It is capital which regulates the extent of production, and the extent to which labour is employed, to meet these needs. But, of course, this only means that capital occupies this role as regulator of production, if you assume that capitalism itself is eternal. In other modes of production, capital does not perform that function. They fail to distinguish between capitalism as an historically necessary form of developing the forces of production, as opposed to it being a natural form.
“Since in the self-same breath they proclaim on the one hand, labour as such (for them, labour is synonymous with wage-labour) and on the other, capital as such—that is the poverty of the workers and the wealth of the idlers—to be the sole source of wealth, they are perpetually involved in absolute contradictions without being in the slightest degree aware of them. (Sismondi was epoch-making in political economy because he had an inkling of this contradiction.)” (p 259)
But, on the basis of this inkling, Sismondi's solution to the contradiction was not to push forward through it, but to seek to move in the opposite direction, to the restoration of more primitive forms. There are reflections here also of many present day concerns and ideas. The Tories continually bleat about the success of the economy, for example, as though the economy were something separate from the millions of people within it. Of course, what that really means is that the economy, on a number of metrics is doing well, which means not that the millions of workers are doing well, but that capital, as the regulator of production is doing well. It means that millions of workers are employed on low wages, in insecure jobs, each of them, thereby, producing more profits for capital.
“Since the same real development which provided bourgeois political economy with this striking theoretical expression, unfolded the real contradictions contained in it, especially the contradiction between the growing wealth of the English “nation” and the growing misery of the workers, and since moreover these contradictions are given a theoretically compelling if unconscious expression in the Ricardian theory, etc., it was natural for those thinkers who rallied to the side of the proletariat to seize on this contradiction, for which they found the theoretical ground already prepared. Labour is the sole source of exchange-value and the only active creator of use-value. This is what you say. On the other hand, you say that capital is everything, and the worker is nothing or a mere production cost of capital. You have refuted yourselves. Capital is nothing but defrauding of the worker. Labour is everything.” (p 260)
But, his standpoint remains within the Ricardian framework, because it continues to accept the categories capital and labour. It ultimately only provides the basis for a distributional struggle over revenues, between capital and labour, rather than a class struggle for the abolition of both of these categories themselves. It is the foundation of the ideology of social-democracy, of reformism and syndicalism, remaining within the confines of a trades unionist rather than socialist consciousness.
“That is why the most important among them—Hodgskin, for example—accept all the economic pre-conditions of capitalist production as eternal forms and only desire to eliminate capital, which is both the basis and necessary consequence [of these preconditions].” (p 260)
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