What Hodgskin focuses on, therefore, is coexistent labour, and on this basis, he emphasises accumulation not as an accumulation of dead labour, but of living labour, of the accumulation and development of skilled labour.
“Accumulation in this context means assimilation, continual preservation and at the same time transformation of what has already been handed over and realised.” (p 294)
Marx notes an analogy here with Darwin's theory of evolution, in that each new species arises not on the basis, each time, of starting from the beginning, but of building on what already existed. For Hodgskin, past labour, stored up in the circulating capital, plays no significant role in the accumulation of the skilled labour, because the circulating capital itself is nothing other than coexistent labour. It expands as the quantity of coexistent labour expands, and as its increasing skill results in a wider range of more complex products being produced by it.
This view, as Marx says, is one-sided, but its obvious why Hodgskin adopts such a stance as against the bourgeois economists. It is one-sided because it is not just the progressive development of skilled labour that is determinant here. Even a less skilled worker can produce a more precisely engineered product than a highly skilled worker, if the former has more advanced tools or machines to work with. The accumulation of fixed capital makes immediate labour more productive, and a consequence of that greater productivity is a larger social surplus, the ability to develop science and technology, and so on.
Hodgskin, however, as with other subjectivists, gets things the wrong way round. He recognises the relation between capital and wage labour as a social relation, and that it is this relation that is the basis of profit. But, he then concludes that the presentation of things by the bourgeois economists, as representatives of the bourgeoisie, as being a relationship between current labour and past labour, must be a deliberate deception.
“The capitalist, as capitalist, is simply the personification of capital, that creation of labour endowed with its own will and personality which stands in opposition to labour. Hodgskin regards this as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the interests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way of looking at things arises out of the actual relationship itself; the latter is not an expression of the former, but vice versa. In the same way, English socialists say “We need capital, but not the capitalists”. But if one eliminates the capitalists, the means of production cease to be capital.” (p 296)
Marx does not mean just the elimination of private capitalists, here. As he sets out, in Capital III, the private capitalists are progressively eliminated from production by the very process of capital accumulation. The monopoly of private capital is replaced by socialised capital, in the form of joint stock companies, cooperatives, corporations and state capital. The social function of the private capitalist is taken over by the functioning capitalist, the professional day to day managers, administrators, technicians, and so on. Even within the context of the worker owned cooperative, which acts in the post-capitalist environment, as a transitional form of property, and where these professional managers are employed by the workers, their function remains to be the personification of that socialised capital. Their task is to use the techniques of scientific management so as to maximise surplus value production, so as to facilitate capital accumulation, and thereby create the conditions whereby commodity production itself gives way to the production of use values, based upon social need.
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