It is not, as Jack Conrad claims, that "the world is awash with surplus capital - capital that cannot be profitably invested in the production of surplus value”. The working-class, as in the post-war period, is in an upward trend, but it is near the start of that trend, as in the 1960's, not at the end of it, as in the 1920's or the 1970's/80's. Conrad's analysis is wrong, because he confuses Trump's regime with the US ruling class, and, also, confuses the interests of the US ruling-class - a class of rentiers and speculators – with the interests of US capital itself. Trump himself, is certainly a rentier, but his political regime rests upon, not the ruling-class, nor upon real capital, but on the petty-bourgeoisie, and its associated layers. As with all such regimes, it explains its Bonapartist nature, as described by Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire.
With profits, the rate of profit, and the rate of surplus value at high levels, the idea that capital cannot be invested profitably, so as to produce surplus value, which would signify a crisis of overproduction of capital, is risible. Just look at what happens, for example, when one of those owners of astronomical amounts of money-capital – be it, Musk, Bezos or whoever – does precisely what Marx describes in the passage quoted earlier, and uses that money-capital productively, i.e. turns themselves, once more, into an industrial capitalist. Has Musk found any problem making profits, producing surplus value by investing huge amounts of capital in the space industry? Absolutely, not, and that is just one industry.
The realm of biotechnology, genetic technology, medical science, robotics, cybernetics and so on are wide open for profitable investment on a massive scale. The problem is not the lack of potential for such profitable investment, but that the immediate and guaranteed returns from simply using money for speculation, to obtain capital gains has far outweighed it. The ruling-class, after all, is a parasitic class of rentiers and speculators that removed itself from any functional role in production more than a century ago, and is at home in this world of coupon-clipping and speculation, as against the more tedious business of actually accumulating real capital, and all of the risks that go with it.
Marx noted,
“In order to quickly settle this question, let us point out that one could also mean by the accumulation of money-capital the accumulation of wealth in the hands of bankers (money-lenders by profession), acting as middlemen between private money-capitalists on the one hand, and the state, communities, and reproducing borrowers on the other. For the entire vast extension of the credit system, and all credit in general, is exploited by them as their private capital. These fellows always possess capital and incomes in money-form or in direct claims on money. The accumulation of the wealth of this class may take place completely differently than actual accumulation, but it proves at any rate that this class pockets a good deal of the real accumulation.”
Marx, also, sets out, in that chapter, indeed, that at times of more rapid economic growth, with rising masses of profits, a surplus of loanable, money-capital can arise, precisely because an increasing proportion of the transactions between firms are conducted, not on the basis of bank credit, or resort to capital markets, but simply on the basis of commercial credit between them.
Indeed, more than that. As Marx described, these two forms of property, fictitious-capital and industrial capital, and the revenues derived from them, are imminently antagonistic to each other.
“These two forms, interest and profit of enterprise, exist only as opposites. Hence, they are not related to surplus-value, of which they are but parts placed under different categories, heads or names, but rather to one another...
The lending capitalist as such faces the capitalist performing his actual function in the process of reproduction, not the wage-worker, who, precisely under capitalist production, is expropriated of the means of production. Interest-bearing capital is capital as property as distinct from capital as a function. But so long as capital does not perform its function, it does not exploit labourers and does not come into opposition to labour.
On the other hand, profit of enterprise is not related as an opposite to wage-labour, but only to interest.”
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