can leave its provision to the workers themselves (when workers pay to go through courses to get skills qualifications) or they can rely in part on the state providing it through its training courses. But in each case, dead labour is embodied in the enhanced labour power and then transferred into the products of the labour process, as with the dead labour embodied in means and materials of production.30 But this still leaves a question unresolved. Who trains the trainers? Skilled trainers cannot themselves get their skills from unskilled workers. If their skills are monopoly skills and they produce goods that cannot be produced by unskilled workers, however many work together at the job, then those who own those goods will be able to charge monopoly prices that do not reflect labour values, but simply how much people are prepared to pay. This will be true of certain skills and certain goods at any particular point in time. But over time this labour too will be reduced to some objective ratio of other labour. Capitalists elsewhere in the system will actively seek out new technologies that undermine such skill monopolies by enabling the tasks to be done by much less skilled labour. In this way, the reduction of skilled labour to unskilled labour over time is a never ending feature of capitalist accumulation. If enough unskilled labour is trained up to the level of skilled labour needed to produce particular commodities, those commodities will cease to be scarce and their value will fall to the level that reflects the combination of the labour needed to reproduce average labour power and the extra cost of the training. As Carchedi puts it: Due to the introduction of new techniques in the labour process, the level of skills required of an agent is lowered. The value of his or her labour power is then devalued. We can refer to this process as devaluation (of labour power) through dequalification (of skills). It is this process which reduces skilled to unskilled labour and thus (at least as far as the value of labour power is concerned) alters the exchange relations between the commodities of which those different types of labour power are an input. It is this real process which justifies the theoretical reduction of skilled to unskilled labour, or the expression of the former as a multiple of the latter . . . The process of devaluation through dequalification is a constant tendency in capitalist production, due to the constant need
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond