As Engels notes, here, we also have the return of Duhring's two-person society.
“But it is still more, it is the basic theme of Herr Dühring's whole book. In the sphere of law, Herr Dühring could offer us nothing save a bad translation of Rousseau's theory of equality into the language of socialism, such as one has long been able to hear on a far higher level in any workers’ tavern in Paris. Now he gives us an equally bad socialist translation of the economists’ laments over the distortion of the eternal economic laws of nature and of their effects through the intervention of the state, of force. In this Herr Dühring deservedly stands quite alone among socialists. Every socialist worker, of whatever nationality knows quite well that force only protects exploitation, but does not cause it; that the relation between capital and wage-labour is the basis of his exploitation, and that this arose from purely economic causes and not at all by means of force.” (p 194-5)
In fact, what Engels took for granted, here, is not so easily taken for granted, today, even within the ranks of supposed “Marxists”. Today, much of the “Left” is concerned with the coercive power of monopolies, just as with its extension, with theories of imperialism based on the ideas of “unequal exchange”, “super exploitation” and so on. It is a triumph of the ideas of Sismondi and Proudhon, also contained in the ideas of Duhring, over the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, but camouflaging itself in the clothes of the latter.
Engels quotes Duhring's statement.
“in all economic questions “two processes, that of production and that of distribution, can be distinguished”. Also that the notoriously superficial J. B. Say added yet a third process, that of use, of consumption, but that he was unable to say anything sensible about it, any more than his successors; but that exchange or circulation is only a department of production, which comprises all the operations required for the products to reach the final and actual consumers.” (p 195)
Engels comments,
“By confounding the two processes of production and circulation, which though conditioning each other are essentially different, and unblushingly asserting that the avoidance of this confusion can only “give rise to confusion”, Herr Dühring merely shows that he either does not know or does not understand the colossal development which this very process of circulation has undergone during the last fifty years, as indeed is further borne out by the rest of his book.” (p 195)
Marx and Engels set out this distinction and conditioning in Capital II, and III. I have, also, referred to it, earlier. In Capital II, Marx and Engels set out the distinction between Production Time and Circulation Time, in reference to the circuit of industrial capital, an its rate of turnover. The commodity producer creates the value of the commodity, during its production, but they cannot realise this value until it is sold. They must take it to market and sell it, and this time, required to sell the commodity, at market, and, then, to be able to utilise the money as money-capital to buy, and, thereby, replace the consumed productive-capital, is its circulation time.
The time spent in circulation is time the producer could have been using to produce more commodities, but it does not add any new value. This additional cost, thereby, reduces the amount of realised profit, and must be minimised. Hence, commercial capital takes on this role. As wholesalers and retailers, they specialise in this activity, and obtain the benefits of specialisation and economies of scale. The same is true of money-dealing capital. Both reduce the costs of circulation and speed up the turnover of capital. They create no surplus value, but, as Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 17, they increase the mass of realised profit, and by raising the rate of turnover, raise the average annual rate of profit. Its on this basis that commercial capital, as an element of industrial capital, shares in that average profit.
“After lumping production and exchange together into production as such, he puts distribution alongside production, as a second, wholly external process, which has nothing whatever to do with the first. Now we have seen that in its decisive features distribution is always the necessary result of the relations of production and exchange in a particular society, as well as of the historical preconditions of this society; so much so that when we know these relations and preconditions we can definitely infer the prevailing mode of distribution in this society.” (p 195)
No comments:
Post a Comment