Questions
1. What processes are entailed by/within "the cost of reproduction"? (p. 206)
2. The universal accessibility of new means of production (p. 213): is this "universality" partial in the context of copyright laws?
3. What is included in "greater division of labor"? (pp. 212-213). What does it entail? What is its relationship to machinery/technology?
4. What does Marx mean by "totality"? (p. 207)
5. How are the laboring class and capitalist class defined?
6. Compared to "Estranged Labor," in which Marx offers an argument about alienation, on what basis is Marx arguing here? Immiseration?
Marx seems to anticipate Arendt's work/labor distinction on pp. 204-205: "But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life ..."
What does Marx mean by labor-time? Labor time is the expression of labor's exchange value, but the reality is the labor power.
Reproduction is unpaid. The worker must buy food to reproduce "him"self but, he is not necessarily the one cooking.
The value of labor-power is the socially average cost of subsistence/reproduction it takes to (re)produce a worker.
Why is this work italicized so much.
Is "totality" an ontological or methodological claim? Mode of production = means of production + relations of production. The latter changes based on transformations in the former.
Are the "laws" of capitalism mechanistic? sociological? economic?
Why does Marx's explanans here shift from his earlier works? How does this better illuminate the explanandums of immiseration.
Laboring class = those who sell their labor-power in return for wages. Capital as accumulated labor? Capital as the means to exchange for labor power?
Capital is determined in the process of production. The brute fact of having a steam engine, for example, does not make it capital until employed as such.
