The Civilising Mission of Capital - Summary
Summary
The
Civilising Mission of Capital is a concept set out by Marx in
The Grundrisse. It says, essentially, that, because
capitalism is forced, by competition, to continually revolutionise
production, and so to raise the level of social productivity, it
must also continually divert the released capital and labour, resulting from this rising productivity, into new spheres of
production. It must continually produce new types of commodities,
and continually stimulate new desires amongst consumers for those
new commodities. It must also, thereby, develop new types of
concrete labour that produces these new products.
The
labourers must, thereby, be trained and educated so as to have these
new skills, and as the workers increasingly become the largest
class, and so the largest body of consumers, so an increasing range
of these products must be included in the normal consumption of
workers, the basis of the value of labour-power. That includes not
just the material commodities bought by workers, but increasingly
the immaterial commodities, the services such as education, art and
culture. Capital necessarily provides the working-class, therefore,
with all of these “civilising” influences, as well as
greater leisure-time, so that the workers themselves acquire the
necessary skills to become the ruling class.
The
further development of capitalist production means that the initial
means of reducing costs, of cheapening prices, and grabbing market
share are superseded, as the extraction of relative surplus value,
by the raising of social productivity dominates. The development of
large-scale socialised capital, means that a change in social
relations occurs, the state must become a social-democratic state,
planning and regulating the economy, to create the conditions for
long-term capital accumulation. The working-class must be drawn
into this corporatist state, itself on the basis of it being
“civilised” and socialised by absorbing bourgeois ideas
and culture.
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