This rise in productivity, as Marx sets out in The Civilising Mission of Capital, in The Grundrisse, also requires it to produce an ever expanding range of commodities, not just as manufactured goods, but also as services, because there is only a limited quantity of any commodity that any consumer can, or wants to, consume. But, to valorise each existing commodity, it must be sold – which means ultimately, exchanged for some other commodity (C – M – C). Consequently, an ever expanding range of commodities and services is produced, and, although the portion of the day required to reproduce labour-power continually shrinks, the quantity of commodities produced in that time continually increases, because the unit value of these commodities falls by a greater amount. Consequently, wages fall relative to profits, but living standards rise. That is, relative wages fall, but real wages rise.
“And this is the economic constitution of our present day society: it is the working class alone which produces all values. For value is only another expression for labour, that expression, whereby, in our present day capitalist society is designated the amount of socially necessary labour contained in a particular commodity. These values produced by the workers do not, however, belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and reserve funds, which allow these owners to buy the labour-power of the working class. From the whole mass of products produced by it, the working class, therefore, receives back only a part for itself.” (p 12)
In fact, as Marx and Engels set out, in Capital III, Chapter 27, and in Anti-Duhring, even this was no longer the case. By the end of he 19th century, those expropriators had themselves been expropriated by socialised capital. The collective owners of that socialised capital are the workers, themselves, in each workplace – the associated producers – but, only in the worker cooperatives do they exercise control over what is, now, their collective property. In the joint stock company that control was usurped by the shareholders, including the state in respect of nationalised enterprises.
Those shareholders, like any other money-lender, are only entitled to interest/dividends on the money lent, but, in fact, used that control to appropriate much larger sums, thereby, denuding profits, and undermining the continued accumulation of capital itself.
“On the one hand, immeasurable wealth and a superfluidity of products with which the buyers cannot cope. On the other hand, the great mass of society proletarianized, transformed into wage-labourers, and thereby disabled from appropriating to themselves that superfluidity of products.” (p 13)
Engels, reflecting the time, went on to highlight this division, and its manifestation in the want and destitution of a large mass of the population. In relative terms, that has continued, and been accelerated, but, for the various reasons that Marx sets out in The Civilising Mission of Capital, and that Engels, himself, described, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of The Working-Class, in absolute terms, that want and destitution was itself reduced, and despite the moralism and catastrophism of petty-bourgeois “anti-imperialists”, not just in the advanced economies, but globally. As Trotsky noted, in relation to the process of combined and uneven development, and of its equalisation,
“The law of uneven development of capitalism is older than imperialism. Capitalism is developing very unevenly today in the various countries. But in the nineteenth century this unevenness was greater than in the twentieth. At that time England was lord of the world, while Japan on the other hand was a feudal state closely confined within its own limits. At the time when serfdom was abolished among us, Japan began to adapt itself to capitalist civilization. China was, however, still wrapped in the deepest slumber. And so forth. At that time the unevenness of capitalist development was greater than now. Those unevennesses were as well known to Marx and Engels as they are to us. Imperialism has developed a more “levelling tendency” than pre-imperialist capitalism, for the reason that finance capital is the most elastic form of capital.”
The case for Socialism is not moralistic, nor, as the Lassalleans argued, because it leads to poverty. As Marx put it,
“It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!”
(Critique of The Gotha Programme)
The case for Socialism is that it represents the scientifically determined next stage of social evolution. In fact, as Marx and Engels described, in relation to socialised capital, as the transitional form of property, its requirement for increasing levels of planning, and regulation of the economy, on a global scale (imperialism) those relations of production of the socialist society are already here. It is only necessary to construct the corresponding legal and political superstructures upon them, i.e. the political revolution.
“This state of affairs becomes daily more absurd and more unnecessary. It must be abolished; it can be abolished. A new social order is possible, in which the present class differences will have disappeared, and in which – perhaps after a short transition period, involving some privation, but at any rate of great value morally – through the planned utilisation and extension of the enormous productive forces of all members of society, and with uniform obligation to work, the means for existence, for enjoying life, for the development and employment of all bodily and mental faculties will be available in an equal measure and in ever increasing fullness.” (p 13)
No comments:
Post a Comment