[b) Polemic against the Ricardian Definition of Capital as Accumulated Labour. The Concept of Coexisting Labour. Underestimation of the Importance of Materialised Past Labour. Available Wealth in Relation to the Movement of Production]
Hodgskin puts forward a view of accumulation as the accumulation of human capital.
“These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.
“… productive capital and skilled labour are […] one.” “Capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous” ( [Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p. 33).
These are simply further elaborations of Galiani’s thesis:
“… The real wealth … is man” (Della Moneta, Custodi. Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).” (p 267)
On this view, Capital is accumulated past labour. All of the material manifestations of this past labour are merely transient, and have to be continually replaced by living labour. In other words, a machine is the product of labour performed last year, or earlier; the raw material it processes is the product of labour itself undertaken yesterday, last week, or last year. The machine wears out, the raw material is consumed in the production of an end product, which is consumed. The machine and the material must be replaced by the product of current labour, which contemporaneously and simultaneously is producing these replacements as outputs, at the same time that the elements of capital they replace are being consumed as inputs. The extent to which the replacements are more advanced is a reflection of the development of more skilled labour, according to Hodgskin. The material productions come and go, but the skilled labour is always able to replace it, and develop it.
“... so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation—which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it—of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.” (p 266-7)
This is an idealist conception that stands in opposition to the purely materialist conception of capital presented by bourgeois economics, and which reduces all economic relations to a relation between things, rather than human beings. The most obvious example is in relation to commodity fetishism, but, as Marx describes in relation to the vulgar economists, like McCulloch, they end up describing inanimate objects as labour, in order to rescue their claim that these things are also productive of value.
“And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites.” (p 267)
Even today, there are debates over the nature of productivity. There are two perspectives from which productivity can be viewed. Productive of use value, and productive of value or exchange-value. We might add productive of surplus value, but that is a derivative of the latter. It is only labour that is productive of new value, and the amount of new value produced is a function of the amount of socially necessary labour performed. This amount of value is not increased, as a result of more use values being produced during that time. It only means that each unit of any particular use value is then a representative of less value, of less socially necessary labour-time.
No comments:
Post a Comment