Section I
Lenin discusses a clear example of where Struve departs from the ideas of Marx in favour of the ideas of Malthus. That is in the case of Struve's views on rural overpopulation. This overpopulation, Struve argues, is not capitalist overpopulation, i.e. an excess of labour in relation to capital, but a simple overpopulation “that goes with natural economy.” (p 453) Struve, however, says that he does not believe this view to be Malthusian, but it is. Struve claims, in his polemic with Danielson, that his position is consistent with F.A. Lange's objection to Marx's theory of relative over population. So, Lenin embarks on a critique of Lange's objection.
Lange firstly misunderstood Marx's theory of population. Marx disagreed with Malthus, and this also forms the basis of his subsequent disagreement with Darwin about there being some abstract theory of population in relation to humans. One difference between humans and other animals, as Engels sets out in his Letter to P.V. Lavrov, is that animals are gatherers, whereas humans are also producers. Another difference is that, because humans are also producers, the different ways in which they organise this production results in different modes of production, different social organisms. That means, Marx says, that each of these different social organisms have their own, historically specific laws, as opposed to natural laws, which extend across all modes of production. Each social organism, therefore, has its own specific laws of population.
Lange misunderstood this, and says,
““May we be permitted to note firstly that, strictly speaking, there is no abstract law of population for plants and animals either, since abstraction is, on the whole, merely the extraction of the general from a whole number of similar phenomena” (Labour Problem, p 143)” (p 453)
Lange does not grasp that Marx had described the way these different social organisms produce in different ways, and so distribute in different ways, and it is this distribution that is significant in terms of population.
“The conditions for human reproduction are directly dependent on the structure of the different social organisms; that is why the law of population must be studied in relation to each organism separately, and not “abstractly,” without regard to the historically different forms of social structure. Lange’s explanation that abstraction means to extract the general from similar phenomena turns right against himself: only the conditions of existence of animals and plants can be considered similar, but this is not so with regard to man, because we know that he has lived in organisationally different types of social association.” (p 453-4)
Marx's theory of relative surplus population is that, under capitalism, there is overpopulation where there is more labour than is required by capital. Capital always seeks such overpopulation, because it means that wages do not exceed the value of labour-power. Capital can continue to accumulate, and so produce additional absolute surplus value, by expanding the social working day, via these increases in population. If capital accumulates faster than the growth in the labour supply/social working day, the rate at which absolute surplus value expands falls, relative to the rate at which capital expands, so that there is relative overproduction of capital, and a fall in the rate of profit. If this condition persists, then as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 15, and in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 21, absolute surplus value cannot be increased at all. Capital is absolutely overproduced, and as the demand for labour rises to a point where workers are able to demand reductions in hours, longer holidays and so on, as well as higher wages, this reduces absolute surplus value, but also relative surplus value. This squeeze on profits, is the consequence of a crisis of overproduction of capital. In other words, where the overproduction of capital is the other side of an underproduction of labour. As Marx says, in Capital III, Chapter 15,
“Given the necessary means of production, i.e. , a sufficient accumulation of capital, the creation of surplus-value is only limited by the labouring population if the rate of surplus-value, i.e. , the intensity of exploitation, is given; and no other limit but the intensity of exploitation if the labouring population is given.”
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