Marx ridicules Karl Arnd, who wrote criticising Rau for referring to “employer's profit” in addition to wages, rent and interest. Marx notes,
“According to this one might think that Adam Smith reduces national wealth to interest, rent and wages, whereas on the contrary he quite expressly declares that profit results from the use of capital and repeatedly and expressly states that interest—insofar as it constitutes surplus-value at all—is only a form derived from profit. Thus the vulgar economist reads into his sources the direct opposite of what they contain. Where Smith writes “profit” Arnd reads “interest”. It would be interesting to know what he supposes Adam Smith’s “interest” to mean.” (p 504)
Marx also ridicules Arnd for his theory explaining movements in the rate of interest by the rate of growth of European forests.
“This deserves to he called the “rate of interest originating in the forest”, and in the same work its inventor has rendered another service to “our science” as the philosopher of the “dog tax”.” (p 504)
There have been many such ridiculous explanations of economic cycles including those related to sunspot activity, and so on, as well as those seeking to replace The Law of Value with the Law of Energy, whereby Marx's analysis is supposed to be now irrelevant because Marx did not live in a world where energy production was so determinant, and so where the depletion of energy resources makes further growth increasingly impossible. Many of those purveying this particular nonsense have also been predicting Peak Oil, and a catastrophic rise in energy prices for the last decade. It is fitting that this latest manifestation of Malthusianism has again been answered by the fact that, instead, energy prices have been falling sharply, as new sources of energy, and new means of more efficiently using energy have been developed over that time.
The relation capital – interest means that the remaining portion of profit must be explained and vulgar economy does that by describing it as a return to the entrepreneur, as wages of superintendence. Yet, as Adam smith had already noted, whilst profits are proportionate to the capital advanced, the wages of superintendence are in inverse proportion to it. The wages of superintendence are proportionally high where little capital is advanced, and proportionally small where a large capital is advanced. But, it would be expected that where a large amount of capital is advanced, including, therefore, a large amount of labour to supervise and coordinate, a large amount of fixed capital and materials to take responsibility for, the labour of superintendence would be that much greater, and so the wages of superintendence greater too.
The reality is, of course, that the industrial profit, or profit of enterprise, remaining after the deduction of interest has little to do with any labour of superintendence. The profit of the firm is a function of the average rate of profit; the interest deducted from this profit is a function of the rate of interest, and similarly for the rent. The profit of enterprise is then a function first of the average rate of profit, and then of these deductions from it.
The labour of superintendence itself divides into two different components. There is the labour of supervision and coordination that is required in all labour processes based on cooperation and the division of labour, and then there is that labour required only because of the antagonistic relation between the labourers and the owners of means of production.
“A conductor does not have to be the owner of the instruments used by the orchestra, nor is it one of his functions as a conductor to speculate on the subsistence costs of the members of the orchestra, or, in general, to have anything to do with their “wages”.” (p 505)
The reason that the wages of superintendence are proportionally high, where a small amount of capital is advanced, is hat the wages of the entrepreneur often do include a large amount of actual wages, including, often, for labour they continue to undertake in actual production.
“... the capitalist is something between an exploiter of other people’s labour and a person who lives off his own labour)” (p 505)
They are proportionally small where a large capital is advanced precisely because the entrepreneur performs proportionately less labour, professional managers are employed on market rates of wages, and so on.
No comments:
Post a Comment