water to the act of washing the plate, so labor is actually condensed in the plate. The use value of water changes because the labor of washing the plate uses the value of transporting water. Pure water is replaced by new labor to compensate for this value, so while the value of the water appears to change when viewed statically, in reality, both the value of the plate and the water remain unchanged.
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Does that mean all mental labor does not generate value, and mental labor is about enhancing the rate of physical labor? Or is it about planning for physical workers? For example, engineers drawing plans for construction. Do doctors, as mental workers, count as generating value? Does the service industry generate value?
The service industry is a sector that helps industrial capitalists realize surplus value, for example, commercial capitalists sell goods to transfer the surplus value to industrial capitalists to obtain profits and compensate commercial workers.
It should be distinguished by whether it is productive labor or not; any labor involves both physical and mental effort.
In primitive society, when there was no differentiation between brain and body, specialized mental workers had not yet emerged, but mental labor for planning indeed benefits the production process. This was also mentioned in the previous Fenghuo post.
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Medical work, like educational work, does not count as productive labor.
Value, in essence, is a form of social relation; it symbolizes society’s recognition of the private ownership of labor products. Only material products that are actually recognized have claims to ownership, so only the labor that creates material wealth is productive labor that creates value. Therefore, in this sense, the service industry, including doctors, only uses existing material products; they do not create anything new, so their labor does not create value. However, because their labor is also necessary for society, others will also give a certain reward when enjoying the services provided by service workers. In this way, service labor plays a role in transferring value from the productive sector.
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The categories of mental labor and physical labor are relative; in reality, there is no such thing as absolute physical labor, nor absolute mental labor. Physical labor, such as moving bricks, also requires thinking; mental labor, such as clerical work in an office, also involves using hands to type. Therefore, these two categories only indicate that there is a type of labor mainly physical and another mainly mental. If it’s like drawing blueprints, then although it consumes physical effort, it is primarily about thinking.
Based on these points, we can say that the role of mental labor is only to assist physical labor in performing better. For example, an engineer drawing blueprints to direct workers to build a house is like a military officer devising strategies to command soldiers in battle. A good officer can help soldiers fight better but cannot replace them in fighting. As mentioned above, since only labor that creates material wealth is productive labor, mental labor naturally does not create value.
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So the idea that mental labor is a form of planning physical labor should be correct, haha. Physical labor without thinking is definitely wrong, just like when I go chopping wood I need to consider what kind of tree I’m cutting, or when foraging for wild vegetables I need to identify which ones are edible, catching crabs also requires strategy, haha.
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Are these two both service-oriented jobs? Doctors and teachers have a high social status here and are very respected.
In primitive society, before the division of labor between brain and body appeared, mental and physical labor were not separated. Early humans did not need a “commander” to “direct” their hunting; they could discuss together how to hunt. They did not need an “engineer” to direct them in making fire; each person researched how to make fire and discussed this technique together. Only after the emergence of class society and the division of labor between brain and body, with differences in brain and body, did a significant distinction between mental and physical labor appear. When communism is achieved, such differences will also disappear, not because the society’s productivity remains as backward as in primitive times and only involves simple labor without division of brain and body, but because by then, people’s intelligence and physical strength will have greatly developed, and everyone will be capable of engaging in social production together. They can work actively without needing others to step in. For example, there would no longer be a division between agronomists and farmers, because the agricultural workers themselves would understand how to improve agricultural techniques. The reason why only physical labor creates value is simply because, under the current division of labor between brain and body, some people rely on the material wealth created by others to sustain themselves, and thus their labor results are owned by others, and they must pay a certain reward to obtain it. Without this division of brain and body, private ownership would disappear, and labor would no longer create value.
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Indeed, both are service-oriented jobs, but both professions are relatively complex. Teachers actually have two sides: on one hand, the education they provide can indeed be considered mental labor, but on the other hand, education as an important means for the bourgeoisie to instill bourgeois ideas into all social classes also means that teachers responsible for education play the role of accomplices of the bourgeoisie, maintaining the bourgeois dictatorship. Moreover, many teachers in China today are part of the middle-class system, bought off by the bourgeoisie, with extremely reactionary thoughts and decayed morals. Many of them have long formed a large aristocratic class, and can hardly be called workers anymore. As for doctors, although they also provide service labor, their thoughts are heavily influenced by bourgeois ideology, often unable to escape the pursuit of fame and profit, and do not truly see healing and serving the people as their medical goals. Today’s hospitals are almost full of corrupt and unscrupulous doctors, such as those involved in the Putian system, Xiangya Hospital Liu Xiangfeng, and other atrocities harming the people. There are frequent reports of doctors prescribing high-priced drugs for kickbacks, and patients being persuaded to spend large sums on completely useless “comprehensive” examinations, being exploited financially. Immoral doctors abuse their positions during surgeries and examinations to spread nude photos of female patients, and many surgeons demand red envelopes before surgery; if not, they refuse to perform the operation. It can only be said that this doctor class is also largely composed of worker aristocrats bought off by the bourgeoisie. Therefore, if these two professions are highly regarded in your country, it is only because many of them are worker aristocrats. If they are sought after, it can mostly be attributed to many petty-bourgeoisie envying these “high-paying” positions that allow them to indulge in bourgeois food, earn high incomes, and exploit others—desperate to get into teaching or medicine to live a life of less work, more money, and exploitation.
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Now it seems that programmers, as mental labor workers, do not actually create value; their income is not wages but surplus value obtained with knowledge as capital.
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If we draw the line like this, it feels like we’re excessively dividing the frontlines. Programmers, as a high-paid class that does not own the means of production, rely on labor skills to sell a good price to the bourgeoisie and share a portion of the surplus value from productive labor. Can this really be simply and crudely labeled as workers’ wages or even bourgeoisie? With that logic, all high-paid non-productive labor workers could be considered either workers or bourgeoisie. Moreover, programmers’ high salaries have already become a thing of the past, right? It’s only in periods of relatively free competition that salaries are very high, and that price is the cost paid by various capitalists to achieve monopoly. The later high salaries of programmers largely depend on long hours and heavy workload.
I don’t quite understand where the high-income segment within this working class comes from.