As set out above, it is only this intervening period, when real capital is advanced to production, where new value is created, which produces the surplus value from which interest is deducted. But, this is obscured further by the fact that the movement M – M, M` - Mi, or simply M - Mi, does occur separately, and independently of the actual movement of capital, and did so prior to capitalism itself. Money lenders do lend money, which is used for unproductive consumption, and yet do obtain interest on it. They lend money to peasant and artisan producers who use it not as capital, but in order to obtain means of production, pay taxes etc.
“And it is in this abstract form, which, indeed, exists as an independent movement alongside the real movement of capital, opens it and closes it, that Mr. Proudhon considers the matter in hand, so that everything inevitably remains incomprehensible to him. If instead of buying and selling, lending in this form were to be abolished, then, according to Proudhon, the surplus would disappear.” (p 524-5)
But, of course, it wouldn't. Under capitalism, only the division of the surplus value between two kinds of capitalists (three if the rent to land-owning capitalists is included, or four if he taxes paid to the state are included) would be ended. Under feudalism, abolition of interest would not prevent surplus value produced by the peasants being appropriated as rent by the landlord, tithes by the clergy, and taxes to the state. Moreover, it would be impossible to abolish interest and interest-bearing capital.
Under feudalism, feudal lords resorted to borrowing to finance their wars. Even where lending was forbidden by the church, that simply meant that the hoarding and lending of money became a function for non-Christian communities such as the Jews and Lombards. Under capitalism, precisely because the advance of productive-capital brings with it the return of profit, those who seek to obtain this profit, but do not have capital of their own, are compelled to borrow it, and to pay the cost of such borrowing, whilst those that do own capital will not lend it unless they receive interest for doing so.
“In order that it should be impossible for commodities and money to become capital and therefore be lent as capital in posse, they must not confront wage-labour. If they are thus not to confront it as commodities and money and consequently labour itself is not to become a commodity, then that amounts to a return to pre-capitalist modes of production in which it [labour] does not become a commodity, and for the greater part still exists in the form of serf or slave labour.” (p 525)
The other alternative is that there should exist Socialism. Free labour only exists, not as wage labour, where the labourer owns their means of production. But, for the labourers to own the means of production themselves, other than via a return to precapitalist conditions, the workers must own the means of production not individually but collectively. However, this social transformation is only possible itself via capitalism, which collectivises the scattered means of production, and converts them into capital, which it concentrates and centralises, on the basis of socialised production and cooperative labour. As this process continues it converts the privately owned capital used for this socialised production, itself into socialised capital, in the form of the cooperative and joint stock company.
“Free labour develops within the framework of capitalist production as social labour. To say that they are the owners of the means of production amounts to saying that these belong to the united workers and that they produce as such, and that their own output is controlled jointly by them. But wanting to preserve wage-labour and thus the basis of capital, as Proudhon does, and at the same time to eliminate the “drawbacks” by abolishing a secondary form of capital, reveals the novice.” (p 525)
No comments:
Post a Comment