Confusing the Industrial Revolution, after 1800 (actually the Industrial Revolution is normally taken as having started in 1760), as the commencement of industrial capitalism, is to make the same mistake as Sismondi, or the Narodniks and Danielson in Russia, as Lenin describes, for example in "A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism". Industrial capitalism had started in Britain centuries prior to that, and prior to capitalism entering agriculture. The former is the necessary condition for the latter. What occurs after 1760 is the development of machine industry, and the increasing role played by relative surplus value. What develops after 1760, and particularly after 1800, when steam engines are introduced on a wider scale, and machines are used to produce machines, is that large-scale, industrial, machine industry develops. It also creates the material conditions for the growth of productive-capital relative to the antediluvian forms of capital that previously dominated - commercial capital and financial capital. It creates the basis for the dominance of industrial capital over those previous forms, which becomes manifest with the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
As Engels put it,
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest-bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc.”
(Preface To The Second German Edition of “The Condition Of The Working Class”)
Robert's subjectivist approach is also illustrated when he says,
“But under capitalism productivity rose sharply and the level of real wages was no longer determined by the weather or pandemics, but by the class struggle over the production and distribution of the value and surplus value created in capitalist production in agriculture and industry.”
Firstly, as Marx, Engels and Lenin describe, this is to confuse the purely distributional struggle over wages for class struggle, but secondly, it is again to abandon Marx and Engels' materialist analysis, for a subjectivism in which the level of wages is not determined objectively, on the basis of the value of labour-power, but purely subjectively on the basis of a contest of wills between greedy capitalists and more or less militantly inclined workers! Gone, here, is all of the pages of scientific analysis by Marx in Capital of the objective determination of the value of labour-power, as the basis around which wages rotate, or of the determination of the value of commodities, and consequently of the surplus value being the difference between the new value created, and the value of labour-power to be reproduced. Instead we have simply a rehash of the old vulgar economy, and its subjective determination of wages, as understood by Lassalle and his followers.
By contrast, for Engels,
“The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.”
(The Condition of the Working Class, Chapter 10)
And, for Marx,
“I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. ... the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.”
The level of living standards is not the product of some subjectively determined distributional struggle, as Roberts claims, and which, as Marx and Engels demonstrate, the workers would inevitably lose from, but is purely a consequence of the rise in productivity that capitalism brings about, and which is also the basis of The Civilising Mission of Capital, as described by Marx in The Grundrisse.
No comments:
Post a Comment