Ravenstone's main focus is on the surplus product rather than surplus labour. As with many of these writers, there is a certain asceticism in his ideas. There was a strong link between these early socialists and social democrats and Methodism. It is a thread that has allowed conservatives to tar socialists with the brush of wanting to reduce everyone in society to the same low level, rather than to raise them up.
Ravenstone sees the productive power of labour being able to create a surplus product, and this surplus product is then what constitutes capital. This surplus product is in the hands of non-workers, idlers, be they landlords, capitalists or their flunkeys.
“For Ravenstone property is merely appropriation of the products of other people’s labour and this is only possible insofar as and in the degree that productive industry develops. By productive industry Ravenstone understands industry which produces necessaries. Unproductive industry, the industry of consumption, is a consequence of the development of capital, or property.” (p 260)
There is also an echo of Adam Smith's writing on productive and unproductive consumption here. The production of necessaries is productive, because it is a production of those goods and services required by the workers for the reproduction of their labour-power. The production of all those things that are not necessaries is not productive, because they are not consumed by workers, not required for their reproduction, and so represent a diversion of their resources.
“Without capital, without property, the necessaries of the workers would be produced in abundance, but there would be no luxury industry. Or it can also be said that Ravenstone, like the author of the pamphlet discussed above, understands or at least in fact admits the historical necessity of capital; since capital, according to the author of the pamphlet, produces surplus labour over and above the labour strictly necessary for the maintenance [of the worker] and at the same time leads to the creation of machinery (what he calls fixed capital) and gives rise to foreign trade, the world market, in order to utilise the surplus product filched from the workers partly to increase productive power, partly to give this surplus product the most diverse forms of use-value far removed from those required by necessity. Similarly, according to Ravenstone, no conveniences, no machinery, no luxury products would be produced without capital and property, neither would the development of the natural sciences have taken place, nor the literary and artistic productions which owe their existence to leisure, nor the urge of the wealthy to receive an equivalent for their “surplus product” from the non-workers.” (p 261)
In this respect, Ravenstone is in advance of many of today's “anti-capitalists”, who stand on the ground of Sismondi, rather than that of Marx. Ravenstone, and the author of the previous pamphlet, do not point to the fact of the development of machinery, foreign trade, and so on, out of the creation and appropriation of a surplus product, as positive justification of the role of capital. On the contrary, they point to the fact that all those things are developed by capital for its own benefit, and against the interests of workers, whose exploitation is increased all the more by them. However, Marx points out, in doing so, they are also forced to acknowledge the historically progressive role that capital plays in doing all these things.
“... they thus admit that this is a result of capitalist production, which is therefore a historical form of social development, even though it stands in contradiction to that part of the population which constitutes the basis of that whole development, In this respect they share the narrow-mindedness of the economists (although from a diametrically opposite position) for they confuse the contradictory form of this development with its content. The latter wish to perpetuate the contradiction on account of its results. The former are determined to sacrifice the fruits which have developed within the antagonistic form, in order to get rid of the contradiction. This distinguishes their opposition to [bourgeois] political economy from that of contemporary people like Owen; likewise from that of Sismondi, who harks back to antiquated forms of the contradiction in order to be rid of it in its acute form.” (p 261)
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