What the storing up of commodities comes down to is that, in economies where producers no longer produce mostly for their own needs, they must be able to meet those needs by being able to buy the commodities required to satisfy them, in the market. Of necessity that means that all those things must be produced as commodities.
“The majority of the commodities consumed by the worker in the final form in which they confront him as commodities, are in fact products of simultaneous labour (they are therefore by no means stored up by the capitalist).” (p 293)
That does not apply just to those commodities consumed personally by the worker, but also to those commodities consumed productively, as part of the labour process. The more production is characterised by an ever increasing division of labour, by an ever rising rate of turnover, and by the introduction of new production techniques, such as flexible specialisation and Just In Time, the more that is the case, so that all production is characterised by this simultaneity.
Apart from those use values produced by Nature, all products are the products of labour. That applies to all those products that comprise the means of production, used by the worker, in their current production, as well as the means of subsistence consumed by the worker to sustain them during their current production. But, under capitalism, these products of labour appear not as the property of labour, but of the capitalist. The former confronts the worker as constant capital, and the latter as variable-capital.
“... their transfer from the worker to the capitalist and the partial return of the worker’s product to the worker, or of the value of his product to the worker, is called the “storing up” of circulating capital for the worker. These means of subsistence which the worker must always consume before his product is finished, become “circulating capital” because he [the worker], instead of buying them direct or paying for them with the value either of his past or of his future product, must first of all receive a draft (money) on it; a draft moreover which the capitalist is entitled to issue only thanks to the worker’s past, present or future product.” (p 293)
Hodgskin has a motive for stressing that the workers' needs depend on coexisting labour, rather than past labour. He wants to eliminate the notion about the “storing up” of past labour, which forms the basis of the bourgeois apologia for capitalist exploitation. The justification for profit is inextricably linked to this notion of the storing up of past labour, of concepts of abstinence and so on that are somehow supposed to explain how this past labour acquires a greater value than identical immediate labour.
Hodgskin does not properly grasp it, but he sees that immediate labour confronts capital, not stored up past labour. He, thereby, recognises that the real basis of profit is the social relation between capital and wage labour. By contrast, the bourgeois economists equate that past labour with capital.
“To grasp the all-round significance of contemporaneous labour as against previous labour is however in itself a very important achievement.” (p 294)
If capital is only a name, a label, put on these commodities, produced by past labour, then how can these commodities have a higher value, i.e. represent more labour-time than that for which they currently exchange? In other words, going back to the example given earlier, if A workers and B workers are both given worthless paper notes with a face vale of €100, which equates to a claim on 100 hours of social labour-time, each group of workers can use these notes to obtain commodities A and B to a value of €100. The same commodities are actually supplied to the market simultaneously by these same workers. Both groups of workers exchange an amount of value in one form – paper money notes – for an equal amount of value in another form – commodities. However, when capital exchanges with immediate labour, it pays the workers, in each case, €100, equal to this claim on 100 hours of social labour-time, and yet receives, in exchange, not 100 hours of labour, but say, 150 hours of labour. It is as though the stored up past labour, represented in the worthless €100 paper note, when it is in the hands of the capitalist, rather than the worker, becomes worth 50% more.
““… it is by the command the capitalist possesses over the labour of some men, not by his possessing a stock of commodities, that he is enabled to support and consequently employ other labourers” (Labour Defended etc.,p.14).” (p 294)
Nor is it the fact that the capitalist possesses money that enables the command over labour, because money gives everyone command over others labour, by enabling them to exchange the value represented by the money for the same amount of value contained in a commodity.
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