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value of this collective consumption(i.e. value of wages in money) is lower than the
value of the collective social production, or the commodity values at a certain
standard of production. In other words, the dispossession through wage contract is a
basis for the dispossession of the workers in the form of surplus value production.
Curiously however wage is an already validated part of the social value of labour-
power; it more often than not stirs up an immediate demand in monetary terms on the
commodity market of the time. As such workers collectively sell their labour-power
but their wages are not under the fardel of further validation. One of the
contradictions of the wage relation thus is not that wage is mundanely a substantial
cost of production for a supposedly value-productive capital, but that surplus value is
the not-yet-validated fragment of the social value of labour-power.
Wage contract is basically about the ‘formal submission’ of labour to capital(i.e.
‘forced solidarity’ on the part of the worker in waged-work and hence labour market)
and not about its ‘real submission’. However, the latter is equally a part of the wage
relation in regulationist analysis. Real submission resorts not to the increases in
unpaid part of the working day through changes in the wage rate and terms(and
extent) of employability but to appropriation of surplus value via an appropriation of
collective techniques of production within the labour process. Although socialisation
of productive techniques would increase productivity in all societies, under capitalist
mode of production, this plans for a ‘socialisation-appropriation’ of such techniques
which decorticates collective labour so that there is on the one side the bare industrial
proletrian and on the other the whole conceptual stratum of work in the form of
mechanisation.
The Parisian analysis of the wage relation does not tritely or tautologically espouse
that social labour would be truly wage labour under some wage system. It more
precisely touches upon the fact that under the said wage system and the labour process
over which capitalist have the utmost puissance, the production of commodities is
strictly that of the production of abstract value. Wage relation in fact structures the
terms of that capitalist puissance so long as it structures the very commodity form of
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