The socialists were theoretically wrong, because the value of the commodity labour-power is determined, as with any other commodity, by the labour-time required for its production, i.e. to reproduce the commodities (wage goods) required to reproduce the worker. That value is always less than the new value created in the labour process by the worker, thus leading to a surplus value. But, the socialists fulfilled a useful function, because they raised the question of why, then, the capitalist and not the worker, was able to appropriate this surplus value, giving nothing in return for it. As Marx, and even Adam Smith, had shown, it could not be explained as wages of superintendence, nor could it be claimed to cover the cost of the constant capital they provided (an error repeated by Michael Roberts*), because the value of that constant capital is reproduced in the value of the commodity itself.
(* “The demand for goods and services in a capitalist economy depends on the new value created by labour and appropriated by capital. Capital appropriates surplus value by exploiting labour-power and buys capital goods with that surplus value. Labour gets wages and buys necessities with those wages. Thus it is wages plus profits that determine demand (investment and consumption)”.
Here, in Roberts' account, the value of consumed constant capital is not preserved and reproduced in the value of final output, as Marx demonstrates, but is, instead, somehow, reproduced out of the profits of the capitalist, whereas those profits only form the revenue of the capitalist, used for their personal consumption, and capital accumulation!)
An argument could be made for a payment to them as interest on the capital advanced, but, as Marx sets out, such interest, on the basis of market rates, would be only a tiny fraction of the total profits produced, and appropriated by capitalists.
So, it then became clear that, although they started from theoretically false arguments, what they exposed was that the appropriation of surplus value, by capital, as profit, was, in essence, no different to the appropriation of feudal rent (Labour Rent, Rent In Kind, Money Rent) by the feudal landlords, or the appropriation of surplus product by slave owners from the labour of slaves. As Marx puts it in Capital III, Chapter 47,
“The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.” (p 791-2)
No comments:
Post a Comment