Saturday 1 May 2021

Michael Roberts and Historical Materialism - Part 8 of 12

The increased pressure from rising feudal rents on the peasants sharpens this process, as Lenin’s analysis of it in Russia illustrates. The peasants with more fertile land, or otherwise better placed, are able to meet these rents, by expanding their commodity production, and vice versa. The poorer peasants, more dependent on domestic production, also find themselves unable to compete with the capitalist production of commodities in the towns. They become wage workers under the Putting Out System, and become increasingly incapable of devoting enough time to their own land even to produce their own subsistence.

In Russia, as Lenin illustrates, they then rent out their land to richer peasants, becoming themselves increasingly proletarianized. Some become full-time agricultural day labourers, others move to the towns to become industrial wage workers. As the richer peasants now are able to employ such day labourers, their money revenues, which previously only acted as money, can now become capital, employing wage workers to produce surplus value. Its by this process, as Marx and Lenin describe, that capitalist production, which starts in the towns, becomes transferred to agriculture.

But, this occurs a long time after the capitalist development of industrial production in the towns, as Marx also describes in Capital. The urban capitalist production places increasing demands on the old agricultural production in the countryside, which continues for a long time, with it causing increasing pressure on the land, given that the peasant producers continue to utilise the old methods. It not only leads to their own exhaustion, but to them exhausting the land itself through overuse. Indeed, as Marx describes in Capital, its only when this has led to large scale ruination of the land that capital begins to invade agricultural production, and to reorganise it, and to apply capital so as to raise its productivity, and restore its former fertility.

Incidentally, this process shows how silly it is to talk about "the law of value under capitalism - in particular, the existence of surplus value in capitalist accumulation", because, it's quite clear that The Law of Value, here, operates in relation to the non-capitalist commodity production. Moreover, it's also quite clear that the independent peasant producer who pays a Money Rent to a landlord, pays over an amount of surplus value, rather than simply surplus product. It's the existence of this surplus value, arising from non-capitalist commodity production that makes possible the establishment and accumulation of capital itself in the first place.

Roberts seems to have made the mistake of bourgeois academics of taking the categories of capitalism (wages) and extending them back into history, rather than analysing each historical period in its specificity. It is even more incongruous to do that at the same time as trying to claim that The Law of Value, as a natural law, only exists under capitalism, or indeed that the concepts value and surplus value only exist under capitalism, when its quite clear that they operated for thousands of years prior to capitalism, in different forms, each of which has to be analysed in its own specificity. That indeed, is the real lesson and foundation of Marx and Engels' theory of Historical Materialism.

To say,

"The development of capitalism in agriculture and in trade laid the basis for the introduction of industrial technology that led to the so-called Industrial Revolution and industrial capitalism" is back to front, as the analysis of Marx and Lenin demonstrates. Simply throwing peasants off their land cannot lead to capitalist production, because, as Marx describes, that has happened throughout history back to Antiquity without resulting in capitalism. Instead it led simply to various forms of slavery, and a sinking back of the level of development. Capitalist production can only become established if it is more efficient than existing forms of production, which means it has to take place on a large scale, to take advantage of economies of scale and division of labour, even prior to the introduction of machines. But, such large scale production can only occur when sufficiently large markets have developed otherwise the production cannot be sold. These large markets can only first arise for a range of industrial rather than agricultural products, in conditions where peasant producers already directly produce the agricultural products required for their own reproduction, and where even the independent commodity producers in the towns still cultivate their own small plots to provide them with agricultural products, as Engels describes.

"The same holds good for exchange between peasant products and those of the urban artisans. At the beginning, this barter takes places directly, without the medium of the merchant, on the cities' market days, when the peasant sells and makes his purchases. Here, too, not only does the peasant know the artisan's working conditions, but the latter knows those of the peasant as well. For the artisan is himself still a bit of a peasant — he not only has a vegetable and fruit garden, but very often also has a small piece of land, one or two cows, pigs, poultry, etc. People in the Middle Ages were thus able to check up with considerable accuracy on each other's production costs for raw material, auxiliary material, and labour-time — at least in respect of articles of daily general use."


(Supplement To Capital III, The Law of Value)

Those large markets can only develop in the towns first, on the basis of the development of urban industrial producers. There is no material basis for such to occur in agriculture first, because the peasants, even the poorest peasants, are able to eke out their subsistence from the land without any requirement to go to market to meet their needs. If they are dispossessed of their land, they become slaves or serfs, not wage workers employed by capitalist farmers, because there is no basis for the latter to exist. If they are employed as wage workers, it is not by capitalists, i.e. not paid out of capital, but out of revenue. In other words, they become employed as retainers, and other such unproductive labourers. Its only after a long period of development of capital in the towns, and growth of an urban proletariat that the demand for agricultural commodities reaches a stage when capitalist production in agriculture becomes possible.

As Engels puts it,

"Theoretically, there is no difficulty at all in the fact that competition reduces to the general level profits which exceed the general rate, thus again depriving the first industrial appropriator of the surplus-value exceeding the average. All the more so in practice, however, for the spheres of production with excessive surplus-value, with high variable and low constant capital — i.e., with low capital composition — are by their very nature the ones that are last and least completely subjected to capitalist production, especially agriculture."

(ibid)

One of the reasons, capital has difficulty entering agriculture, and why it enters that sphere last, is precisely the monopoly of landed property in the hands of the old feudal class.  In every other sphere of production, surplus profits provide the incentive for capital to enter the sphere, but they cannot in agriculture, because the landlord demands the surplus profit as rent.


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