Marx quotes Ricardo,
“One would be led to think.., that Adam Smith concluded we were under some necessity” (this is indeed the case) “of producing a surplus of corn, woollen goods, and hardware, and that the capital which produced them could not be otherwise employed. It is, however, always a matter of choice in what way a capital shall be employed, and therefore there can never, for any length of time, be a surplus of any commodity; for if there were, it would fall below its natural price, and capital would be removed to some more profitable employment” (l.c., pp. 341-42, note).Productions are always bought by productions, or by services; money is only the medium by which the exchange is effected.””
It failed to recognise the difference that rises, even with the introduction of money, C – M – C, whereby, the exchange of commodities splits into two distinct stages, C – M, and M – C, whereby it becomes possible for M, as the general commodity to be demanded in its own right, so that the total circulation falls apart, with C – M, not, necessarily, resulting in M – C.
Marx noted,
“Here, therefore, firstly commodity, in which the contradiction between exchange-value and use-value exists, becomes mere product (use-value) and therefore the exchange of commodities is transformed into mere barter of products, of simple use-values. This is a return not only to the time before capitalist production, but even to the time before there was simple commodity production; and the most complicated phenomenon of capitalist production—the world market crisis—is flatly denied, by denying the first condition of capitalist production, namely, that the product must be a commodity and therefore express itself as money and undergo the process of metamorphosis.
(ibid. p 501)
It creates the potential for all commodities to be overproduced simultaneously, as the one commodity, the general commodity – money – is hoarded.
“At a given moment, the supply of all commodities can be greater than the demand for all commodities, since the demand for the general commodity, money, exchange-value, is greater than the demand for all particular commodities, in other words the motive to turn the commodity into money, to realise its exchange-value, prevails over the motive to transform the commodity again into use-value.”
(ibid. p 505)
Classical Political Economy solved the riddle of the difference between use-value and value, and identified the essence of value as labour, but it failed to completely break from the limitations of the origins of the commodity as first product, and from the conception that all production takes place for the purpose of consumption – either directly or via exchange for other use-values/products.
“In fact, Marx says in Capital: “Political economy ... as an independent science, first sprang into being during the period of manufacture”; and in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, page 29, describes “classical political economy ... as beginning from William Petty in England and Boisguillebert in France, and ending with Ricardo in Britain and Sismondi in France”. Herr Dühring follows the path thus prescribed for him, except that in his view the higher economics begins only with the wretched abortions brought into existence by bourgeois science after the close of its classical period.” (p 290-1)
No comments:
Post a Comment