SNNS 37

 

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 38 of 39

“ But, according to Quesnay, this fund of one milliard serves, for the most part to cover the repairs which become necessary in the course of the year and the partial renewals of invested capital; further, as a reserve fund against accidents, and lastly, where possible, for the enlargement of the invested and working capital, as well as for the improvement of the soil and the extension of cultivation.” (p 321)

In part, this is true. The capitalist farmer, in so far as they undertake labour, covers their own personal consumption out of the wage fund (variable-capital), as with other labour. It is part of the working-capital. But, the repair and renewal of capital should, also, form part of that working-capital. The amount to cover accidents, and for capital accumulation are valid elements of this “interest”. The same categories are listed by Marx, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, in his explanation of why, even under communism, the workers could never receive “the full fruits of their labour”. Indeed, because workers, under communism, would want to develop production and productivity as much, and as quickly, as possible, so as to raise living standards for all, they would need to expand the amount of surplus-value going to this accumulation of capital, i.e. to raise the rate of surplus-value.

Whilst Quesnay's argument may have had validity at the time, and similar arguments were made in relation to the industrial capitalists, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, it soon ceased having any such validity. As profits expanded, the capitalists, also, expanded their own personal consumption, including conspicuous consumption of luxury goods.

“The whole process is certainly “pretty simple”. There enter into circulation: from the farmers, two milliards in money for the payment of rent, and three milliards in products, of which two-thirds are means of subsistence and one-third raw materials; from the sterile class, two milliards in manufactured goods. Of the means of subsistence amounting to two milliards, one half is consumed by the landlords and their retainers, the other half by the sterile class in payment for its labour. The raw materials to the value of one milliard replace the working capital of this latter class. Of the manufactured goods in circulation, amounting to two milliards, one half goes to the landlords and the other to the farmers, for whom it is only a converted form of the interest on their invested capital which accruing at first hand from agricultural reproduction. But the money thrown into circulation by the farmer in payment of rent flows back to him through the sale of his products, and thus the same process can take place afresh in the next economic year.” (p 321-2)

Engels, having given this explanation of the Tableau, then returns to Duhring, and his “truly critical” exposition of it. Duhring had admitted that he did not understand what happened to the net product, and had also, falsely, claimed that the Tableau contained only money values. But,

“We have seen that the Tableau — this description of the annual process of reproduction through the medium of circulation which was as simple as for its time inspired — gives a very exact answer to the question of what becomes of this net product in the course of economic circulation. Thus once again it is with Herr Dühring alone that the “mysticism” and the “confusion and arbitrariness” remain as “the most dubious aspect” and the sole “net product” of his study of Physiocracy.” (p 322)

Engels notes Duhring's other claims about the Physiocrats and their historical influence.

““With Turgot,” he teaches us, “Physiocracy in France came to an end both in practice and in theory”.” (p 322)

That Mirabeau was essentially a Physiocrat in his economic views, a leading authority in the Constituent Assembly of 1789, and this assembly put a large part of Physiocratic principles into practice, including a heavy tax on ground-rent, “all this does not exist for “a” Dühring.” (p 323)

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Artemis & Artifice

On Wednesday, NASA launched the Artemis Mission to the Moon. When Man first left behind the shackles of the Earth, and entered the Space Age, I was in Infant School. I grew up with the adventure of Torchy the Battery Boy, when my parents rented our first tiny black and white TV from Rediffusion. I was still at Infants School, when the USSR, put Yuri Gagarin into space, 65 years ago, in April 1961. By then, I had moved on to watching Supercar, and was fully committed to becoming a scientist like Professor Popkiss. At the start of Junior School, I was avidly watching the adventures of Steve Zodiac and the crew of Fireball XL5, and at weekends the missions of Space Patrol.

Anyone growing up at the time could hardly not be influenced, in some way, by the fact that a new age had begun. The other darker side, of course, was that the rocket technology that was sending humans into space, had first been developed as a means of delivering explosives, as a means of killing other human beings. The Chinese, centuries earlier, had developed the basic principles of rocketry, along with their development of gunpowder. Although the story of modern rocketry has focused on the role of the Nazis's V1 and V2 rockets, developed by Werner Von Braun, who was quickly snatched up by the US, and central to its rocket development, the first such developments came in the USSR, in the early 1920's. With the US, developing the technology at around the same time, led by the likes of Robert Goddard. The soviets, also, took back their fair share of former Nazi scientists.

So, along with the excitement of entering a new space age, came, also, the sheer terror of the same technologies, now, resulting in our own nuclear annihilation. Few people who grew up during that time, did not have similar dreams about nuclear warheads raining down on their heads, as they tried, in vain, to escape the explosion, especially as the memory of World War II, was still fresh. I remember, while at Junior School, in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, waking up, in the middle of the night, to a loud thunderous bang, and the curtains in the bedroom being brightly illuminated from without, thinking that this was it. Fortunately, it was only a very loud thunderstorm.

In that space race, despite the US having the most advanced economy in the world, and having the services of Von Braun, it was the USSR that led the way.

Key Soviet Space Firsts:

• First Artificial Satellite: Sputnik 1 (October 4, 1957).
• First Animal in Orbit: Laika on Sputnik 2 (November 3, 1957).
• First Spacecraft to Impact the Moon: Luna 2 (September 14, 1959).
• First Human in Space & Orbit: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1 (April 12, 1961).
• First Human in Space for >24 Hours: Gherman Titov on Vostok 2 (August 1961).
• First Group Flight: Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich on Vostok 3/4 (1962).
• First Woman in Space: Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6 (June 16, 1963).
• First Spacewalk: Alexei Leonov on Voskhod 2 (March 18, 1965).
• First Robotic Moon Rover: Lunokhod 1 (1970).
• First Space Station: Salyut 1 (1971).

But, the soviets also had many other firsts, such as the first fly by of the Moon, and first photographing of the far side of the Moon, by its Luna Missions, in 1959. It was also, first in its missions to Venus, Mars and other planets. This was at a time, in the 1950's, and early 1960's, when despite the US being the most advanced economy, the USSR was industrialising very fast, and many in western governments seriously feared that its planned economy was soon going to overtake them. In fact, no such thing happened, because although the soviet centrally planned, and so bureaucratic, economy was good at directing resources to such heavy industrial development, as seen during WWII, it was, for the same reasons, poor at adapting, or meeting the needs of its citizens for consumer goods.

Nevertheless, it was enough for the US to see the need to outdo the USSR in that race, even if, as is the nature of US capitalism, to do so, at a superficial rather than fundamental level. JFK promised to put a man on the Moon by the end of the 60's, “not because it was easy, but because it is hard.” Exactly why you would want to put a man on the Moon, was not quite clear, because the soviets had already landed unmanned spacecraft on the Moon, as well as Venus and Mars by that time. It was artifice, as the US sought to capture the headlines.

In terms of why it was harder to send a manned mission, rather than an unmanned mission, that too was unclear, as I and a number of my school friends, now at secondary school, argued with our teacher at the time, who seemed to be concerned at the steady leftward drift of his students. Is it easier to have a human drive a car, or fly a plane, we asked, rather than have a robot do it? Given that 60 years later, we still do not have reliable self-driving vehicles, or planes, the answer to that question in 1967, was quite obvious, if not to our teacher.

Yet, the soviets had done the hard thing, focusing on unmanned missions to the Moon and elsewhere, perhaps because, in those first Luna missions, they had detected strong ionising radiation from the Sun, which is lethal to organic life, without the protection of the Earth's magnetic field (seen in the Aurorae), and of Earth's atmosphere. The soviets also pioneered the work on space stations, which, even with the development of the ISS, was invaluable. Even so, learning from those earlier observations in relation to the Solar Wind, as the crew spend months in space, it orbits below the Van Allen Belts.

When NASA landed men on the moon, in 1969, as JFK had promised to do, our teachers sat us down, as a school, to watch the virtually indecipherable, grainy black and white images sent back from the Moon. Given that only a few years earlier, TV pictures sent across the Atlantic, by means of the Telstar satellites, had only just occurred, pictures sent from a distance more than 80 times greater was inevitably grainy, not helped by the fact that we only had black and white TV's. To have coped with the vast differences in temperature on the Moon, between its areas of light and shade, and the problems of the solar radiation, with more or less just Kodak 70mm medium format film was quite an achievement.

The Moon landing was a major media event, in 1969, even though, in reality, it achieved nothing that had not been achieved years before, other than using a manned spacecraft. Even the fact that Apollo 11 returned to Earth, was not that significant. In 1970, the USSR sent its Luna 16 to the Moon to collect samples, and it successfully returned them to Earth. By the time, NASA sent Apollo 12 to the Moon, the public had already grown tired. It was no longer new. TV audiences for the first landing were estimated at 125-160 million in the US, and 650 million globally, whilst for Apollo 12, despite its much better image quality, they fell to around 11 million in the US. Only with the drama of Apollo 13, did interest recover, but quickly dissipated again, as TV screens, across the globe, were filled with the images of US war crimes committed in South-East Asia, for example the My Lai massacre.

In the immediate aftermath of Apollo 11, and, especially as the US and USSR began to engage in a period of detente, and cooperation in space, the Sunday newspapers filled with stories of imminent manned bases on the Moon, and manned missions to Mars to be undertaken by the end of the 70's, or early 80's at the latest. The same stories have emerged at regular intervals in the 50 years since then. So, although I watched the launch of the Artemis Mission with interest, I could not help feeling that, once again, this was more about artifice, given the current competition between the US and a dynamic China.

Someone commented on the TV, in one of the channels coverage of the launch, that it was something new, that the mission was to go to the other side of the Moon, but the USSR had done that in 1959, nearly 70 years ago, now. Someone else, commented that they were going deeper into space than ever before, but that is clearly not true either, even for manned flight, let alone unmanned flight. Given that in 1969, 57 years ago, we did not have even personal computers, and the power of a £2 million mainframe computer, was about the same as today contained in a microchip in a toaster, the current mission seems underwhelming.

In 1903 the Wright Brothers undertook the first manned flight. They did so in a plane that was basically held together by glue and string. By the 1950's, we already had passenger jet flights across the globe. By the 1970's, we had Concorde. But, despite the huge developments in technology, not least in computing power, this Artemis Mission still amounts to 4 humans “sitting in a tin can” to use David Bowie's description, on top of a huge fuel bomb! It is not even achieving a Moon landing, as happened nearly 60 years ago, in 1969. Even the advances made in the 1980's, with the Space Shuttle, are a distant memory.

The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 7

The ruling-class, its media, and the social-imperialists have continually tried to portray NATO as a “defensive alliance”, rather than what it actually is, which is the tip of the military spear of US imperialism. NATO was established prior to the Warsaw Pact, and numerous accounts show that, it was US imperialism, and its Western Allies that were quick, as WWII entered its closing stages, to bring an end to their connections with the advancing Red Army, which had born the brunt of the fighting in Europe. Similarly, in China, it was the US and its allies that ensured that Japan, handed over Formosa/Taiwan to Chiang Kai Shek, in order to keep it from the advancing forces of Mao's Peasant Army. Indeed, the US military engaged more openly in China itself, unsuccessfully, to support Chiang.

As every martial artist, let alone military strategist knows, there is no real distinction between defence and offence. One of the most obvious examples is the “tortoise”, used by the Roman army, in which it has the appearance of being a defensive shield, but is used to enable the ranks of centurions beneath it to continually advance. The “defensive” nature of NATO is exactly the same, as is the use, from 1947 onwards, of the claims of national self-defence by the Zionist state, which under cover of such hypocrisy, has continually expanded its own territory.

The Zionist state has had its own reasons for such expansion, on that basis, since it came into existence, in 1947, by seizing land from the Palestinians. As an ethno-nationalist ideology, Zionism is both inherently racist, and expansionist, and that is hard-wired into the Zionist state, whichever party is in office. It is Zionism, which is committed to extending the scope of Israel from the river to the sea, using the old biblical mythology, as its justification, and one, therefore, that sits, today, conveniently with the rise of the Christian Zionists, in the US, who see it as their duty to promote such a development, as the basis of Armageddon.

Of course, this mystical, religious claptrap is not believed by, or the basis of the motivation of, the ruling-class. Their interests and motivation are securely based on more earthly and material concerns, as previously described. For US imperialism, and its fraction of the global ruling-class, those concerns revolve around limiting the further growth of the global influence of China. It is simply that, in this context, the interests and expansionist nature of Zionism fits perfectly with the interests of US imperialism, and its subordinates in Europe. Everything that Trump has done in that regard, both in his first term, and now, his second term, was already begun under previous Presidents, both Republican and Democrat. Not for nothing did a, then, Senator Joe Biden say, “If Israel did not exist, we would have to create it.”

Biden and Hariis, as well as the likes of Starmer, and other European politicians, lied and lied again, in the most blatant manner, to deny that the Zionist state was committing genocide and other war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in Gaza, just as they have allowed the Zionist state, for nearly 80 years, to ignore, entirely, one UN Resolution after another, in relation to its expansionary wars, violence and occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands. On the contrary, they have ideologically defended its explanations for such occupation, on the basis of its right to "defend" itself. At the same time, they have armed and financed its occupations, and, now, its genocide and war crimes.

Dragged in front of the international courts that were only intended to prosecute the tyrants and butchers of states opposed to western imperialism, the Zionist war criminals have, of course, claimed that they should not be there, that the courts have no jurisdiction over them. And, they have largely been supported in those claims by the western imperialist states. After all, the Zionist state, which would have to have been created if it did not exist, was, in the words of Chancellor Merz, in Germany, “doing their dirty work for them”, in the Middle-East. The US has even imposed sanctions on the judges of the international courts themselves, so affronted are they that the rules based international order, and international law should be thought to apply to them and their proxies.

Like Louis XIV, US imperialism believes “L'etat, c'est moi”, when it comes to the global order. Thomas Hobbes argued that the Sovereign once appointed had absolute power, and appointed its own successors. The permanent state fulfils that role, irrespective of what government is in office, whatever the nature of the political regime, be it an Absolute Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy, Bourgeois-Republic, or Bonapartist regime. Trump sees himself as an Absolute Monarch, prompting the “No Kings” demonstrations across the US. But, King or no King, Trump or no Trump, the driving force of US imperialism, and of the imperialist state, would remain. Louis XIV, after all, on his death bed, said, "I depart, but the State shall always remain."

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Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 37 of 39

Adam Smith had abandoned his Labour Theory of Value, because he saw that wages did not equal the new value created by labour. He argued that, as soon as landed property and capital arise, the owners of these factors of production will demand a price for allowing their use. As Marx sets out, he need not have abandoned his Labour Theory of Value, and, in places, where he is being analytical, he reverts to it. Ricardo, indeed, did not abandon it, but was, then, presented with the same contradiction faced by Smith that wages did not equal the new value created by labour.

Smith had, in fact, done all the work required to understand, as the Physiocrats did, that surplus-value is created in production, and only realised in exchange. His error was in not distinguishing between the use-value/commodity labour-power, and the value creating activity labour. Had he done so, he would have seen that there is no need to abandon the LTV. The value of labour-power, bought by the capitalist, is, like every other commodity, equal to the labour required for its reproduction. The capitalist does not exploit labour-power, does not cheat the worker in the price they pay for it, but pays the worker its full price. The capitalist does not exploit labour-power, but exploits rather labour.

The value of a day's labour-power may be, say, 8 hours labour, and that is what the capitalist pays to the worker for that labour-power, as wages. But, having bought that labour-power for a day the capitalist can utilise it for a day, and that day might be 10, 12, or more hours in duration. In other words, the labour creates 10, 12 or more hours of new value. The difference between that and the 8 hours of necessary labour (value of labour-power) then forms the surplus-value/profit.

Smith, basically, took over the Physiocratic advances but went further with the LTV, in recognising that value is labour. But, like the Physiocrats, he recognises the contradiction seen in the fact that wages do not equal the new value created by labour, by arguing, as they did, that the owners of the factors of production – land, labour and capital – demand a price for their supply. Because capital is scarce, and labour plentiful, he says, capital is sold above its value, and labour below. His explanation of the falling rate of profit flows from this, as he says that, as capitalism progresses, and capital is accumulate, the supply of capital will rise relative to demand, and the supply of labour will fall.

I have examined these arguments of Smith and Ricardo and Marx's critique of them, elsewhere, in examining Marx's explanation of that tendency.

But, as Marx notes, by the second half of the 19th century, the functional role of the private capitalist had also disappeared, just as it had, earlier, for the landlord class. As the scale of industrial capital grew, it could only be managed and administered by a growing professional, middle-class army of managers, administrators, accountants, technicians and so on. They were drawn from the working-class, requiring an expansion of free, public education. They became the functioning capitalists, just as the industrial capital, itself became “socialised capital”, as the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. the workers and managers. The monopoly ownership of capital by private capitalists had become a fetter on the development of capital. The expropriators were expropriated.

The former capitalist owners were relegated to the role of suppliers of money-capital, owners of fictitious-capital, with no social role in production, as had happened to the landlords. They were, now, just a parasitic excrescence living off their ownership of money-capital. As with the landlords before them, if they ceased to exist, production would continue as before, but, now, with their revenues being used productively to accumulate additional capital.

The bourgeoisie and its ideologists, who recognised this, in respect of the old ruling-class – the landed aristocracy – of course, do not admit it when it comes to the redundancy of their own position.

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The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 6

Whatever the actual form of this monopolistic competition, the underlying reality was that it required expanding markets, and those expanding markets meant the creation of multinational states, such as is in formation with the EU, and the various similar blocs across the globe. Global imperialist competition, now, takes the form of competition between these various large, multinational blocs. As with the previous shifting alliances between nation states, so too these blocs form their own shifting alliances as they jockey for position.

For a long time, after WWII, as US imperialism was hegemonic, and as the other imperialist states faced the USSR, they subordinated themselves to US imperialism, and its determination of what constituted “international law”. The US created NATO, with its subordinated allies in Europe, prompting the USSR to respond by creating the Warsaw Pact. Superficially, NATO acted to “protect” Western Europe from the threat of invasion from the USSR. But, in reality, Western Europe was not under threat of invasion from the USSR. It sought only to hang on to its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, assigned to it, at the end of WWII, in the conferences at Potsdam and Yalta, to assuage its fears of itself being, again, a victim of invasion from the West, as it had been repeatedly.

US imperialism stationed its troops in Europe for the same reason it created its military bases in 80 countries across the globe, not for any kind of altruistic, defensive reason, but to assert its own global reach, and interests. NATO was the means for US imperialism to spread the cost of its own military expenditure, to serve the interests of US imperialism, just as the US used the role of the Dollar as global reserve currency to pay for its expenditure with increasingly worthless, paper Dollars, which led to the inflation, and global currency crises of the 1970's. Europe acted as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and early warning system, against any nuclear missile attack from the USSR, the form that any actual war with the USSR would inevitably take, as against any significant, conventional ground offensive.

European countries in NATO, whose real protection against the USSR came from their higher living standards, were obliged to spend money on weapons and weapons systems they were never going to use in Europe, but only ever in support of US imperialism in its militaristic adventures across the globe, for example, in South-East Asia, or Africa and the Middle-East. More than 60% of European military spending goes directly to US arms manufacturers, directly subsidising and justifying the large-scale production of those US companies, and further subordinating European states to the US. Another reason for US imperialism's troops in Europe, was to deter the working-class in Europe from advancing its own interests.

For so long as US imperialism was hegemonic, the role of international law was to represent the interests of US imperialism, and, to a lesser degree the interests of its subordinates in Europe and Japan. The global para state bodies designed to plan and regulate global capitalism, such as GATT/WTO, IMF, and the World Bank also fulfilled that function. But, even within those constraints, as soon as US hegemony began to break down, as US industrial capital went into relative decline, in the face of the rising power of imperialist capital elsewhere, in Europe, Japan, and most notably China, the façade began to erode.

As early as 1971, when France demanded payment of US debts in Gold, at the official exchange rate of $35 an ounce, the US, ended convertibility of the Dollar, bringing the Gold Standard crashing down, and initiating a decade of global currency instability. A surging Japanese industrial capital, dominated world markets, replacing the once dominant US multinationals, and amassing huge trade surpluses with the US in the process, leading to the US using its remaining dominance as global superpower to impose measures on Japan to limit its expansion. Trump is not the first to engage in such actions.

Over the last 40 years, the US has repeatedly imposed tariffs on imports to the US, as its domestic industry has continued to decline relative to its global competitors in Asia, and Europe. Whilst, its actions have been referred to the WTO, it has largely ignored the international rules based order it created, as soon as those rules ceased to operate in its favour. When it comes to other global bodies that has been even clearer. The US, never backed the creation of the International Criminal Court, for example, because it clearly saw, in advance, that its own global military adventures, its own record of military and paramilitary actions, would be a hostage to fortune. It has been its subordinates in Europe that did sign up to the ICC, and ICJ, that again, have been the ones left trying to justify the hypocrisy of an international law that only sought to put defendants from third world countries in the dock, whilst giving worse war criminals from the imperialist states a free pass.

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Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 36 of 39

“If it were not for this interest, the farmer—the chief agent in agriculture—would not advance the capital for investment in it. Already from this standpoint, the appropriation by the farmer of that portion of the agricultural surplus proceeds which represents interest is, according to the Physiocrats, as necessary a condition of reproduction as the farmer class itself; and hence this element cannot be put in the category of the national “net product” or “net income”; for the latter is characterised precisely by the fact that it is consumable without any regard to the immediate needs of national reproduction.” (p 321)

In other words, to use Marx's formulation, gross output is equal to c + v + s. C, the consumed constant capital (raw and auxiliary materials, and wear and tear of fixed capital) plus the variable-capital (the physical wage goods), must all be reproduced on a “like for like basis”, so that reproduction can occur. Only what is left over after that represents the net or surplus product. Of course, in class societies, the exploiting classes do not see things that way. They, after all, must consume to live, and they justify their consumption on the basis of their functional role in society. Landlords provide land, without which production could not take place; capitalists provide capital, without which production could not occur; money-capitalists provide money, without which some industrial capitalists could not accumulate capital.

The Physiocrats represented the ideas of the rising French bourgeoisie, and, in particular, the capitalist farmers. Like the rising productive-capitalists everywhere, they recognised that the old, aristocratic, landlord class no longer had any functional role. They played no part in agricultural production, as that function was now undertaken by the capitalist farmer. If the landlords didn't exist, then, what the Physiocrats saw as the mystical power of the land to create a surplus product (output greater than inputs) would still exist. If the farmers did not have to hand over that rent to landlords to consume unproductively, production not only would still take place on the same scale, but those rents could be used productively, to cultivate additional land.

In Britain, this same perception led the bourgeoisie's ideologists to argue for land nationalisation. If land was nationalised, they argued, rents paid to the aristocracy would instead go to the capitalist state, so that it would not need to levy as much in tax, which is a deduction from profit. That would leave more profit, and so a greater potential for capital accumulation and economic growth. This is the opposite to the Keynesian argument set out earlier, which argues that increased taxes by the state used, for example, in arms spending can act to increase capital accumulation, employment and growth. Keynes' argument was just a 20th century version of the argument put forward by Malthus as paid apologist of the landed aristocracy. Malthus plagiarised Sismondi's arguments in relation to the inevitability of an overproduction of commodities, and put forward as the solution, increases in the revenues of the landlords, clergy and state, so that the capitalists had less to use to increase production, and all of these other parasitic and unproductive classes had more to spend to increase demand.

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