“What the moneylender sells in actual fact to the industrial capitalist, what really happens in the transaction, is simply this: he transfers the ownership of the money to the industrial capitalist for a certain period of time. He disposes of his ownership title for a certain term, and as a result the industrial capitalist has bought the ownership for a certain period. Thus his money appears to be capital before it is sold and the mere ownership of money or a commodity—separated from the capitalist production process—is regarded as capital.” (p 460-1)
On this basis, anyone who owns money or commodities they do not intend to consume, but who can now lend these commodities or money to someone else, becomes a capitalist. The money or commodities in their possession without acting as capital still become capital. In other words, money or commodities only become capital when they are used productively, i.e. they are used to set in motion wage labour, which produces surplus value, thereby expanding the value of the initial capital. But, they only become such in the hands of an industrial capitalist. The owner of money and commodities who is not an industrial capitalist does not, and has no intention of using them in that way. Yet, in their hands, the money or commodities still acts as capital, simply on the basis that, by lending them to someone else, they attract interest, so that their value also appears to self-expand, without any connection to the actual process of production. They appear to be self-expanding value in its pure form where an initial monetary value is automatically transformed into a larger monetary value, over a set period of time.
“It is their immanent attribute to create value, to yield interest, just as the attribute of the pear tree is to produce pears. And it is as such an interest-bearing thing that the money-lender sells his money to the industrial capitalist.” (p 461)
And, separated from the production process, the interest simply accruing to the owner of the money-capital, so this reinforces the idea that interest is the revenue that accrues specifically to capital, whereas profit is then a return to entrepreneurship.
“[Interest seems to be] a specific kind of surplus-value the generation of which is due to the mere ownership of capital and therefore to an intrinsic characteristic of capital; whereas on the contrary, industrial profit appears to be a mere addition which the borrower obtains by employing capital productively, that is, by exploiting the workers with the help of the capital borrowed (or, as people also say, by his work as a capitalist, the function of the capitalist being equated here with labour, and even identified with wage-labour, since the industrial capitalist, by really taking part in the production process, appears in fact as an active agent in production, as a worker, in contrast to the idle, inactive moneylender whose function of property owner is separate from and outside the production process).” (p 461-2)
In the process, this further obscures the source of profit as surplus value. Capital, now reduced to its existence as loanable money-capital, is seen as creating new value, which flows back to the owner of this capital as interest. The industrial profit is then only a return to the entrepreneur, for their specific labour, just as wages are paid to other workers. The category of surplus value, thereby, disappears completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment