In Capital, Marx begins with an analysis of the commodity, as the basic cell form, which the entire organism of capital is comprised. Only as part of this analysis does he, later, analyse labour-power as a specific commodity, and wages as the price of that labour-power. Here, Marx begins with labour-power and wages. There are several reasons for that. Although Capital was also intended to lay bare the nature of capitalism for the workers, and their parties, to utilise, it was also the theoretical form in which Marx explained, and proved, his theory of historical materialism, as the scientific basis for understanding the evolution of such social organisms, in the same way that Darwin's theory explained biological evolution.
Marx, similarly to Darwin, showed that there was no need to resort to the actions of God or Divine Providence, or even conscious human will, to explain such evolution. Biological evolution occurs via natural processes, as those members of species best adapted to the material conditions prosper, and their advantageous characteristics are passed on into following generations, until they form a separate species. Similarly, material conditions, also, determine the most advantageous means by which societies can produce to meet their needs, and these specific productive relations determine the social relations that arise from them.
As Marx put it,
“the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.”
(Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9)
Every society is constrained, and driven by The Law of Value, as set out, by Marx, in his Letter to Kugelmann. That is, every society must produce use values/products to meet its needs to live, but it has limited labour-time to produce those products. As Engels put it, they must continually balance the useful effects (use-value/utility) from any given product, against the labour-time (value) required to produce it, in order to maximise its welfare. That drives, automatically, a search for more efficient means of producing, so that this higher productivity enables more use values to be produced with any given amount of available labour-time. The unit value of products, thereby, falls.
Although the effect of this process can be seen as determining why, in some parts of the world, material conditions do not drive rapid development of technology (because Nature provides these things free, in abundance), or else, leads to collective activity (Asiatic Mode of Production), and so on, Marx sought to prove his theory by looking, in detail, at just one mode of production – capitalism – and showing how it arose, naturally, out of feudalism, and was, already, in process of transition to the next, higher mode of production – Socialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment