Saturday 18 August 2018

Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, Chapter 17 - Part 51

Marx describes crises as being of the first form or the second form. The crisis of the first form is that which has been described above. It is the crisis which arises as a result of the contradictory nature of the commodity itself, as being both use value and exchange-value. And, this contradiction is manifest and gives rise to the possibility of crisis as a result of the separation of purchase and sale. In itself, this possibility of crisis is abstract. The separation of purchase and sale creates the possibility of crises for several reasons. Having bought inputs, and engaged in production, the output may not be sold, for a variety of reasons; or it may not all be sold, at its price of production; or it may all be sold, but at a price below its price of production; or it may all be sold, but not immediately, so that its metamorphosis into money-capital is delayed, which, in turn, delays the metamorphosis of this money-capital into productive-capital. For each of these reasons, the circuit of capital breaks down, or has the possibility of breaking down. 

But, it may also be the case that this circuit could break down, because having sold, and metamorphosed the commodity-capital into money-capital, it cannot again be metamorphosed into productive-capital. It only requires that a steel producer cannot obtain iron ore, or coal, or that a textile producer cannot obtain cotton, and the whole of their production is stopped. The possibility of such a crisis exists for all these reasons, but this possibility is not an inevitability, and what actually causes the possibility to become an actuality has to be investigated in each specific case. 

The crisis of the second form is a crisis relating to money as means of payment. As Marx says in Capital I, Chapter 3, this type of money crisis has to be distinguished from a purely financial crisis

“The monetary crisis referred to in the text, being a phase of every crisis, must be clearly distinguished from that particular form of crisis, which also is called a monetary crisis, but which may be produced by itself as an independent phenomenon in such a way as to react only indirectly on industry and commerce. The pivot of these crises is to be found in moneyed capital, and their sphere of direct action is therefore the sphere of that capital, viz., banking, the stock exchange, and finance.” (Note 49) 

A purely financial crisis is such as those that occurred in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, when private banks issued bank notes way in excess of their deposits, or, as happened with speculative bubbles, such as the South Sea Bubble, or John Law's Mississippi Scheme. Similar financial crises arose in 1929, 1987, 2000 and 2008. But, the money crisis that Marx is describing here, as a crisis of the second form, arises as a necessary consequence of the crisis of the first form. In other words, the producer who has found they cannot sell their output may already have bought inputs from their suppliers, and now finds they cannot pay for them, having bought them on commercial credit, i.e. they have bought on the basis of only having to pay for them later. They must now borrow money, in order to cover these payments. For the banks, and other money lenders, it does not matter that the producers now demand this money to use only as currency, as means of payment, rather than as money-capital. As far as the lender is concerned, it is money-capital they are supplying, and they insist on being paid the market price, i.e. the rate of interest, for it. 

As the demand for this money-capital rises, and as the producers become prepared to pay almost any price for it, to stay afloat, so interest rates rise sharply, commercial credit becomes constrained, and a crisis ensues, as payments from one business fails, leading to payments from other businesses failing. In such situations, as Marx sets out, the appearance is given that the problem arises due to a lack of money. However, the problem is not lack of money, but lack of money-capital. It is the inability to metamorphose capital from one form to another, which creates the crisis, which then appears as a failure to make payment. 

“The crisis in its second form is the function of money as a means of payment, in which money has two different functions and figures in two different phases, divided from each other in time. Both these forms are as yet quite abstract, although the second is more concrete than the first. 

To begin with therefore, in considering the reproduction process of capital (which coincides with its circulation) it is necessary to prove that the above forms are simply repeated, or rather, that only here they receive a content, a basis on which to manifest themselves.” (p 510) 

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