From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Sep 20 2006 - 14:42:35 EDT
Hi Ajit, I was responding to Howard and Jerry... The case made is that although money and commodities are essential to capitalism, they do not themselves define its essence. This makes sense if by "essence" we mean its "historically unique specificity" and if we equate "capitalism" with "capitalist mode of production" - the essence of capitalism in that sense could be defined in terms of specific social relations or one specific social relation such as the capital relation (for my contributions to a definition of social relation (other contributors also introduced some difficult terminology), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_relation). One sort of problem here is, that capitalism may be a merchant capitalism which does not involve a specifically capitalist mode of production - only merchant capital, bank/finance capital and rentier capital, and at best a proto-industrial form of production involving independent craftsmen and episodic or marginal wage labour. You can also have situations of semi-slavery, indentured labor, semi-proletarian labor and so on. So you can in principle have a capitalism without significant capitalist production being involved. Howard's problem is that wage-labour pre-existed the capitalist mode of production by many centuries, so wage-labour (the commodification of labour power) is not unique to the capitalist mode of production, at best you can say that industrial capitalism generalises wage-labour, i.e. transforms the labour force into employees and thereby creates a general labour market. Contrary to Marxism, however, I think the transformation of labour-power into a commodity is not a fixed or static condition, but an historically evolving process. Howard also comments that "Many think that value does not exist except as part of capitalist production. It is therefore essential to capitalism. But for those who take this position, not just that: whether it be explained from the perspective of the essentialist or anti-essentialist, value is a defining characteristic of capitalism. On this view our understanding of commodities and money in terms of value is strictly limited to capitalist production; in the ancient world, for example, money was a means of exchange but did not represent value. I may have this wrong, though, because I don't understand the argument." The view that economic value exists only within capitalism is so obviously false for any bona fide economic historian that it can be made true only by specifying a unique meaning for economic value, applying only to capitalism, in which case you have a tautology. In the ancient world, the money-commodity obviously also was a store of value as well as a medium of exchange, and means of purchase and payment. If my definition of the CMP is acceptable to Smith, Ricardo, Sraffa and the neoclassicals I have no particular problem with it, except that I don't think it is true, both because Marx takes a different view of the value-creation process, and because he takes a different view of the power relations and social relations involved. Marx aims to show how capital, which originates in the trade of a largely non-capitalist society, gradually subordinates the whole of production to its commercial principles and thus forms an historically distinctive, independent economy operating on the basis of the laws of capital accumulation. His book is called DAS KAPITAL and it shows how capital can grow to dominate a whole society, so that it reproduces itself through the movements of capital, and what that means. But not only that. He shows that the generalised use of money and commodities revolutionises social relations, so that "generalised commodity production" in fact means the domination of capital over society as a whole, in a way which is historically specific and qualitatively new. In particular, this involves the separation of the direct producers from ownership of the means of production, as an ongoing process. I think Capitalism does not necessarily require that some or all wages are paid in money, it requires at most that wages are expressible (or accounted for) in money prices. Wages may also be paid "in kind" or in shares or stock-options and the like. However, if all wages are paid in kind there exists little monetarily effective demand that can buy all the finished consumer goods, so this is not really compatible with a capitalist economy. The only way that could work, is if employers bought all the consumer goods and services produced by Department II (consumer items-producing sector) and somehow distributed them or "resold" them to the workers, but this would usually involve more extra costs than profit, which most employers would therefore be unlikely to agree to other than in special situations, such as work in remote locations or where private purchase is impracticable. Usually corporations will take care of the supply of some basic necessities such as accommodation, health services, food, schooling, transportation and the like, but not everything the worker needs or consumes; at least part of the wage is still paid in money. What is specific to the CMP is that "production of output is conditional on capital accumulation", but what the social meaning of this is, is something that Marx spends a lot of time exploring and explaining. Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Sep 30 2006 - 00:00:06 EDT