Jones succeeded Malthus as professor of political economy at Haileybury. Marx says that Jones' words, here, show how the science of political economy ends with this recognition of the transitory, historical nature of bourgeois productive relations, “leading to higher relations in which the antagonism on which they are based is resolved. By analysing them political economy breaks down the apparently mutually independent forms in which wealth appears.” (p 429)
Even in the works of Ricardo, Marx says, this analysis of wealth shows the phantom of material wealth, and uncovers the role of The Law of Value, in all human production. Wealth is shown to be, “simply a continually disappearing and continually reproduced objectivisation of human labour. All solid material wealth is only transitory materialisation of social labour, crystallisation of the production process whose measure is time, the measure of a movement itself.” (p 429)
This is a repetition of Marx's description of The Law of Value, as set out in his Letter to Kugelmann.
The different forms of wealth, under capitalism, appear independent, but, even on the basis of the Ricardian analysis, it becomes clear that this independence is only apparent. Rent and interest are merely deductions from profit, which itself is derivative from surplus value. Rent is surplus profit appropriated by the owners of landed property, whereas interest arises only because money-lending capital develops as a separate form of capital from industrial capital. The Ricardians themselves recognised that landed property was no longer socially useful, nor necessary, and that rent held back capital accumulation.
The Ricardians, therefore, reduced the contradiction down to that between capital and wage labour, but they see this relation as eternal, as a natural law.
“The later economists go one step further and, like Jones, admit only the historical justification for this relationship. But from the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognised as historical, the delusion of regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic social formation, to which capitalism is only the transition.” (p 429)
Herein, again lies the difference between Marx's view and that of the Sismondists, and today's “anti-capitalists”.
Jones describes the way that previously the non-agricultural labourers, the artisans in the towns, exchanged their labour for revenue, primarily the revenue of the landlords. But, under capitalist production, these non-agricultural labourers, now employed as wage labourers, exchange their labour-power for wages, whilst the capitalist sells the product of that labour in exchange for revenue. So, now, there is an exchange of revenue with capital.
““He has been but an agent to give the labourers the benefit of the expenditure of the revenues of the surrounding customers, in a new form and under new circumstances…” (p. 79).” (p 430)
Marx then cites what he says is a good explanation, by Jones, of the way the change in production relations brings about a change in social relations.
“As communities change their powers of production, they necessarily change their habits too” (p. 48). “During their progress in advance, all the different classes of the community find that they are connected with other classes by new relations, are assuming new positions, and are surrounded by new moral and social dangers, and new conditions of social and political excellence” (loc. cit.).”
Marx then gives an extended citation from Jones on the way these new productive relations bring about a change in the morals, norms, and ideas that dominate society.
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