email: hobgoblinlondon@aol.com
THE HOBGOBLIN NO.6 2004
Marx's Capital in the the Struggle for a New Human Society. By Andrew Kliman.
Extricate Mankind from the Prison of Capitalism. By Harry McShane.
Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx's Capital:
The Humanism and Dialectic of Capital Volume 1, 1867 to 1883; The Logic and Scope of Capital, Volume III. Today's Epigones Who Try to Truncate Marx's Capital (on Ernst Mandel); Rosdolsky's Methodology and the Missing Dialectic.
Karl Marx on The Limits the Working Day; and The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour. (Introduction by Richard Abernethy)
Labour and Value from the Greek Polis to Globalised State-Capitalism. By David Black
Marx's Capital in the the Struggle for a New Human Society.
By Andrew Kliman.
This special issue of The Hobgoblin on Marx’s Capital carries three chapters of Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1958 Marxism and Freedom which analyze and comment on all three volumes of Capital, as well as her late 1970s’ critiques of Ernest Mandel’s “Introduction” to Volume I and of Roman Rosdolsky on Marx’s method. Also included are new essays by Dave Black on the concept of value, and Richard Abernethy introduces Marx on the working day.
In the face of unprecedented retrogression, the struggle for new human relations continues. A whole new movement against exploitative global capital has emerged, and tens of millions of people worldwide have mobilized in opposition to the U.S. government’s “permanent war.” Yet people engaged in these and other struggles must also struggle daily with an inner enemy, the ever-present spectre of TINA – “there is no alternative.” TINA weighs like a nightmare on our brains, constricting our thought processes and making our brains themselves impose limits upon what we dare to fight for and even to hope for.
These self-imposed limits should not be confused with realism and practicality. TINA has led to the resurgence of an unrealistic, almost desperate hope that, though capitalism is here to stay, it can nonetheless be reformed in a fundamental and sustainable way. How else can we account for the renewed popularity of social democracy, even though it collapsed everywhere just as Russian state-capitalism did, unable to sustain itself and its reforms in the face of neo-liberal reaction? Moreover, the theoretical basis of calls for “fair exchange,” more representative international financial and political institutions, “living wages,” and similar nostrums is, all too often, unrealistic hope that fundamental reform is sustainable.
What we need, I think, is a different sort of hope, hope grounded in real possibilities for a better future, and a different sort of thinking – dialectical thinking – that can help us search out and develop the real possibilities that TINA-think assumes away. Capital continues to deserve careful study as a prime example of revolutionary dialectical methodology in action. Although many leftist theorists today regard the dialectic as an expression of capital’s “totalizing” logic, in Marx’s hands the dialectic “includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; … it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; … it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary” (Marx, Postface to the 2nd ed. of Capital, Vol. I).
Thus, although Mandel’s “Introduction” and other commentaries try to divide Marx into a revolutionary and a “strictly scientific” economist, this division is untenable. From the dual character of the commodity on the first page, to Volume III’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, the internal contradictions of which produce economic crises, Capital’s “positive” theory of how capitalism functions includes “negativity” within itself. The system’s dualities and internal contradictions are what make it inherently unstable and therefore something humankind can transcend. At each moment, however, discerning how this abstract possibility can become a real one requires a lot of hard thinking.
Another reason why Capital continues to have direct implications for political practice is that Marx was taking on ideologies quite similar to those of our day. On the one hand, he combats the TINA-think of bourgeois political economy (“there has been history, but there is no longer any”). At the same time, he combats the political economy of Proudhon and other leftists who claimed that the ills of capitalism can be ameliorated by reforming monetary, exchange, and financial relations, while leaving the capitalist mode of production intact.
This latter dimension of Capital is often suppressed. Some leftists do not want the specificity of Marx’s ideas to interfere with their calls for us to “unite” – behind them; others want to attach his name to perspectives and projects that have more in common with the tendencies he fought than with his own ideas. Marx himself, however, continually fought for his specific ideas within the movement, especially once Capital was published and available for all to study. In 1875, the “Marxist” (Eisenach) and Lassallean political parties in Germany united on the basis of the Gotha Programme. Marx’s critique of this Programme complains again and again that its positions and demands fail to measure up to the theoretical conclusions worked out in Capital. This was no academic exercise. He opposed the unification of the parties precisely because he found the Programme’s ideas wrong and inadequate. He would not let the desire for unity interfere with the development of ideas. The ideas are what give action its direction, as Dunayevskaya often put it.
When Capital is considered as a critique of bourgeois political economy only, not a critique of Proudhonist political economy as well, some of it becomes inscrutable or even pointless. Consider section 3 of the first chapter, on “the value-form.” This section contains an intricate dialectical derivation of money from the commodity form, but what is the point? Marx is emphatic that this derivation is crucial – “we have to perform a task … we have to show … we have to trace” – but why? The answer, I believe, is that he is showing money to be a necessary consequence of commodity production. In order to do away with the social ills associated with money and exchange, it is necessary to do away with commodity production. Conversely, as long as commodity production remains, so must money and the social ills associated with it. As Marx had written earlier, in a critique of Darimon, a Proudhonist, “it is impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks, and in order to know the limits [of] monetary reforms and transformations of circulation [commodity exchange]” (Marx, Grundrisse, Vintage Books, p. 145).Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Capital, too, can offer us crucial assistance today as we labour to search out and develop real possibilities for a new, human society. She challenges the widespread leftist faith that abolition or reform of market relations can overcome capitalism. Simultaneously, she “grasps the transient aspect” of alienation and exploitation, which are engendered and sustained by the historically unique system of capitalist production. Only in this system is there an incessant drive to produce ever-more “value” – ever-more wealth as an end in itself, wealth that is produced in order to produce more wealth, not to satisfy human needs. And only freely associated workers, Dunayevskaya contends, can abrogate the law of value and thereby make their products serve them, rather than the opposite. (Suddenly the words “commodity fetish” take on a whole new meaning.)
Some of what she said about Capital is more widely recognized today than when she wrote, and a whole school of Marxian economists and philosophers – the so-called “value-form” school – now emphasizes, as she did, Capital’s focus on capitalism’s historically unique character. Yet what it emphasizes is the uniqueness of a society dominated by money, market exchange, and finance. Marx realized that, in a society “bounded by the craze for making money,” it is difficult “to see in the character of the mode of production the basis of the corresponding mode of circulation, [not] vice versa” (Capital, Vol. II, Kerr ed., pp. 132-33) It is all the more difficult in an era in which finance seems increasingly to be the prime engine of money-making..
Thus, much of what Marx said, and Dunayevskaya reclaimed, about the relationship between production and the market has yet to be understood, much less internalized. Consider another statement from Volume II to which she draws attention: “The peculiar characteristic is not that the commodity, labor power, is saleable, but that labor power appears in the shape of a commodity.” “Huh?,” one can hear frustrated and bemused readers ask. “What is a commodity if not something saleable?” If Marx was right that the commodification of workers’ labour power (capacity to work) is the defining characteristic of the capitalist epoch, then those who want to transcend this epoch would do well not to let the question remain a rhetorical one.
What made Dunayevskaya singularly able to reclaim dimensions of Capital that many overlooked or found opaque – and others have suppressed – was her conviction that Stalinist Russia was a state-capitalist society, together with her felt need to substantiate that conviction by grounding it in Marx’s theory. Russia’s statified property and Plan sufficed to make it non-capitalist in the eyes of those who equated capitalism with private property, the market, etc. Rejecting that equation, she was able to discern that Marx had distinguished capitalism from all other societies on the basis of its historically unique mode of production, a mode of production that, she held, prevailed also in Russia. This insight into the uniqueness of capitalist production enabled her to develop a new interpretation of Capital in which “commodity,” “abstract labour,” “fetishism” and other concepts were no longer centered in the market and exchange.
Thus Dunayevskaya’s presentation of her new interpretation of Capital is tightly interwoven with her analysis of Russia as a state-capitalist society. Yet the former is not reducible to the latter. It remains relevant in an era in which state property, planning, and the Party are, thankfully, widely recognized not to be panaceas, but in which faith persists that mere changes in property forms, exchange relations, and political institutions can bring about sustainable social change.
Reading Dunayevskaya on Marx, however, is no substitute for reading Marx – nor do I think she meant it to be. Her commentaries on Capital are all “argumentative” rather than “expository”; they are interventions on specific issues that sometimes presuppose the reader’s familiarity with the book, not attempts to popularize it or tell us “everything we need to know” about it. She regarded Mandel’s lengthy introduction to Volume I of Capital as a “burden” on the work and a “vulgarization” that presented his views instead of Marx’s. The particular content of his introduction is no doubt part of what angered her, yet, especially in the last decade of her life, Dunayevskaya also expressed profound dissatisfaction with how even the best “post-Marx Marxists,” such as Engels, had treated Marx’s work. Because they were overly confident that they understood his work, she argued, they too gave us popularizations that presented their views as his. (See “Marxist-Humanism’s Challenge to All Post-Marx Marxists,” in the 2nd ed. of Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991.)
In the case of a book like Capital, there is a constant temptation to rely on popularizations, as well as a temptation to read commentaries like Dunayevskaya’s as if they provided the same “assistance.” I think it is crucial to resist such temptations. Precisely because Capital is so difficult and complexly structured, one ends up either reading the popularization instead of the book, or reading the book through the popularizer’s eyes, lightly glancing over unfamiliar things and finding (of course!) that the rest confirms what one already “knows.” Unfortunately, what has long been said about there being “no royal road to science” is true.
I’d like to conclude with a comment on another kind of resistance to the patient, methodical study that a work like Capital demands of the reader. Like much of the 1960s’ New Left, many young leftists today think that “too much” emphasis on theory is a bad thing, that it leads to hierarchy and the authoritarian vanguard party. I consider this a radical misdiagnosis. The vanguard parties were long on flexibility and short on genuine theoretical reflection and development. (I recently learned that the U.S. Communist Party held classes at its Jefferson School, ostensibly on Capital, in which students never even opened the book.) Rank-and-file members needed to learn flexibility, not ideas, in order to fall in behind the changes in the party line, and the name of the game was to follow the leader, not to follow out the logic of ideas to their conclusion. And if we fail to follow out the logic of ideas, we inevitably end up following someone or something else. We either follow the leader or rely upon “common sense” – i.e. unthinkingly follow bits of bourgeois ideology instilled in us since birth.Top of the page
Preface by Harry McShane to Marx’s Capital and Today’s Global Crisis by Raya Dunayevskaya.[1]
[We are pleased to reprint the original preface by Harry McShane to the pamphlet Marx’s Capital and Today’s Global Crisis by Raya Dunayevskaya.1 McShane (1891-1988) was synonymous with working class struggle in the west of Scotland. As a comrade of John McLean, McShane was one of those early Marxist’s who saw the importance of independent working class education. After breaking from the stalinised Communist Party in 1953 he embraced Marxist-Humanism producing The Scottish Marxist-Humanist until 1976.]
It is certainly a compliment to be asked to write a Preface to another work by the tireless, sincere and scholarly author, Raya Dunayevskaya. She never lets up in her efforts to unearth and make use of what is basic in Marxist theory and to tie that up with the practical tasks that must be undertaken in order to extricate mankind from the prison of capitalism that stands in the way of human development. This work comes at a time when too many of our fellow human beings have become deplorably indifferent about the future of humanity. The only school of thought that points to a future for mankind is that of Marxism. It must, however, be Marxism resurrected from the bog of futility and obscurity into which it was put by leaders who used it as nothing more than a label.
Retrogression is visible in industry, politics, and without a doubt, in the field of theory. The more often our political guides use the word "strategy," the clearer it becomes that they are dazed by the problems that they find insoluble. Retrogression gets deeper in modern society. That is why Raya Dunayevskaya calls for urgency; a call directed to the masses, the only force that can bring retrogression to an end and open up the way to human emancipation. The choice is between the downhill road of human degradation, on the one hand, and human development on the other. The future rests with the masses.
The thought of the transformation of society coming from the masses is an indispensable element of Marxist theory fully expressed in the writings of both Marx and Lenin. Those who dispute it have shut their eyes to the facts of history. Raya Dunayevskaya refers to the Paris Commune and how it affected Marx. The new kind of order initiated by the people of Paris won the admiration of Marx. What Marx said about this exciting historical episode should be read by all who would like to probe the depth of Marx's revolutionary thinking. It was in the Commune that the act of self-government by the masses was initiated in such a way as to influence Marx, and, some years later, Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution. Bringing to life the admiration expressed by Marx, the author says, "The armed people smashed parliamentarianism. The people's assembly was not to be a parliamentary talking shop but a working body."
One is tempted to devote more space to the Paris Commune than is permissible here, but the question must be put: Who, before reading the points made by Raya Dunayevskaya,. suspected that the Paris Commune had any bearing on Marx's Capital? Labour, as she says, was released from the confines of value production "which robs the workers of all individuality and reduces them merely to a component of labour in general." The author points out that new additions were introduced into the French edition of Capital. Marx makes the point himself. Before leaving this reference to the Paris Commune, it seems appropriate here to recall that Lenin, writing in 1919, accused leading socialists in Germany of failing "to understand the significance of Soviet, or proletarian democracy, in relation to the Paris Commune, its place in history, its necessity as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Lenin, of course, said much more than that on the Paris Commune, and attached great importance to it.
When Raya Dunayevskaya writes of change coming from below she thinks not only of the world in which Marx lived; she relates the basic philosophy of Marx to the world of conflict in which we live and sees there the choice facing humanity. The dangers that confront us are so serious that unless some force exists that is capable of transforming society we may as well throw our hands up in despair. The force produced by the history and economics of capitalism is the proletariat on which rests the realization of the universal desire for freedom innate in the make-up of every member of the human race. This concept of movement confirms what the author attributes to Hegel and Marx. There is little fear of her meeting with serious opposition in that. When connecting Marx with Hegel on dialectical movement, as she does in all her works, she has the support of Marx himself.
There is something else that connects Marx with Hegel; it is something that Marx took from Hegel, but found it a reality in capitalist production. The word "alienation" has found its way into the vocabulary of many Marxists, but, too often, is passed over lightly and often forgotten. It is important that the process of exploitation under capitalism be understood by all, but there is much more than that in Capital if we look for it. Raya Dunayevskaya renders a service by re-producing the chapters on all three volumes of Marx's Capital that formed part of her book, Marxism and Freedom. These chapters had an enlightening effect on the writer of this Preface. It became clear that there is more in Marx's Capital than economics. It would be marvelous if rank and file members of the labour movement could all be persuaded to read these chapters.
The process of exploitation on which capitalism rests is shown in the early chapters of Capital, but too many readers of that work thought that sufficient, not knowing that the philosophy that drove him along finds expression there. There is the picture of how the worker is dominated by the products of his labour plus the picture of the road to freedom. Freedom, above all else, is what Marx is concerned about. Raya Dunayevskaya gives emphasis to what Marx meant when referring to the division of labour, the domination of the worker by the machine and "the fragmentation of man."
Now that a new interest is developing, here in Britain, in Marxist education, one would hope that use will be made of this particular section of Raya Dunayevskaya's work. It is well to recall the fact that, for many years, Marxist economics featured strongly as part of the curriculum in classes of the Labour movement. John Maclean was said to have the largest class in Europe on Marxist economics - when he was not in prison for his political activities.
We are no longer justified in regarding Marx as just a brilliant economist. The philosophy that runs through Capital was deep-rooted in Marx and actuated him through his life. It dates from the days when he called himself a Humanist - before he wrote the Communist Manifesto along with Engels. The author pulls the writings of Marx together and views the world situation from the Marxist-Humanist viewpoint. With Marx she sees Communism as only the beginning; as a stage mediating the higher development of man as a result of his own creative activities. This viewpoint necessitates a look at Russia where, in 1917, the greatest stride towards the goal of Communism was taken.
Before anyone else, Raya llunayevskaya, who had been in the revolutionary movement for years, boldly declared that Russia had marched in the opposite direction to that set by Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks. She made an original analysis of the economy of Russia in support of her contention that Russia had been completely transformed into a statecapitalist society. She led a minority to the Trotskyist movement on this issue. The regime in Russia has nothing in common with the Marxist aim of human liberation or the call of Marx for "the development of human power which is its own end." State-capitalism is a rapidly growing trend throughout the world, with the result that the democratic pretence of the rulers is becoming more apparent. The banner of liberation must be raised by the people below. It is this aim that gives purpose to this work by Raya Dunayevskaya.
It seems remarkable that it is the elements of Marxist thought ignored for many years by Marxist theorists that the author sees as important if we are to understand either Marx or Lenin. Why Marxist writers tried to minimize the significance of Marx's acknowledgement to Hegel is difficult to understand. Revolutionaries may not know it, but through Marx we all owe a debt to Hegel. We are enriched by his discovery of dialectics even if Hegel confined it to the world of thought. It is just as puzzling why so little has been said by the same writers about Lenin making a study of Hegel after the collapse of the Second International in 1914. In his Philosophic Notebooks, Lenin saw that thought in the mind of the human being can be creative. As against the old type of materialism expounded by many Marxist writers, to Lenin dialectics was the proof of working people changing society. The reluctance of Marxists to give sufficient attention to the Humanist Essays that Marx produced in 1844 is likewise puzzling. This abundance of material is presented by the author to give fresh meaning to Marxism.
Just as Marx and Lenin would, the author repudiates any suggestion that theory and practice can be separated. They are related dialectically. The present situation should bring about their higher unity; this is the author's purpose. She has identified herself with the concrete struggles for freedom in East Europe, in Africa and in America. She has thrown herself into the Women's Liberation movement now gathering strength, just as she has participated actively in the Black movement for more than a quarter of a century.
In this new work, as in all she writes, she makes visible the banner of freedom. What is basic for her is the curtailment of freedom under the present social order. The how and why of it is explained in the chapters on Marx's Capital. It is important that these chapters be read by all interested in the industrial disputes and the problem of unemployment. Why is it that in Britain while the balance of payments is improved by the flow of North Sea oil, the number of unemployed has jumped to a record figure? What produces the problem of investment? What events caused Marx to make changes in the structure of Capital?
The recent virulent racialism and openly Nazi National Front activity in Britain are today compelling even the bureaucratic Labour leaders to take a second look at Marx's famous statement: "Labour in the white skin cannot be free so long as labour in the Black skin is branded." This was neither beautiful rhetoric, nor intended only for the U.S. audience. It is so relevant to our day and age on both sides of the Atlantic that ours is the generation that can fully understand Marx's restructuring of Capital under the impact of the Civil War in the U.S. and the consequent struggles for the shortening of the working day both in Great Britain and in the U.S.
The top politicians who have been tinkering with the economic problems plaguing this society have long since given up hope of getting any solution from the writings of the late Lord Keynes or anyone else. They would do well to read Raya Dunayevskaya on Karl Marx.
There is nothing dull in her writing. The reader feels that he or she is being allowed to see the picture. The road - the only road to freedom and human emancipation - is there for all to see, even if it is hard and up-hill.
1 Marx’s Capital and Today’s Global Crisis by Raya Dunayevskaya, News & Letters USA 1977.
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A Critique of Roman Rosdolsky
Rosdolsky’s Methodology and the Missing Dialectic
By Raya DunayevskayaPreface
It is an opportune time to publish this review of The Making of Marx’s Capital, for a new edition of this major work by the Ukrainian Marxist scholar Roman Rosdolsky has been issued by Pluto Press. The importance of this book can be measured in the fact that despite being out of print for many years it has retained influence and respect and is considered a classic in the field of Marxist studies.
Rosdolsky was born in Western Ukraine in 1898. As a youth he was courageously active in the International Revolutionary Social Democracy, which opposed the First World War. He later became a leader of the Communist Party of West Ukraine. An opponent of Stalin he survived the repression of Ukrainian communists only to be incarcerated in Auschwitz in 1942. He emigrated to the USA in 1947 where he saw for the first time a rare copy of Marx’s rough draft of Capital – the Grundrisse. He then spent over fifteen years writing the Making of Marx’s Capital.
Dunayevskaya, also from Ukraine; knew Rosdolsky from 1948. She too had been studying the Grundrisse and they remained friends for some years. They differed in views of Stalinism, Rosdolsky being closer to Trotskyism. Their differences increased with Dunayevskaya seeing the centrality of dialectics in Marxism as opposed to “in general”. They parted in 1953 during the East German revolt. This disagreement is reflected in this review, published in News & Letters in Jan 1978. Here Dunayevskaya takes issue with Rosdolksky, asserting that it is this dialectical methodology which is ‘totally missing’ in his magnum opus: the Making of Marx’s CapitalAmong non-Stalinist but leadership-conscious Marxists there is hardly a work that has gained the acclaim accorded to The Making of Marx's 'Capital' by Roman Rosdolsky. Published in Germany in 1968, it has now been brought out by Pluto Press in an English translation for the fantastic sum of $35. It is as if the price itself testifies to its importance. If not a "classic", it is, after all, about the only available lengthy, serious commentary on Marx's Grundrisse, which has only recently been published in English for the first time.
Roman Rosdolsky, a well-known Marxist theoretician, tells us that ever since 1948, when he obtained one of the rare copies of the Grundrisse then available, he has been studying that "Rough Draft" of Capital and set himself a two-fold task: (1) to write a commentary, or more precisely, an exposition of the new discovery "mainly in Marx's own words"; and (2) "to make a scientific evaluation of some of the new findings which it contained" (p.xi). The preoccupation with the latter comprises Roman Rosdolsky's original contribution. To it he devotes Parts One and Seven—"Introduction", i.e., mainly the origin and structure of the work; and "Critical Excursus". To these 225 pages should really be added some 35 pages (Part Six, "Conclusion") which summarize what he found in the exposition and commentary of the work.i Since, as he correctly notes, "Of all the problems in Marx's economic theory the most neglected has been that of his method both in general and, specifically, in relation to Hegel," methodology is the underlying motif not only of his "critical excursus", but the reason for writing the whole of the 581 pages.
I wish I could report that a genuine contribution to dialectical methodology had been made by Rosdolsky. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. If there is anything that is totally missing in his massive study it is dialectics. To the extent to which he does make a contribution to the comprehension of the Grundrisse (lots of quotations, especially on Money, but no self-movement of the whole) the reader gets neither a view understanding of why Marx nevertheless decided to start everything "anew".THE MISSING DIALECTIC
This is said not to play down the significance of the Grundrisse, much less to say that "starting anew" meant Marx discarded the validity of the range of the "Rough Outline" just because, instead of the six books there listed, Marx readied for publication only three, and finished only one. Quite the contrary. While he definitely rejected its shapelessness, comparing it to the formlessness of "sauerkraut and carrots", Marx meant to develop further some of the most brilliant and profound of his writings that could not find their way into the new dialectic structure of Capital, Volume I—like "The Pre-Capitalist Economic Forms”, and “the absolute movement of becoming”. We get a whiff of this in a footnote in the totally new “Fetishism of Commodities” when he refers to the Taiping Revolution, as against the quiescent European workers following the 1848 revolutionary defeats, as if China embarked on their revolution “to encourage” the Europeans to revolt.
Rosdolsky on the other hand, who writes 581 pages to expound the Grundrisse, has not a word to say about the originality, dialectic, and dimension of the new, totally new, concept of the Orient, China especially, contained in “Pre-Capitalist Economic Forms”, though the period he was writing in followed the 1949 Chinese Revolution, which was the compulsion for the European Marxists to publish, first, that very section, and finally the whole of the Grundrisse. (The English translation, however, first came out in 1973.)
It was the specific section on the economic forms preceding capitalist production that became most relevant to the new birth of a “Third World.” Nor was it only a question of relevance. It was the dialectics of liberation that gave the dialectic of thought a new dimension of revolution. It is the dialectic that is missing from Rosdolsky’s methodology. By using it synonymously with methodology he has managed to reduce both to mere presupposition.THE PRESUPPOSITION
Let’s take a second look at Rosdolsky’s claimed preoccupation with methodology. It has led him, among other things, to create a special Appendix directly to Part One on Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital rather than wait for the end of his work where he deals with all debates on Volume II of Capital, including of course, Luxemburg’s critique of Marx’s theory of accumulation (pages 490-505). What, in the first part, he entitles “Methodological Comments on Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of Marx’s Schemes of Reproduction” (pages 63-72) turns out to be a question of Marx’s presupposition of a “closed capitalist society.”
Luxemburg uses neither the word, dialectic, nor methodology, making it clear that she is arguing against Marx's "theoretical assumption of a society of capitalists and workers only", and not against the dialectical development flowing from this. It is the assumption that, she claims, is "a Bloodless theoretical fiction" as against the reality of "third groups" and capitalism being surrounded by non-capitalist lands. Indeed, she stresses that it is "the spirit of Marxist theory" that demands we "abandon the premise of the first volume."
The issue has been debated for more than a half century. What is new in Rosdolsky is the claim that it was not done methodologically, that her error in grappling with the problems in Volume II of Capital was that she "underestimated the so-called 'Hegelian inheritance' in Marx's thought" (p.492). The irony is that what he cites as proof was her criticism, not of Vol. II, but Vol. I. So aroused was she over the attacks on her Accumulation of Capital that far from "underestimating Hegelian inheritance", she hit out against Marx's "famed Volume I of Capital with its Hegelian Rococo ornamentation" which she now (March 8, 1917) wrote "is quite abhorrent to me." Rosdolsky, however, proceeds on his merry way, exposing "the dialectic content hiding behind Marx's 'Hegelian style'"—as if style were the issue.
In truth, so total is his blindness to dialectic as content as well as form, as self-movement, self-development, self-activity—all internal, with external being the objectification, manifestation, the non-human—that, by the end of his 445 pages of exposition, Rosdolsky succeeds in reducing to absurdity the very meaning of the word, the very specific word that Marx, and Marx alone, used so incisively and originally: Reification.
Where Marx used the word to prove the horrors of capitalistic alienation of the laborer, reducing man to thing, Rosdolsky applies it to economic category, entitling the concluding chapter of his exposition, "The Reification of Economic Categories . . . " Where Marx demonstrates that the mystification of economic categories, the fetishism of commodities, all arise from the very "perversity" (Marx's expression) of relation of object to subject, relations between men assuming the "fantastic form of relations between things," Rosdolsky puts mystification of things on a par with "reification of labor".
Marx does the exact opposite, demonstrating that the reason why the perversion of subject to object assumes that form is due to the fact that, in the process of production, that is what production relations "really are": laborers are mere appendages to machines. The reader can now see that my criticism of Rosdolsky sticking so narrowly to the Grundrisse meant, not a way of playing down the importance of Grundrisse, but stressing that, in form, and in content and articulation of economic categories, economic laws of development through contradiction and crises—the "law-of motion" of capitalism to its collapse—Marx's final statement is not in Grundrisse, but in Capital.
Rosdolsky, however, is preoccupied with the changes "in general" rather than in the particular, with the number of books rather than the changes within the first volume of Capital, which is, after all, the only one Marx fully prepared for the printer, 1867. After that, he again introduced changes he considered so important that he asked even those who had read it in the original to read the new French edition (1872-75) since it "possesses a scientific value independent of the original."ii Rosdolsky, on the other hand, is veritably obsessed with "the movement from the abstract to the concrete" as if the dialectic never gets to the concrete.
It is true Rosdolsky has made some valuable contributions, the most important being that he makes clear that the Humanism of the young Marx, 1844, the relationship of Marx to Hegel of the mature Marx, the Marx of the Grundrisse, 1887-58, and the "scientific" socialism of the Marx of Capital, 1867-83, are all one and the same. It is surely valuable when the one who says this is not a "Hegelian Marxist", but an "economist."
It is also valuable when Rosdolsky demonstrates that, although Marx finished only three books after he outlined six, what seemed to have been left out, like the book on Landed Property, actually was incorporated in the part on Rent in Volume III. And Rosdolsky does indeed make mincemeat of Karl Kautsky's contentions: (1) that the historic sweep of Marx's famous chapter, "Historical Tendency of Accumulation", is but a variation of "Change in the Appearance of the Law of Appropriation"; and (2) that the outline in 1862-63 was already the finished new outline of Capital, 1866, which Rosdolsky correctly shows would have meant "nothing short of disregarding the Working Day, Simple Cooperation, Division of Labor, etc." (p. 17). But Rosdolsky himself fails to see that the writing of some 75 pages on The Working Day directly into the "abstract" theoretic volume I, while relegating to Vol. IV the contending with all the other "Theories of Surplus Value", meant an actual break with the very concept of theory, both as dialectics of thought and dialectics of liberation.
Instead, Rosdolsky decided to conclude his "Critical Excursus" with a special chapter in praise of Oscar Lange's Political Economy which, says Rosdolsky, "is to our knowledge the only work in more recent academic Marxist literature which consciously, and in detail, takes up the question of the methodology of Marx's Capital" (p. 552). This would, to say the least, sound peculiar to all except Rosdolsky who is himself deaf to the dialectic. It was Lange who rushed to the defense of the Stalinist break with the dialectic structure of Capital and—integral to that break—the revision of the Marxist analysis of the law of value, when I translated that article from Pod Znamenem Marxisma (Under the Banner of Marxism) in the American Economic Review of Sept. 1944. The authors had proposed that in the future Russian teaching should not follow the structure of Capital.
In my commentary, I stated that this was but the reflection of "economic reality," that is to say, the state-capitalist, not socialist reality.
In the excuse that, "tempting" as discussions of value would be, it is outside the confines of his study, Roman Rosdolsky has not a word to say of this debate.iii I doubt that that is the reason for his silence, and not only because he chose, as the very climax of his work, to end with a discussion of Lange, full of praise of his Political Economy for devoting three chapters to "methodology." No, my doubt is due to the fact that this is not a question of debates, inside or outside of Russia. It is a question of the actual revision of Marx's view that the law of value is the motivating force of capitalism. It is a question of timing—the height of World War II—and the Russian workers could have told Rosdolsky that Stalin was announcing that there was to be no change in the exploitative reality even after the successful end of the war.
As he said, what is actually at stake, whether Roman Rosdolsky was or was not conscious of it, is that tailending Stalinist economism is unavoidable when the Subject—freely associated labor—is left as an abstraction. This leads inexorably to the failure to grapple with the dialectic. To understand how this is so we must return to Marx.
Marx wrote 881 pages of the "Rough Draft" of what was to be Capital i.e., the Grundrisse, and only in the very last paragraph he writes "The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity," and then notes that "This section is to be brought forward." To Engels he writes that, now that he wishes to single out some of these chapters and rework them for publication, "before the deluge"—that is, before the economic crisis of 1857-58 runs its course, perhaps even to revolution—he finds that he must first construct a new first chapter as he doesn't have one on Commodity. And this he did for the 1859 publication, Critique of Political Economy. But this too is no sooner published than, once again, Marx is dissatisfied both with "the form of presentation," and structure of the whole six books he outlined.
By the time—eight years later—Marx had completed his analysis of the economic laws of capitalist production and, as an active revolutionary, was head of the first International Workingmen's Association, Marx had decided to start ab ovo. Nor was it only a matter of a new outline of three instead of six books. Everything was new, and nothing more so than the split in the category of labor into abstract and concrete labor.
Beca
u
se Marx considered that split in the category of labor his most original contribution, crucial to "all understanding of political economy," he no sooner began Chapter I, Commodities, with their twofold nature—use-value and exchange-value—than he made it clear that that was not the essence, that he must at once go to the essence—the twofold character of labor itself. By the time he had finished that first chapter there was also a totally new section, the last, entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities." It was clear by then that he had "thrown out" what had previously followed Commodity, and Money—history of the theory of each category, all of which had been relegated to Volume IV of Capital.
The Fetishism of Commodities has since become not only one of the most famous of Marx's writings, but so bothersome to all exploitative state powers, especially those calling themselves "socialist," that evidently they just cannot live with it. What Stalin declared necessary for "the teaching" has since been codified, without any acknowledgment such as they had to make in 1943 when it flew in the face of all previous "teaching" by friend and foe alike. Discarding, or making an abstraction, of the concrete imperative of freely-associated labor taking destiny into its own hands, stripping away the fetishism of commodities, of Plan, of anything and everything non-human, and declaring, with Marx, "Human power is its own end," inexorably leads one to tailend Stalinism, that is to say, state-capitalist "methodology."
Just as Lange's "methodology" was pragmatic, Stalinist eclectic, so was Rosdolsky's. Despite all talk of dialectic, and relationship of Marx to Hegel, Rosdolsky, by no accident whatever, concluded that one need "no longer bite into the sour apple, study the whole of Hegel's Logic in order to understand Marx's Capital—one can arrive at the same end, directly, by studying the Rough Draft" (p. 570). Too bad that all Rosdolsky arrived at by the end of his study of the "Rough Draft" was the quagmire of Polish neo-Stalinism which Rosdolsky calls "neo-Marxism."
Thus does the dialectic wreak its vengeance on non-Stalinist pragmatists who skip over Marx's admonition that the Hegelian dialectic "is the source of all dialectic" as well as Lenin's conclusion that it is, indeed, impossible to understand Marx's Capital "especially its first chapter, without studying the whole of Hegel's Logic."i Contrast this to Ch.2, Section B, entitled "The 1850's: The Grundrisse, Then and Now", pp. 61-76, Philosophy and Revolution; also for changes in the structure of Capital, see Marx's Capital and Today's Global Crisis, especially sections entitled "The Relationship of History to Theory", pp. 29-36, and "Appearance and Reality", pp. 77-82.
ii Elsewhere I go into detail on these changes. See especially "The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of Capital", and "The Breakdown of Capitalism: Crises, Human Freedom and Vol. II of Capital" in Marx's Capital and Today's Global Crisis.
iii Which is less, I might add, than even Lange did in his very last compilation of his writings before his death. It is true he does not mention me, but he does mention his own article in the American Economic Review, and there is no way to read that without knowing the new Stalinist thesis, and his defense of it.The Hobgoblin
Number 6 2005
Karl Marx on The Limits the Working Day; and The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour.
(Introduction by Richard Abernethy)
To be a working man, woman – or child – in the mid-nineteenth century, at the time when Karl Marx wrote Capital, meant a life almost totally dominated and consumed by work. The Factory Act of 1847 had limited the working day to ten hours (i.e. a 60 hour working week, as Saturday was a normal working day), but only for women and young people in certain industries. Elsewhere, people were worked to the limits of endurance – and beyond. Marx describes the fate of Mary Anne Walkley, a milliner, who died suddenly at the age of 20, after working for 26 hours and 30 minutes at a stretch in a crowded, badly ventilated workshop, and then going to sleep in a dormitory that was also crowded and poorly ventilated.
That was 1863. In our own times, globalised capital is recreating similar conditions in newly industrialised countries. A 21-year-old woman working in a sports garment factory in Indonesia described her experience:
“In June and July 2003, the sewing department I am part of worked from 7am until 4am the next day because of a large Reebok order. We were allowed to go home for about seven hours, but had to be back at the factory at 11am to work until 10pm.”
While working on Capital, Marx was engaged in an international working class campaign to set a reasonable limit to hours of work. He drafted the resolution passed by the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva in September 1866:
“We declare that the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive... the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working day”.
The reduction of the working day opened up time for family and social life, sports and
hobbies, education and culture. Working people won for themselves time to find out about the world and participate in social and political movements in order to change it.
In Britain and other advanced capitalist countries there is still a tug-of-war between workers and employers over work and time. Annual working time is composed of normal, contractual hours (in the UK, typically around 37 per week), plus paid overtime, plus unpaid overtime, minus annual leave. In 1998, with the adoption of the European Union Working Time Regulations, it became unlawful for an employer to require more than 48 hours, on average, per week. There is still a loophole, whereby workers can “opt out” of the regulations, and some bosses make this a condition of starting a job, or pressurise staff into signing away their rights.
According to TUC figures, in the UK one worker in six works more than 48 hours a week, and one in ten works more than 55 hours. Many of the “extra” hours are made up of unpaid, unrecognised, unrecorded overtime. Often people face an informal expectation that they will put in extra time at their jobs, for instance, by being given work targets that can only be met by working extra time.
U.S. workers have the longest annual hours in the developed world, partly because their vacations are so meagre: on average, 8.1 days after a year on the job, 10.2 days after three years. This compares very badly with the UK (minimum 4 weeks) and France (5 weeks).
We invite our readers to share their experiences of this issue, through the pages of The Hobgoblin. It would be helpful to know both about situations where the long hours culture is a problem, and those where workers have successfully held the line of a ‘normal’ working day.THE HOBGOBLIN NO.6 2005
Capital A Critique of Political Economy
The Working DayBy Karl Marx [I]
I. The Limits of the Working Day
We started with the supposition that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary part of his working-day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris paribus, a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working-day itself is not yet given.
Let us assume that the line A—-B represents the length of the necessary working-time, say 6 hours. If the labour be prolonged 1, 3, or 6 hours beyond A—-B, we have 3 other lines:
Working day I: A-------B - C
Working day II: A- - - -B- - -C
Working day III: A - - - B- - - - -C representing 3 different working-days of 7, 9, and 12 hours. The extension B—-C of the line A—-B represents the length of the surplus-labour. As the working-day is A—-B + B—-C or A—-C, it varies with the variable quantity B—-C. Since A—-B is constant, the ratio of B—-C to A—-B can always be calculated. In working-day I, it is 1/6, in working-day II, 3/6, in working day III 6/6 of A—-B. Since further the ratio surplus working-time, necessary working-time, determines the rate of the surplus-value, the latter is given by the ratio of B—-C to A—-B. It amounts in the 3 different working-days respectively to 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. On the other hand, the rate of surplus-value alone would not give us the extent of the working-day. If this rate, e.g., were 100 per cent., the working-day might be of 8, 10, 12, or more hours. It would indicate that the 2 constituent parts of the working-day, necessary-labour and surplus-labour time, were equal in extent, but not how long each of these two constituent parts was.
The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus-labour. The working-day is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate. 1
Although the working-day is not a fixed, but a fluent quantity, it can, on the other hand, only vary within certain limits. The minimum limit is, however, not determinable; of course, if we make the extension line B—-C or the surplus-labour = 0, we have a minimum limit, i.e., the part of the day which the labourer must necessarily work for his own maintenance. On the basis of capitalist production, however, this necessary labour can form a part only of the working-day; the working-day itself can never be reduced to this minimum. On the other hand, the working-day has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First, by the physical bounds of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend only a definite quantity of his vital force. A horse, in like manner, can only work from day to day, 8 hours. During part of the day this force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working-day encounters moral ones. The labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social advancement. The variation of the working-day fluctuates, therefore, within physical and social bounds. But both these limiting conditions are of a very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working-days of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.
The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To him its use-value belongs during one working-day. He has thus acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But, what is a working-day? 2
At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this Ultima Thule, the necessary limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. 3
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. 4
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. 5
The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises:
The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power. You and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again. Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of "saving" and "abstinence." Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration, and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance. The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different things. If the average time that (doing a reasonable amount of work) an average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-power, which you pay me from day to day is 1 / 365 x 30 or 1 / 10950 of its total value. But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1 / 10950 instead of 1 / 3650 of its total value, i.e., only 1/3 of its daily value, and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity. You pay me for one day's labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity. 6
We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.2. THE VORACIOUS APPETITE FOR SURPLUS-LABOUR. MANUFACTURER AND BOYAR
Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, 7 whether this proprietor be the Athenian calos cagaqos well-to-do man, Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist.8 It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. 9 Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself: So was it also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now Roumania).
The comparison of the greed for surplus-labour in the Danubian Principalities with the same greed in English factories has a special interest, because surplus-labour in the corvée has an independent and palpable form.
Suppose the working-day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour, and 6 hours of surplus-labour. Then the free labourer gives the capitalist every week 6 x 6 or 36 hours of surplus-labour. It is the same as if he worked 3 days in the week for himself, and 3 days in the week gratis for the capitalist. But this is not evident on the surface. Surplus-labour and necessary labour glide one into the other. I can, therefore, express the same relationship by saying, e.g., that the labourer in every minute works 30 seconds for himself, and 30 for the capitalist, etc. It is otherwise with the corvée. The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant does for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour on behalf of the Boyard. The one he does on his own field, the other on the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time exist, therefore, independently, side by side one with the other. In the corvée the surplus-labour is accurately marked off from the necessary labour. This, however, can make no difference with regard to the quantitative relation of surplus-labour to necessary labour. Three days' surplus-labour in the week remain three days that yield no equivalent to the labourer himself, whether it be called corvée or wage-labour. But in the capitalist the greed for surplus-labour appears in the straining after an unlimited extension of the working-day, in the Boyard more simply in a direct hunting after days of corvée. 10
In the Danubian Principalities the corvée was mixed up with rents in kind and other appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the most important tribute paid to the ruling class. Where this was the case, the corvée rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently on the other hand took origin from the corvée. 11 This is what took place in the Rumanian provinces. Their original mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic or Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severally as freehold by the members of the community, another part — ager publicus — was cultivated by them in common. The products of this common labour served partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents, partly as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common expenses. In course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped, along with the common land, the labour spent upon it. The labour of the free peasants on their common land was transformed into corvée for the thieves of the common land. This corvée soon developed into a servile relationship existing in point of fact, not in point of law, until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal under presence of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corvée, which the Russian General Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards themselves. Thus Russia conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian provinces, and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe.
According to the "Règlement organique," as this code of the corvée is called, every Wallachian peasant owes to the so-called landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the year. With deep insight into Political Economy, however, the working-day is not taken in its ordinary sense, but as the working-day necessary to the production of an average daily product; and that average daily product is determined in so crafty a way that no Cyclops would be done with it in 24 hours. In dry words, the Réglement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12 working-days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36 days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in like manner three times as much. In all, 42 corvée days. To this had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for extraordinary occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has to furnish annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional corvée is estimated at 14 days for each Wallachian peasant. Thus the prescribed corvée amounts to 56 working-days yearly. But the agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate only 210 days, of which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for bad weather, together 70 days, do not count. 140 working-days remain. The ratio of the corvée to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3 % gives a much smaller rate of surplus-value than that which regulates the labour of the English agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only the legally prescribed corvée. And in a spirit yet more "liberal" than the English Factory Acts, the "Règlement organique" has known how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days out of 12, the nominal day's work of each of the 56 corvée days is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day. In one day, e.g., must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work, especially in maize plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day's work for some kinds of agricultural labour is interpretable in such a way that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia conditions are still harder. "The 12 corvée days of the 'Règlement organique' cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to 365 days in the year." 12
If the Règlement organique of the Danubian provinces was a positive expression of the greed for surplus-labour which every paragraph legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France. 13
The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working-day 10 hours, i.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., including 1/2 an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus leaving 10 1/2 working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., of which 1/2 an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours are left, 10 1/2 for each of the first 5 days, 7 1/2 for the last. 14
Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly, by order of Parliament. They give regular and official statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus-labour.
Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors.15 "The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves off a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is:Before 6 am 15 minutes
After 6 pm 15 minutes
At breakfast time 10 minutes
At dinner time 20 minutes
- 60 Minutes
Total for five days 300 minutes
On Saturday before 6 am 15 minutes
At breakfast time 10 minutes
After 2 pm 15 minutes
- 40 minutes
Weekly total 340 minutesOr 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working-days." 16
"Five minutes a day's increased work, multiplied by weeks, are equal to two and a half days of produce in the year." 17
"An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a.m., after 6 p.m., and at the beginning and end of the times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year." 18
Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories work "short time," i.e., for only a part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working-day. The less business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
Thus the Factory Inspector's report on the period of the crisis from 1857 to 1858:
"It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking at a time when trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it. ... In the last half year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing," yet, over-work is continued beyond the legal hours. 19
"For a great part of the time," says Mr. Howell, "owing to the depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working short time. I continue, however, to receive about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment."20 The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from 1861 to 1865. 21 "It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work cleaning their machinery, &c., especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve ... they would not have been so employed if sufficient time had been set apart specially for cleaning, &c., either before 6 a.m. sic.! or before 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoons." 22
"The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain.... 23 In cases where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors making out a case." 24
These "small thefts" of capital from the labourer's meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as "petty pilferings of minutes," 25 "snatching a few minutes," 26 or, as the labourers technically called them, "nibbling and cribbling at meal-times." 27
It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus-value by surplus-labour, is no secret. "If you allow me," said a highly respectable master to me, "to work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket." 28 "Moments are the elements of profit." 29
Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as "full-timers," and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as "half-timers." The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of "full-timers" and "half-timers " 30Footnotes
1 "A day's labour is vague, it may be long or short." ("An Essay on Trade and Commerce, Containing Observations on Taxes, &c." London. 1770, p. 73.)
2 This question is far more important than the celebrated question of Sir Robert Peel to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce: What is a pound? A question that could only have been proposed, because Peel was as much in the dark as to the nature of money as the "little shilling men" of Birmingham.
3 "It is the aim of the capitalist to obtain with his expended capital the greatest possible quantity of labour (d'obtenir du capital dépense la plus forte somme de travail possible). J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil. "Traité théorique et pratique des entreprises industrielles." 2nd ed. Paris, 1857, p. 63.
4 "An hour's labour lost in a day is a prodigious injury to a commercial State.... There is a very great consumption of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among the manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the most fatal of consumptions." "An Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c.," p. 47, and 15 3.
5 "Si le manouvrier libre prend un instant de repos, I'économie sordide qui le suit des yeux avec inquiétude, prétend qu'il la vole." N. Linguet, "Théorie des Lois Civiles. &c." London, 1767, t. II., p. 466.
6 During the great strike of the London builders, 1860-61, for the reduction of the working-day to 9 hours, their Committee published a manifesto that contained, to some extent, the plea of our worker. The manifesto alludes, not without irony, to the fact, that the greatest profit-monger amongst the building masters, a certain Sir M. Peto, was in the odour of sanctity (This same Peto, after 1867, came to an end a la Strousberg.)
7 "Those who labour ... in reality feed both the pensioners ... called the rich and themselves." (Edmund Burke, l. c., p. 2.)
8 Niebuhr in his "Roman History" says very naively: "It is evident that works like the Etruscan, which in their ruins astound us, pre-suppose in little (!) states lords and vassals." Sismondi says far more to the purpose that "Brussels lace" pre-supposes wage-lords and wage-slaves.
9 "One cannot see these unfortunates (in the gold mines between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Arabia) who cannot even have their bodies clean, or their nakedness clothed, without pitying their miserable lot. There is no indulgence, no forbearance for the sick, the feeble, the aged, for woman's weakness. All must, forced by blows, work on until death puts an end to their sufferings and their distress." ("Diod. Sic. Bibl. Hist.," lib. 2, c. 13.)
10 That which follows refers to the situation in the Rumanian provinces before the change effected since the Crimean war.
11 This holds likewise for Germany, and especially for Prussia east of the Elbe. In the 15th century the German peasant was nearly everywhere a man, who, whilst subject to certain rents paid in produce and labour was otherwise at least practically free. The German colonists in Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, and Eastern Prussia, were even legally acknowledged as free men. The victory of the nobility in the peasants' war put an end to that. Not only were the conquered South German peasants again enslaved. From the middle of the 16th century the peasants of Eastern Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia, and soon after the free peasants of Schleswig-Holstein were degraded to the condition of serfs. (Maurer, Fronhöfe iv. vol., — Meitzen, "Der Boden des preussischen Staats" — Hanssen, "Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein." — F. E.)
12 Further details are to be found in E. Regnault's "Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes," Paris, 1855.
13 "In general and within certain limits, exceeding the medium size of their kind, is evidence of the prosperity of organic beings. As to man, his bodily height lessens if his due growth is interfered with, either by physical or local conditions. In all European countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service, has diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry in France was 165 centimetres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the law of March 21, 1832, 156 cm.; on the average in France more than half are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 cm. It is now 155. In Prussia it is 157. According to the statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette, May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is, that in Prussia out of 1,000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because of deficiency in height, and 399 because of bodily defects.... Berlin in 1858 could not provide its contingent of recruits, it was 156 men short." J. von Liebig: "Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie. 1862," 7th Ed., vol. 1, pp. 117, 118.
14 The history of the Factory Act of 1850 will be found in the course of this chapter.
15 I only touch here and there on the period from the beginning of modern industry in England to 1845. For this period I refer the reader to "Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England," von Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845. How completely Engels understood the nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports, Reports on Mines, &c., that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most superficial comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children's Employment Commission, published 18 to 20 years later (1863-1867). These deal especially with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to 1862, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced. Here, then, little or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions painted by Engels. I borrow my examples chiefly from the Free-trade period after 1848, that age of paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the great firm of Free-trade, blatant as ignorant, tell such fabulous tales. For the rest England figures here in the foreground because she is the classic representative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous set of official ctatistics of the things we are considering.
16 "Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L. Homer, Inspector of Factories," in Factories Regulation Acts. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859, pp. 4, 5.
17 Reports of the Inspector of Factories for the half year. October, 1856, p. 35.
18 Reports, &c., 30th April, 1858, p. 9.
19 Reports, &c., l. c., p. 10.
20 Reports &c., l. c., p. 25.
21 Reports &c., for the half year ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Reports, &c., 31st October, 1862, pp. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during the last half year 1863. Cf Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 1863, p. 7.
22 Reports, &c., October 31st, 1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of manufacturers given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption in factory labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning of June, 1836, information reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (Yorkshire) that the owners of 8 large mills in the neighbourhood of Batley had violated the Factory Acts. Some of these gentlemen were accused of having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for meals and one hour for sleep at midnight. And these children had to do this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the "shoddyhole," as the hole is called, in which the woollen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere of dust, shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth continually with handkerchiefs for the protection of his lungs! The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they were too scrupulously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed. The quaker gentlemen were mulcted in £20. Dryden anticipated these gentry:
“Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity,
That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie,
That look'd like Lent, and had the holy leer,
And durst not sin! before he said his prayer!"
23 Rep., 31st Oct., 1856, p. 34.
24 l. c., p. 35.
25 l. c., p. 48.
26 l. c., p. 48.
27 l. c., p. 48.
28 l. c., p. 48.
29 Report of the Insp. &c., 30th April 1860, p. 56.
30 This is the official expression both in the factories and in the reports.
I The following are Sections1 and 2 from Chapter 10 of Volume 1 of Capital. Reproduced from the Marx/Engels Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 1995, 1999
THE HOBGOBLIN NO.6 2005Top
THE HOBGOBLIN NO.6 2005
Labour and Value from the the Greek Polis to Globalised State-Capitalism
By David Black
The notion of ‘Value’, in relation to labour and exchange of goods, has, from Aristotle onwards, been seen as inseparable from ‘moral’ and ‘social’ issues. The first half of this essay examines the ‘Reformist Anarchist’ analysis of Value: as rooted in the Greeks’ concept of telos; the ‘economic morality’ of the medieval scholastics; the Aristotelian anarchism of William Godwin; and the co-operative schemes of the Ricardian socialists. In the second half I turn to Marx’s critique of the Ricardians and review some recent studies by Andrew Kliman, which seek to draw out the implications of Marx’s writings on Value for possible ‘Alternatives to Capitalism.’
A Leftist Aristotle? Nature, Labour and Telos
In Aristotle’s concept of teleology Nature was characterised by ‘meaning’. Development in Nature involved not just causality and mechanical motion but also the potentiality for form in the material itself. Nature, within its own order and hierarchy, was seen as always striving towards the ‘good’. Just as form and cosmos struggled to overcome boundlessness and chaos, so Aristotle’s City State (the polis) sought to control the ‘unlimited desires’ of those within its walls and subdue the ‘untamed nature’ of the ‘barbarians’ on the ‘outside’. Aristotle advocated a polis in which principles of ‘excellence’ and ‘justice’ would be administered by an elite of educated citizens; for only those able to command the labour of others could be ‘free’ enough to be educated in the required ‘virtues’. Everyone else he excluded from citizenship: slaves, women, artisans, wage workers, merchants and bankers; all of whom, he argued, would in any case be better of in a well-run Greek polis than in a barbarian camp or a tyrannical oligarchy.
Alisdair MacIntyre points out that whereas Plato’s 'Republic' was irreconcilable with the realm of historically existing poleis (his ‘practical’, earthly polis was restricted to the ‘community of philosophers’), in Aristotle’s polis the telos was already implicitly embodied and acknowledged within the actual social practices of the time. Universal Form only had meaning in relation to the particular:‘Aristotle understood that movement from human potential to its actualisation within the polis as exemplifying the metaphysical and theological character of a perfected universe’. [1]
Murray Bookchin points out that although Aristotle divided society into free men and non-citizens, he recognised a meaningful hierarchy within those he excluded from citizenship. For in taking into account the ‘higher’ level of labour, in which the manual and mental are combined, Aristotle rated the ‘master craftsman’ as superior to the artisan because of his ‘practical intelligence’: his ‘teleological’ understanding of the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ of ‘good works’. Aristotle implicitly ‘respected’ the ‘good’ worker, whilst condemning those whose aim in life was simply to accumulate wealth: who were, in his words, ‘intent on living only, and not living well’. [2]
Jose Perez Adan’s 'Reformist Anarchism' examines the influence of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Catholic Aristotelianism’ on anarchist economics. [3] Aquinas argued that considerations of production and exchange had to be subservient to the concerns of a ‘commutative justice’ which deliberated about ultimate (divine) ends as well as proximate (earthly) ones. Money was seen as simply ‘the translation of fixed and invariable value into an easy measure of exchange’. Usury – ‘generating money out of want without contributing to the creation of value’ – was considered an ‘ontological disorder’, because it suggested that money, rather than the labour and moral order, created value. Regulations were seen as essential to stabilise prices and ensure the compensation of producers for their toil and replacement of materials invested in production. Whereas in neo-classicist political economy wages were seen as determined a posteriori by the fluctuating whims of the market, in Scholastic metaphysics wages represented an ‘objective value’. Aquinas argued that exchange of goods by a trader could be regarded as legitimate activity only ‘for the sake of public utility so that necessary things should not be lacking… and he seeks money, not as an end, but as a wage for labour’. Taking a position which would horrify the liberal pioneers of free-trade and property rights in the 18th century, Aquinas held that in a famine property rights were overridden by social necessity: to prevent starvation, it would be justified to expropriate, if necessary, a supply of grain surplus to the owner’s personal needs.
In the 18th century, such ‘objective values’ were challenged by the new liberal tradition. Writing on the influence of Aristotelian and Calvinist theology on the Scottish Enlightenment, MacIntyre describes how an ideology had developed in Scotland which saw the basic unit of the ‘good’ society as the household of the small-holding farmer - guided from above by definite social, moral and theological principles. Against this tradition stood the new ‘Anglicising liberalism’ of David Hume and Adam Smith, for whom the basic unit of society was the acquisitive individual. The liberals saw land, like everything else, as just a commodity; and the continued existence of the peasantry was seen as obstacle to economic development. After the Civil Wars of the 17th century and the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th, the English bourgeoisie wanted no more arguments about how ‘higher’ principles should govern the ‘natural’ order of society. The time had come to recognize that society had become a mass of competing passions and needs which functioned ‘naturally’ through transactions and exchanges. What was needed was a political and social structure to facilitate trade, protect private property and quell any ‘lawless’ resistance. This structure, Hume claimed, was essentially what had been established by ‘Dutch William’s’ Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Labour and Value
Hume’s notion of the ‘acquisitive individual’ underpinned Kant’s concept of ‘unsocial sociability’ as well as the political economists’ Labour Theory of Value (LTV). The basis of the LTV was that the price of a commodity, representing its exchange value, was based on the toil of making it or the toil saved by having it. In Adam Smith’s development of the theory, the ‘natural price’ of the commodity was what was sufficient ‘to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labour, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing, and bringing it to market.’ William Godwin argued that the LTV essentially meant that labour and wealth were the same thing. Like Smith, Godwin counterposed the ‘natural’ individual to the institutions of society, but whereas Smith argued that church and state should be persuaded not to hinder economic freedom progress, Godwin saw these institutions as enemies of morality and freedom to be got rid of as soon as possible. Godwin, the first Aristotelian anarchist, called for social and economic reforms which would be subservient to the ‘final destination’ (telos) of society. He recognised that the ‘proximate ends’ – of material returns and economic stability – might help to bring the end to fruition, but he insisted that they were not ends in themselves.
Malthus led the counter-attack on Godwin’s assertion of the claims of political philosophy against political economy. For Malthus, the most serious obstacle to progress and morality was not institutions but ‘human nature’, which stubbornly refused to accept wage-slavery and destitution as ‘natural’. Whereas Smith and Hume left the question of ‘natural rights’ unclarified, Malthus dismissed it altogether. Malthus predicted that any substantial increase in the population would lead to universal pauperisation, and that Poor Law ‘welfare’ would in time consume all public revenue. He supported the protectionist Corn Laws because he saw prosperous landowners as an ideal market (an ‘effective demand’, in Keynesian terms) for the output of industry (landowners, unlike the workers, being consumers-par-excellence).Ricardo, whilst accepting Malthus’s theory of population and ‘welfare’, took the opposite view on the Corn Laws. Ricardo predicted that, as more and more land was cultivated to provide food for the ever-growing population, the cost of production on the least productive farms would provide the price-norm for the whole of agriculture. The landlord class would profit more and more from the ever-rising price of food and rent for land; and in the absence of free-trade, this class might monopolise the wealth of society to such an extent that the capitalists would find themselves starved of investment and the system might wind down into a ‘stationary state.’
Ricardo argued that wages should never exceed the level necessary to ‘reproduce’ the ‘class of labourers’. He did however recognise an historical aspect to the concept of ‘subsistence’ i.e. that the provisions for reproducing the ‘class’ might need to be more ‘generous’ for succeeding generations. Ricardo’s major work, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, appeared in 1817, a time of hunger, industrial crisis and revolt. In 1820 he argued (though not publicly) that that workers should be allowed to vote, for that way they might be persuaded to vote for the abolition of the Poor Laws and the Corn Laws by workers’ leaders schooled in the LTV. Ricardo’s views were not welcomed by the ‘law and order’ party in England. According to Marx, in 'Theories of Surplus Value':
‘Closely bound up with [h]is scientific merit is the fact that Ricardo exposes and describes the economic contradiction between the classes—as shown by the intrinsic relations—and that consequently political economy perceives, discovers the root of the historical struggle and development’.Ricardo and Marx
According to Ricardo, the exchangeable value of a commodity depends on the relative quantity of labour contained in its production process – a theory which is often identified with Marxism minus the socialist ‘conclusions’. This ‘identity’ is however, a myth. Marx argues that although political economy was ‘scientific’ in its ‘analytical’ method - of proceeding from the phenomenal forms of value to their essence (labour) - it had failed to hold the abstracted essence to account for the concrete forms it assumes in the ‘real’ world. Marx says, in criticising Feuerbach’s approach to the history of religion, that it is one thing to discover the ‘earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion’ by analysis of its ‘apotheosized’ forms but something else to develop these forms from the ‘actual given relations of life’. The former method (Feuerbach’s) is ‘easier’, but it is latter (Marx’s method to be developed in ‘Capital’) that is truly ‘scientific’.
In Ricardo’s theory of ‘relative value’ his labour values were expressed quantitively, and therefore, in their role as commodities-in-relation-to other-commodities, fell back to being representations of exchange-values. For Ricardo, the surplus value obtained in the process of production was too ‘obvious’ to be investigated i.e. it was just a fact of ‘natural productivity’ that the process resulted in a commodity more valuable than the inputted labour-time. Whereas Ricardo assumed that the length of the working day was fixed, Marx argues that the objectivity of struggles by workers to limit the working day and ‘control’ the machinery and conditions of work gave these struggles a scientific content. Aagainst the fight for the Ten-Hour Day, political economy met its limit. Marx thus takes a class position in splitting surplus value into absolute surplus-value (produced by lengthening the working day) and relative surplus-value (produced by making labour an appendage to machinery and thus lessening the labour-time necessary to produce the commodity).
Ali Shamsavari says that Marx’s critique turns on the fact that political economy had ‘never succeeded… in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange value’.[4] Marx, in discovering the qualitative relation in the value-form, not only refutes Ricardo, as the leading ideologist of the bourgeoisie, but also those who drew socialist conclusions from Ricardo’s premises. Whereas Ricardo saw money as the ‘medium’ of exchange, the Ricardian socialist, John Gray, imagined that it would be easy to replace money with ‘time-chits’ measured by labour-time, which could be used to buy commodities whose values would be likewise measured by the labour-time. The problem with this, in Marx’s view, was that Ricardians assumed there was no conflict between the private labour of the workers and social labour under the rule of capital. Marx says that if it is seen as necessary to transform labours and products into exchange-values then this view has come about because ‘individuals now produce only for society and in society’ and because ‘production is not directly social, is not the “offspring of association”, which distributes labour internally.’ [Grundrisse 158-9]
Whether Ricardian or not, in the notions of honourably-intentioned ‘anti-Globalisation’ campaigners today there is a similar underlying assumption of identity between ‘private’ associated labour and the social labour of the world economy. The scheme to put ‘Fair Trade’ labels on products manufactured by co-operatives or ‘eco-friendly’ companies in the Third World is an example of this. When the goods are put on sale alongside similar ‘unfair’ products, which are made according to socially-necessary labour time and sell for less, the challenge to the law of value is reduced to the subjective ‘generosity’ of the consumers.
Judging by Adan’s account, it seems that post-Godwinian reformist anarchists tend to see in Marx’s Capital an unfortunate ‘deviation’ from the LTV which seems to rule out ‘co-operative enterprise’. Similarly, Bookchin sees in Marx a denigration of the category of use-value, which the Utopian socialists, such as Fourier, counterposed to exchange-value through the ‘force of association’. The reformist anarchists, rather than beginning from the standpoint of the already existing struggle between the enforced co-operation of capital and labour at the point of production, situate the LTV in the struggle ‘to rescue the market from monopolistic intervention’.
Intrinsic Value
The present pace of capitalist globalisation gives a new urgency to assessing the relevance of Marx’s three Volumes of Capital to present-day struggles and the debate on possible alternatives to capitalism. All of the important critiques of Marx’s Capital are based on the supposed errors of Marx’s ‘Value’ theory. In Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value5 Andrew Kliman begins with a section on ‘Common Misconceptions’, which quotes Schumpeter:
‘Marx’s theory of value is the Ricardian view… He was under the same delusion as Aristotle, viz, that value, though a factor in the determination of relative prices, is yet different from, and exists independently of, relative prices or exchange relations. The proposition that the value of a commodity is the amount of labour embodied in it can hardly mean anything else.’
Schumpeter does recognize that Ricardo’s ‘absolute’ values really only functioned as ‘exchange values or relative prices’, whereas for Marx ‘values’ exist independently of exchange values. Schumpeter says that if we could accept Marx’s differentiation, much of his theory would become meaningful and tenable. ‘Of course’, he says, ‘we cannot’. But what if we can?
Marx, in Kliman’s account, is indeed investigating exchange value as ‘the mode of expression, the “form of appearance,” of a content distinguishable from it’. Kliman describes how Marx, in his Notebooks of 1861-3, begins to argue for the first time that since two commodities of differing materiality are qualitatively equal as exchangeable objects, then they must share a common property of substance: a ‘third thing’, which belongs to each commodity as its ‘intrinsic value’. Although, as use-values, commodities appear as independent, their exchange value is the relative expression of the social labour time that is their substance. Kliman contends that in the opening pages of Capital, Marx, rather than offering a theory of exchange ratios based on relative quantities of labour, aims ‘to break from the conception of value as a ratio in exchange’. Rather than a ‘Labour Theory of Value’, Marx’s is a ‘Value Theory of Labour’. Value, Kliman argues, is ‘an intrinsic property of the commodity itself’; whereas exchange-value is, as Marx says, ‘the mere form of appearance’, not its ‘proper content’. Whilst it is true that the common property of commodities is that they are ‘useful’ (at least in some sense) and are ‘products of labour’, this labour, as labour-power, in finding its expression in value, ‘no longer possesses the same characteristics as when it is the creator of use-values’. What remains from the commonality of use-values, is, according to Marx, only a ‘residue’, a mere abstraction.
Values and Prices
Critics of Marx have spent much time on the ‘problem’ of Marx’s controversial ‘transformation’ of values into production prices. The problem is seen as inherited from Ricardo’s theory of profit. Ricardo saw that competition between capitals leads to uniformity of the rate of exploitation of labour; and that prices tend to equal costs of production plus an average profit, rather than surplus labour-time values. Marx argues that, given labour-time measured as exchange ratios, the equilibrium of profitability must be undermined if firms employing the same amounts of wages for labour (the variable capital of living labour, the only source of new value) have to input different amounts of fixed and circulating capital (constant capital: embodied past labour, which produces no new value). In such a state of disequilibrium, firms with smaller profit rates will be starved of investment and forced either to adopt different lines of production or go under. Marx does not however dispute that values and prices diverge; he says that they must diverge in the total process of production, circulation and accumulation – otherwise accumulation would be impossible. Whilst Marx sees no reason to demonstrate the necessity of equilibrium of profit rates amongst different technical compositions of constant and variable capital, he does - employing the ‘power of abstraction’ - show how such an equilibrium might come about. If different enterprises of different organic compositions of capital are owned by the same capitalist, or a like-minded group of capitalists, acting ‘en bloc, as totality… What we have to deal with is the collective capitalist, the total capital appears as the share capital of all the individual capitalists together.’ This insight is concretised by Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1943 critique of the Stalinist claim that Russia had overcome the ‘law of capitalism: the average rate of profit’ because capital was distributed according to the state plan rather than being allowed to flow to the most profitable industries. Dunayevskaya argues that this ‘different’ method of distributing profit is simply another way of extracting surplus-value from the workers through social-capital: the very source, not of equilibrium but of class conflict. [6]
The Temporal Single-System Interpretation
Theorists of the ‘transformation problem’ attempt to ‘make sense’ of Marx’s Capital Vol. III by splitting his formulations into separate - value-based and price-based – ‘systems’. Kliman, arguing against this dualistic approach, claims that Marx’s account of value-price transformation and analysis of surplus-value and profit ‘can be understood in a manner that renders them internally consistent’ in the ‘temporal single-system interpretation’ (TSSI) - which Kliman adheres to along with Carchedi, Freeman, Ernst and others.
TSSI represents a counter-attack to the sustained critique of Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit (TFRP) from a succession of critics since the end of the 19th century. For neo-Ricardian critics of Marx, the ‘natural productivity’ of labour, working ‘in harmony’ with technology, is enough to stave off the TFRP. Okishio formulates a simple crisis-free economy in which use-values are measured as physical entities with money playing no role in the process: grain is the only commodity, the only means of production, the only wage paid to workers and the only commodity consumed by the capitalists. Proceeding from this very simple model, Okishio argues that even in more complex economies, there is no need to depart from a ‘physicalist’ model. In challenging Marx’s location of the TFRP in mechanisation, Okishio tries to show that capitalists tend not to adopt any techniques that will depress profits; rather, he argues, the TFRP is rooted in wage-levels which undermine the technology-driven ‘productivity’. Significantly, Okishio’s crisis-free models do not allow for the temporal factor of changes in prices. [7]Kliman sees this ‘simultaneist’ approach to input and output prices as a crucial error, which he attempts to further expose in his critique of Dmitriev, another physicalist. Dmitriev imagines a production process of commodities by machines in which profit comes about without any living labour taking part in the process. Although this might seem to be sci-fi, the point is that even when Dmitriev moves on to more complex ‘models’ of multi-commodity economies in which workers as well as machines are employed, he still sees no need to implicate ‘value’ in a relationship with labour-time; when everything in the production process can be measured ‘physically’, there is no need for the alleged ‘metaphysics’ of Value Theory. Kliman, in A Physicalist Approach to, and Critique of, Marx: A Conceptual History8, considers Dmitriev’s model of a factory of 10 machines producing 11 replicas of themselves over their one-year ‘life’-span. With no value added by living labour, the profit rate of 10 machines producing 11 of the same is 10 per cent. Kliman points out that whereas Dmitriev values inputs and outputs simultaneously, Marx’s analysis in Capital implies that over the year, the price will fall, and with no living labour to add to value, profit will be zero. Whilst Dmitriev’s ‘simultaneous’ model is justified within its own theoretical terms, Marx’s approach seems to resonate in the ‘real’ world: anyone who owns a car or a personal computer knows that the machine bought today will be worth less tomorrow, as will the plant that produced it.
Kliman allows that although productivity affects profit negatively, it can also have a positive effect on profit: by driving down prices of the means of production and thus promoting potential profit. However, as Dunayevskaya says of the TFRP, because of the constant revolutions in new techniques that reduce the time necessary to reproduce a product, ‘there comes a time when all commodities … have been “overpaid”. The crisis… follows.’[9] Value as ‘self-moving substance’ suffers interruptions due to ‘revolutions in value’: technological development causes the destruction of already existing sums of value advanced by individual capitals, which cannot meet the changing conditions. What is truly independent is not the capitalist, but value – autonomised, circulating and self-expanding.
Marx’s critics, who interpret his analysis of the transformation of the product of labour into a commodity as an argument for a labour theory of exchange ratios, thus conflate value with use-value and fail to see the nature of commodity production itself as source of contradiction. As empiricists, they are more concerned with quantitatively determining how things behave rather than (as was Aristotle) with what things are. To know the nature of the ‘commodity itself’, Kliman says, is to know that it is a ‘value in addition to a use-value, an artifact which exists only in a specific kind of society’. In Marx’s words (to Adolph Wagner), ‘neither “value”, or “exchange value” are my subjects, but the “commodity”… the simplest social form in which labour is presented in contemporary society.’ Marx thus approaches ‘value’ not from a concept, but from a ‘concretum’, the commodity. Kliman, in Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value, points out that at the same time Marx appropriates Hegel’s concept of the ‘concrete totality’: for both of them, ‘that which is concrete is a unity of diverse elements’. The empiricists and positivists, demanding firm ground for ‘solid’ scientific analysis, fail to see that ‘Marx was thus laying the ground for his subsequent analysis of capitalism’s contradictions’.
In political economy, although value in exchange is clearly a social activity, it is equally an ‘object-object relationship’. Kliman concludes that in ‘getting behind’ this fetishized relationship Marx reveals ‘the relationship of the individual product to its producer. The enquiry into value has thus shifted … to one that refers to a subject-object relation… an alienated one’, in which the labour the worker expends in producing the commodity ‘can take on an autonomous form’. Ricardo, on the other hand, had conceived the labour-value relationship as causal and therefore external to each other:‘The subject matter remained always the relations among the commodities themselves. Conversely, by clearly distinguishing between value and exchange value, Marx in effect created a category that expressed an internal relation between labour and value, worker to product.’
If capitalist production is, as Marx puts it, ‘the rule of things over man… the inversion of subject into object and vice versa’, then the concept of ‘value, i.e. the past labour that dominates living labour’ does, as Kliman claims, take on ‘a much greater meaning’.
In the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', Marx conceives of an immediate post-revolutionary change, in which the worker would be paid according to the amount of work s/he does: for the ‘same amount of work… given to society in one form, he receives back in another’. The ‘revolution’ would have to overturn the relationships in the factory, in which, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse,
‘the association of the workers... is not posited by them but by capital. Their combination is not their being, but rather the being of capital. To the individual worker it appears fortuitous. He relates to his own association with other workers and to his co-operation with them as alien, as to modes of operation of capital.’ [p505]Any ‘anti-capitalist’ revolution worthy of the name would have to break with the totalising and all-consuming ‘logic’ of capital from day one of any revolutionary transformation. In ‘teleological’ terms, the first stage of a post-value-producing society - proximate aims - would have to contain the higher goal of breaking down the division between mental and manual labour – the ‘final’ destination.
1 Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988),
2 Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982),
3 Jose Perez Adan, Reformist Anarchism 1800-1936 (on William Godwin, Josiah Warren, Stephen P. Andrews, Benjamin Tucker, Eric Gill and Herbert Read), 1992
4 Ali Shamsavari, Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Capital, (1991)
5 Andrew Kliman, Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value – On the unity of value, fetishism and the analysis of capitalist production in Capital (2003)
6 ‘The Nature of the Russian Economy’, The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism: selected writings by Raya Dunayevskaya
7 Andrew Kliman, ‘Marx’s law of the falling tate of profit today’, in Explorations in Dialectical and Critical Theory, Ed. News and Letters (2002).
8 Paper presented at the International Working Group on Value Theory symposium at the University of Greenwich, 29 June, 2000
9 "State-Capitalism and Marxism", written in 1947. Available at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1947/decline-profit.htm
THE HOBGOBLIN NO.6 2005
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