A division of atheneum publishers, inc
Yüklə 0,99 Mb.
|
|
1 See Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1848 (MEGA, I, vi, pp. 473 et seq.) The full equivalence of the terms used by Marx in his earlier and later period is clearly demonstrated by the fact that Engels in his later editions was able to substitute the new term "price of labour power" in all cases where Marx had originally used the term "price of labour" without any change of the real argument. 122 ECONOMIC THEORY OF CAPITAL and formalistic further development, were used by Marx to work out his new concept of "commodity-producing labour" which was henceforth to serve as a pivot for a new understanding of the whole conceptual system of Political Economy. The distinction between use-value and exchange-value, in the abstract form in which it had been made by the bourgeois economists, (and had, in fact, already been applied by Aristotle to the commodity production of Antique Society) did not provide any useful starting-point for a materialistic investigation of bourgeois commodity production as a particular social form. It was insufficient also for theoretical reasons. The concept of use value was only perfunctorily mentioned by them as a presupposition, of exchange value, and exchange- value alone was treated as a real economic category.1 With Marx, as we have seen in a former chapter, use value is not defined as a use value in general, but as the use value of a commodity. This use value inherent in the commodities produced in modern capitalistic society is, however, not merely an extra-economic presupposition of their "value." It is an element of the value, and itself is an economic category. The mere fact that a thing has utility for any human being, does not yet give us the economic definition of value. Not until the thing has social utility (i.e., utility "for other persons") does the economic definition of use value apply.2 Just as the use value of the commodity is economically defined as a "social use value" (use value “for others"), so is the 1 See the first three paragraphs of Ricardo's Principles; the first introduces the distinction between use value and exchange value by way of a quotation from Smith; the second emphasizes use value as an absolutely essential presupposition of exchange value; while in the third it is definitely dismissed from all further investigation. 2 See Capital, I, p. 7. See further, for the most detailed presentation of Marx's view on this question, his polemics against Rodbertus and Adolf Wagner in the MSS. of 1881-82 grouped under the heading Oekonomisches en général (X) in Marx's papers (published as an Appendix to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute's edition of Capital, 1932, pp. 841 et seq, particularly pp 846-53). This was Marx's last word on economics. 123 KARL MARX specifically useful labour which goes into the production of this commodity defined economically as a "social labour" (labour "for others"). Thus, Marx's "commodity-producing labour" appears as a social labour in a two-fold sense.1 It has, in common with labour in other stages of the historical development of production, the general social character of being a "specifically useful labour," which goes to the production of a definite kind of social use value. It has, on the other hand, the specific historical character of being a "generally social labour," which goes to to production of a definite quantity of exchange value. The capacity of social labour to produce definite things useful to human beings (a general condition of the Circulation of Matter going on between Man and Nature) appears in the use value of its product. Its capacity for the production of a value and a surplus value for the capitalist (a particular characteristic of labour which derives from the particular form of the social organization of the labour process under the conditions of the capitalistic mode of production within the present historical epoch) appears in the echange value of its product. The fusion of the two social characteristics of commodity-producing labour appears in the "value form" of the product of labour, or the "form of commodity." Only thus critically modified, is the theory of labour value a suitable starting-point for an economic theory in which labour is considered not merely formally and in one of its aspects but in its full material realization. The earlier bourgeois economists when speaking of labour as a source of wealth, had likewise thought of "labour" in terms of the various forms of real work, though they did so only for the reason that their economic categories were as yet undeveloped, and still in the process of separation from their original material contents, vague and indeterminate. Thus, the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, etc., successfully declared the true source of wealth to lie in the labour 1 See Capital, I, i, § 2, The Two-fold Character of Commodity-producing labour, 124 ECONOMIC THEORY Or CAPITAL expended in the export industries, trade and shipping, in agricultural labour, etc. Even with Adam Smith, who from the different branches of labour definitely advanced to the general form of commodity-producing labour, we find that concrete aspect retained, along with the new and more formalistic definition which is also expressed in his system and was later to become the exclusive definition of value in the work of Ricardo, and by which labour is defined as an abstract and merely quantitative entity. This same abstract form of labour, which he correctly defined as exchange-value producing labour, he at the same time, irrationally enough, declared to be the only source not only of value (exchange value) but also of the material wealth of the community, or use value. This doctrine which still obstinately persists in "vulgar" socialism, and which is unjustly imputed to scientific socialism by its bourgeois critics, is according to Marx economically false. In so far as "labour" is regarded in its specific character as useful labour, and, in the same way, "wealth" its material form as an object of utility, labour is not the only source of wealth. (If this were so, it would be difficult to explain why in present-day capitalistic society just those persons are poor who hitherto have had that unique source of wealth at their exclusive disposal, and even more difficult to account for the fact that they remain unemployed and poor, instead of producing wealth by their labour). But it is just here, in the very inconsistency of his economic theory, that a remembrance of the concrete reality of human labour lingers in the mind of Adam Smith. In praising the creative power of "labour" he was not thinking so much of the forced labour of the modern wage-labourer, which appears in the value of the commodities and produces capitalistic profit, as of the general natural necessity of human labour, which produces things useful and beautiful. Likewise, his naive glorification of the "division of labour" achieved in these "great manufactures," by which he understood 125 KARL MARX the whole of modern capitalist production, does not so much refer to the extremely imperfect form of present-day capitalists division of labour (arising through commodity production and exchange) as to the general form of human labour vaguely fused with it in his theoretical exposition.1 "Adam Smith's contradictions," said Marx later, "are significant in so far as they contain problems which he indeed does not solve, but which he reveals just by contradicting himself."2 In the further development from Smith to Ricardo, Political Economy becomes more consistent — and one-sided. Even now, bourgeois economists do not deny that there are two characters inherent in the commodity, use value and exchange value. But they deal only with "value of exchange" as the true economic value. While immersed in their "economic" definition of "value" in terms of labour, they appear to have quite lost sight of the other aspect of labour which had, at least unconsciously, been taken into consideration by the older economists, that is, of labour as a specifically useful activity, which brings forth as its product a definitely useful object (a use value). "Political Economy," said Marx, "nowhere explicitly and consciously distinguishes between labour represented in value and the same labour so far as it is represented in the use value of its product."3 Marx has reintroduced in a new form real, concrete labour into Political Economy. He deals with "labour" not in the indefinite, ambiguous, and vacillating form as it had appeared in the writings of the older bourgeois economists; not as the labour of the commodity-producer, or as the materially and formally free labour of the independent master craftsman, who had control over his own material means of production, and
2 See Theories of Surplus Value, I, p. 171. 3 See Capital, pp. 46-47, footnote 31.
ECONOMIC THEORY OF CAPITAL who exchanged the product of his labour in the form of a commodity for another kind of commodity, or the product of another form of an equally free and independent labour. Marx deals with labour in its present unambiguous, and definite, form of labour producing a commodity for another person, i.e., of labour formally paid to its full value but actually exploited; formally free, actually enslaved; formally the independent labour of an isolated worker, actually collective labour performed by proletarian wage-labourers who are separated from the material means of production and to whom their own tools and the social character of their own labour, — that is, the productive power of what would be under otherwise similar conditions the produce of an isolated worker, now increased a thousandfold by the social division of labour — stand opposed in the form of Capital.1 Political Economy is now no longer a science of commodities, and a science of labour only indirectly, and in an abstract and one-sided manner. It becomes a direct science of social labour, of the productive forces of that labour, of their development and afterwards their enslavement by the fixed forms of the production-relations prevailing in present-day bourgeois society and, finally, of the emancipation of the productive forces in present society by the revolutionary action of the proletarian class. A glance at the first volume of Marx's Capital will suffice to convince us of the completely changed character of this science of economics. From the very beginning the meticulous analysis of the most general economic categories ("Commodity," "Money," and "Transformation of Money into Capital") in the first chapters of Marx's work, adheres only in appearance to "that turbulent sphere of the exchange of commodities which is taking place on the surface of commodity-producing, society, open and visible to all." In truth, from the opening sentence to the final conclusion, the Marxian analysis serves to make us look through 1 See Theories of Surplus Value, III, p. 3o». 127 KARL MARX those highly abstract and sophisticated categories of the bourgeois economists, to disclose their "fetish character," and to demonstrate the specific social character of bourgeois commodity production lying behind them. It becomes highly transparent while dealing, in its later parts, with the sale and purchase of a commodity of a very special composition, labour-power. It finally passes from the realm of commodity-exchange into another sphere entirely, the "hidden haunts of production, on whose threshold we are faced with the inscription: No admittance except on business."1 From now on the labour process, or what is according to Marx but another name for the same thing, the process of material production, both in its material and historical aspects, constitutes the subject matter of the economic theory of Capital. That applies not only to chapters 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, etc., which are especially devoted to the analysis of labour and, which, quantitatively, make up half of the first volume but, as revealed by a closer examination, to the whole book.2 Just as Leviathan is but the nominal title of Hobbes's political work, so Capital is only nominally the subject of Marx's new economic theory. Its real theme is labour both in its present-day economic form of subjugation by Capital and in its development, through the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, to a new directly social and socialist condition. 1 See Theories of Surplus Value, III, pp. 177-78. 2 See Capital, III, ii, pp. 366-67. 128 CHAPTER VII THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES POLITICAL Economy, which considered bourgeois commodity production as the final achievement, valid for all time, of a rational and natural system of economic order, had reduced all economic concepts to value, and all economic laws to the law of value. It had defined the exchange value of commodities which appears in the purchase and sale the products of labour as a given "quantity of value," independent of the particular kind of utility or "use value" of the several commodities, and dependent only on the labour-time expended on their production. Notwithstanding an often conflicting outside appearance it adhered to the essential truth of this definition. Bourgeois economics did not, however, get beyond that formal concept. Even the best and most consistent among its exponents who were fully aware of its objective economic contents and had not mistaken "value" for an arbitrary term (as superficial thinkers had done even then), had taken the circumstance that relative quantities of labour are represented in the value-relations of its products, and thus labour in value, as an evident fact not requiring any further investigation. A further generalization of the categories which had been regarded by bourgeois economists as the ultimate generalization of their science became possible only when the narrow horizon of bourgeois economic science was left behind by a new scientific advance, which was based on the the changed view-point of the revolutionary proletarian class. According to Marx, the most general category within the realm of economics is no longer "value" or the "quantity of value," but the value form of the product of labour or the form of commodity itself. Even this fundamental form of the bourgeois mode of production is a "general form" only from the standpoint of a merely 129 KARL MAKX "economic" science (and it represents, indeed, an extreme limit of the generalization which is possible from that restricted stand point). It is at the same time, from the more advanced viewpoint of the Marxian Critique of Political Economy, on the contrary, a specific mark by which the bourgeois mode of production is distinguished from other historical forms as a particular form of social production. The transition from the one concept to the other, which is implied in the whole of Marx's economic work, is explicitly made in that final paragraph of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, so important for the stand taken by Marx against all bourgeois economics, which bears the rather mysterious title of The Fetish-character of the Commodity and ih Secret.1 1 See Capital, I, i, sect. 4. — The final standpoint of Marx in this matter is only imperfectly expressed in the other two passages which might be referred to in the existing text of Capital (III, xlviii) and in the Theories of Surplus Value (III, 7, sub-section I, under the heading "The Capital Fetish"). It is best here, as in many other cases, to take only the first volume of Capital, which was prepared for press by Marx himself and, in addition, the second volume, as edited from later Marxian MSS. by Engels, as an absolutely authentic presentation of the Marxian standpoint. The other works which figure as the continuation of Capital (i.e., the 3rd vol. edited by Engels, and the Theories of Surplus Value edited by Kautsky) should be regarded only as what they actually are, viz., older presentations of the Marxian thought which in no case can be taken to supersede the statements contained in vols. 1 and 2 and, in fact, are all drawn from earlier MSS. Moreover, these older MSS. used by Engels and Kautsky, being first drafts and preliminary notes, often do not contain those important statements showing the practical impact of the preceding theoretical analyses, which Marx used to reserve for the final revision. (See Engels' communications in the Preface to Capital, III, pp. ix-x). A careful distinction between the earlier and later, the final and preliminary statements of Marx has a particular importance for the subject under discussion, as just here the further development of the Marxian thought has continuously remained in a state of flux. Thus, in the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, the first chapter on "Commodity," which presents the earliest version of the later first chapter of Capital, was only in the last moment added to the rough draft, which, instead, had only contained a section on "Value." (See MEGA, III, ii, pp. 349 and 308-12). Again, the sparse references in the "Critique" of 1859, to the "mystification of the commodity," which appears in the "exchange value," were only in the last revision of the text of Capital enlarged to form the independent examination of The Fetish character of the Commodity and its Secret, which now forms the concluding section of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital. 130 THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES The "fetish-character" of the commodity, reduced to its simplest form, consists in the fact that man's handiwork assumes a peculiar quality which influences in a fundamental way the actual behaviour of the persons concerned. It does not wield that remarkable power (as the earlier economists had believed) by an eternal law of nature, yet it is endowed with such power under the particular social conditions prevailing in the present epoch of society. Whence arises this mysterious character of external things which is described by political economists as their "value," and which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are no longer produced directly for use but for sale as "commodities?" The value of a commodity does not arise either from its physical qualities or from its specific utility, nor even from any specific qualities belonging to the labour involved in its production. The value relations appearing, in the exchange of the products of labour as "commodities" are essentially not relations between things, but merely an imaginary expression of an underlying social relation between the human beings who co-operate in their production. Bourgeois society is just that particular form of the social life of man in which the most basic relations established between human beings in the social production of their lives become known to them only after the event, and even then only in the reversed form of relations between things. By depending, in then conscious actions upon such imaginary concepts, the members of modern "civilized" society are really, like the savage by his fetish, controlled by the work of their hands. Commodities and, in a still more conspicuous form, the particular kind of commodity which serves as a general medium of exchange, namely, money, and all further forms of capitalistic commodity production derived from those basic forms, such as capital, wage-labour, etc., are examples of that fetish form assumed by the social production-relations of the present epoch. What Marx here terms the Fetishism of the World of Commodities is only a scientific 131 KARL MARX expression for the same thing that he had described earlier, in his Hegel-Feuerbach period, as "human self-alienation"1 and which had, indeed, formed the real foundation for this particular calamity which befalls the Hegelian "idea" at a definite stage of its speculative development.2 Marx had, however, emphasized as early as this, the real economic and social facts underlying that Hegelian philsophical term. Much more clearly than Feuerbach and the other philosophizing Hegelians he had recognized that the various forms in which that philosophical category enters into present-day society - as "property, capital, money, wage-labour, etc.", are by no means a kind of self-created "idealistic figment of our imagination." On the contrary, all those "alienated forms” actually exist in present society as "very practical, very material 1 See above pp.III et seq. The first definite application of the philosophical concept of "alienation" to the economic concepts of money, value, credit, etc., made by Marx in his unpublished Notes of 1844, on reading a work of the elder Mill (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 531 et seq.), and in the Economico-Philosophical Papers written in the same period (ibid, p. 29 et seq. esp. pp. 81 et seq.). Among the most striking statements in those early papers we find in the far-reaching discovery that the estrangement, the alienation of the labourer, does not only arise from his relationship to the products of his labour, but exists also within the productive activity itself (pp. 85 et seq.). On the other hand, Marx was already fully aware of the fact that even such apparently higher developed forms of capitalist organization as the credit and bank systems, which the followers of St. Simon and other Utopian socialists had idealized as being "a gradual undoing of man's separation from matter, of capital from work, of private property from money, of money from man," amount in truth to an even more infamous and extreme self-alienation in that their element is no longer a commodity, metal, paper, etc., but indeed is the very moral existence, the social existence, the inmost heart of man himself; in the disguise of trust and confidence of man to man — the highest degree of distrust and a "complete estrangement" (pp 533-35). About the same time Marx noted for future use an interesting term employed by the Utopian Socialist Pecquour — of the vertu magique of fertility which is conveyed to the dead element of matter by labour, that is, by the living man. That early reference to the particular form which the general fetishism attached to all commodities assumes in the particular commodity, called "labour power," is the first indication of the specific connection between what Marx later called the "fetish character of the commodity” and his doctrine of "surplus value." 3 See Hegel Phenomenology of the Mind (Works, II, 1932, p. 594) and its critical analysis by Marx (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 153-72). 132 THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES things."1 For example, the fact that one of the worst cases of that "self-alienation of humanity" appears in present-day bourgeois society as the contrast of the haves and the have-nots is by no means the outcome of a mere conceptual or spiritual process. "Not having is the most desperate spiritualism, an entire negation of the reality of the human being, a very positive having, a having of hunger, of cold, of sickness, of crimes, of debasement of imbecility, of all forms of inhumanity and abnormality.”2 And in striking contrast to the "idealistic" dialectics of Hegel who had endeavoured to annihilate the existing self-alienation of man in society merely by an imaginary philosophical annihilation of the objective form, in which it is reflected within the human mind,3 Marx denounced the utter insufficiency of a mere effort of thought to handle the real forms of that self-alienation which exist in the present-day bourgeois order of society and of which the "alienated" concepts of the bourgeois economists are only an outward expression. It is, for this purpose, above all necessary to abolish, by the practical effort of a social act, its underlying real conditions.4 Marx had also called by name the social force which was to perform that revolutionary action: “the communist workers in the workshops of Manchester and Lyons” and the "associations" founded by them.5 The later Marxian criticism of the “fetish-character” inherent in the commodity "labour-power" and, indeed, in all “economic" categories differs from that earlier criticism of the economic "self-alienation" mainly by its scientific and no more philosophical form. 1 See Marx, The Holy Family (MEGA, I, iii, p. 224). 2 Ibid, p. 212. 3 See MEGA, I, iii, pp. 156 et seq., esp. p. 162. 4 The 1844 writings of Marx quoted in this chapter anticipate, with regard to the economic use of the term "self-alienation," that more general criticism which Marx and Engels two years later in their critical exposure of "The German Ideology" directed against every conceivable application of the term. 5 See MEGA, I, iii, pp. 211 et seq., 222 et seq.
KARL MARX Modern capitalistic production both historically and theoretically rests on the separation of the real producers from their material means of production. Thus it is but a juridical illusion that the workers either as individuals or as members of an amalgamated group of labour-power owners freely dispose of their property. The common assumptions underlying the “fetishistic" concept of an individual, and even of a collective, "bargaining" with regard to the commodity "labour power" are still derived entirely from the dreamland of the free and equal individuals united within a self-governed society. The propertyless wage labourers selling through a "free labour contract," their individual labour powers for a certain time to a capitalistic "entrepreneur" are, as a class, from the outset and for ever a common property of the possessing class which alone has the real means of labour at its disposal. It is, therefore, only one part of the truth that was revealed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto when he said that the bourgeoisie had "resolved personal worth into exchange value," and thus replaced the veiled forms of exploitation applied by the pious, chivalrous, ecstatic, and sentimental middle ages" by an altogether unveiled exploitation.1 The bourgeoisie replaced an exploitation embroidered with religious and political illusion, by a new and more refined system of concealed exploitation. Whereas, in medieval society even the utterly material tasks of production were performed under the spiritual disguise of "faith" and of an "allegiance" due by the "servant" to his master," in the new era of "Free Trade," conversely, the continuing exploitation and oppression of the labourers is hidden under the pretext of the "economic necessities of production." The scientific method of concealing this state of affairs is called Political Economy. From the critical exposure of the fetishism inherent in the commodity "labour-power" there was but one step to the dis-
2 See Capital, I, pp. 680-682 and III, ii, p. 367. 134 THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES covery of the most general form of the "economic" delusion appearing in the "commodity" itself. Just as the classical economists had derived all other terms of their science from the "value" appearing in the exchange of commodities, so Marx now traced back the delusive character of all other economic categories to the fetish-character of the "commodity.” Though even now that most obvious and direct form of the "self-alienation of the human being" which occurs in the relation between wage-labour and capital, keeps its decisive importance for the practical attack on the existing order of society, the fetishism of the commodity labour-power is at this stage for theoretical purposes regarded as a mere derivative form of the more general fetishism which is contained in commodity itself. Thus the Marxian criticism of the existing order is transformed from a particular attack on the class character into a universal attack on the fundamental deficiency of the capitalistic mode of production and the structure of society based upon it. By revealing all economic categories to be mere fragments of one great fetish did Marx ultimately transcend all preceding forms and phases of economic and social theory. Political Economy itself had in its later development rectified such primitive misconceptions as that by which the adherents of the so-called "monetary system" had regarded money, in the form of gold and silver, as a product of nature, endowed with some peculiar social qualities, or the physiocratic illusion that rent grows out of the earth, not out of society. It had at its highest point of development theoretically interpreted "interest" and "rent" as mere fractions of the industrial "profit."1 However, even the most advanced classical economists remained under the spell of that same fetish which they had already practically dissolved by their own theoretical analysis, or fell back into it, because they had never succeeded in extending their critical analysis to that general fundamental form which appears in the value-form of 1 See Capital, III, ii, p. 366, and Theories of Surplus Value, III. pp. 571-72 135 KARL MARX the labour products and in the form of commodity itself. The great theoretical art of classical Political Economy here met its his historical barrier. "The value form of the labour product is the most abstract but also the most general form of the bourgeois mode of production which is thereby historically characterized as a particular kind of social production. By misconceiving it as an eternal and natural form, he will overlook the particular character of the value form and thus also that of the commodity form, which appears further developed as money form, capital form, etc."1 Marx was the first to represent that fundamental character of the bourgeois mode of production as the particular historical stage of material production, whose characterist social form is reflected reversedly, in a “fetishistic" manner, both in the practical concepts of the ordinary man of business and in the scientific reflection of that "normal" bourgeois consciousness - Political Economy. Thus the theoretical exposure of "the fetish character of the commodity and its secret" is not only the kernel of the Marxian Critique of Political Economy, but, at the same time the quintessence of the economic theory of Capital and the most explicit and most exact definition of the theoretical and historical standpoint of the whole materialistic science of society. The theoretical disclosure of the fetishistic appearance of commodity production has a tremendous importance for the practical struggle carried on by those who are oppressed in present-day society and who as a class are rebelling against this oppression. In view of the "good intentions" and scrap of paper proclamations constantly repeated by the official spokesmen of present-day economics and politics that "the worker shall no more be regarded as being a mere article of commerce,"2 the very statement 1 See Capital, I, pp. 47-48, footnote 32. 3 See, e.g., Versailles Treaty, article 427, where at the instigation of the American Federation of Labour this principle was formally accepted as the first of the "Eight principles for the regulation of the conditions of labour" embodied in the Rules of the then constituted League of Nations. 136 THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES of the existing fact that under present conditions the worker is and remains an article of commerce, becomes an open rebellion against the paramount interest of the ruling class in keeping intact both the fetishistic disguise and the underlying actual conditions. It forcibly re-establishes the responsibility of the ruling bourgeois class for all the waste and hideousness which by the "fetishistic" device of bourgeois economics had been shifted from the realm of human action to the so-called immutable, nature-ordained relations between things. For this reason alone, any theoretical tendency aiming at an unbiassed criticism of the prevailing economic categories, and the corresponding practical tendency to change the social system of which they are an ideological expression, is opposed from the outset by the overwhelming power of the classes priviledged by the present social order and interested in its in its maintenance. The ultimate destruction of capitalistic commodity-fetishism by a direct social organization of labour, becomes the task of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle. A theoretical expression of this class struggle and, at the same time, one of its tools, is the revolutionary Critique of Political Economy. 137 CHAPTER VIII. THE "SOCIAL CONTRACT"
2 See Vico, Principii di una scienta no uva d'interno alia commune natura dtlle nazioni, 1725. 3 See the Marxian statement quoted above p. 20. 4 See Marx, German Ideology (MI'XJA, I, v, p. 26): "Civil society as such develops with the bourgeoisie; however, the social organization springing directly from production and commerce which formed in all times the basis of the State and of other phenomena of the idealistic superstructure, has been continually called by the same name." 138 THE "SOCIAL CON i ii ACT" used both terms rather indiscriminately as one comprehensive name for the whole of the new social relationships which had now at last been agreed upon by the human individuals through the conclusion of the "social contract," be it that this contract was reached in full harmony and complete freedom (as the more superficial exponents of the new theory had it) or that, after the more realistic concepts of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel, it was forced upon an unwilling opposite party after a mortal struggle according to the right of the strongest. Marx's materialistic description of the social nature of the relations which are "reversely" expressed in the categories of Political Economy as relations between things, has a similar significance for the proletarian movement of the present epoch as Rousseau's theory of the "social contract” had for the bourgeois revolution of the preceding historical epoch. The unmasking of the fetish character of the commodity contains the rational and empirical solution of a problem which the social theorists of the 18th century had not even set themselves and which such later bourgeois schools as the romanticists, the historical school, the adepts of the “organic” theory of the State, and Hegel had approached in a more or less mystical way. At first sight, there seems to be no great difference between Marx's demonstration of the "secret" contained in the “form of the commodity" and the manner in which Hegel had dealt with the apparent mystery of the fact that history, made by men, follows a plan not conceived by men. Just as Hegel had said that "in world history out of the actions of men comes something quite different from what they intend and directly know and will; they realize their interests, but something further is achieved thereby which is internally comprised in it, but of which they were not conscious nor did they aim at it,"1 so Marx dwells on the contradiction that men in exchanging the products of their labour 1 See Hegel, Philosophy of History, General Introduction, I, ii, under the heading "Individuality." 139 KARL MARX as commodities and in ultimately producing them for no other purpose than that of such exchange, just thereby achieve that qualitative and quantitative social division of labour which afterwards appears to them as an external thing in the definite value-relations of the commodities exchanged or in the value-form of the commodity. "They don't know it, but they do it."1 He emphasizes the paradox still more by the often repeated statement that the utter absurdity pertaining to the fetish categories of Political Economy is only an unavoidable outward appearance of an equally fundamental absurdity underlying the real capitalist mode of production and that thus, in the economic value relations of the commodities, the social relations of isolated commodity producers appear to them as "what they really are."2 However, all these paradoxes are for Marx, otherwise than for Hegel, only a means by which he compels the reader who is still under the spell of the traditional bourgeois concepts to look at such a palpable and everyday thing as a commodity as containing anything like a "secret" at all. The uncovering of this “secret” is not reached by Hegelian wizardry but by a rational and empirical analysis of historically existing phenomenon and of the real social facts underlying its appearance. For the prophets of the 18th century, Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo, the "natural" starting point of all social life was the free individual as he just emerged from the feudal bonds of the Middle Ages and from the close connection with physical and geographical conditions by which he had been hampered in the earlier epochs of his development. The new concept of society starts from the specific social connection which for the single individual living and acting in this society is given from the outset as a quasi-external fact independent from his knowledge and purpose. From the bourgeois point of view, the individual citizen thinks of the "economic" things and forces as of something entering into his private life from without. He uses them as instruments for his 1 See Capital, I, p. 40. 2 Ibid, p. 39. 140 THE "SOCIAL CONTRACT subjective ends and, on the other hand, is restrained by them to a certain extent, in his otherwise free-willed actions. According to the new concept, individual men with all their actions and sufferings move, from the outset, in definite social circumstances arising from a given stage in the development of material production.1 These social circumstances and their historical developments, though set by human beings themselves in their united action, are nevertheless for the individuals concerned given just as irrevocably and as "objectively", as is, according to Hegel, the philosophical "idea" appearing in history or, according to a still more ancient and respectable theory, God the Almighty appearing in the flesh. Yet they are no longer regarded by Marx as a superhuman authority like the Absolute Reason which, according to Hegel's description, is "as cunning as it is powerful" and which lets men "wear one another out in the pursuit of their own ends" and thus, without direct interference, nevertheless "attains her own purpose only."2 This concept of Hegel's was, after all, nothing else than an idealization of the bourgeois concept of the benefits derived from free competition. Avoiding to Marx s critical principle, the contradiction in question results, on the contrary, from a deficiency in the present capitalist regulation of social production compared with that higher form which is to-day no more a mere matter of imagination, but an objective historical development and a real goal gradually approached by the workers in their revolutionary class struggle. It is writ large on the face of the formulae of Political Economy that they "belong to a type of social organization in which the production process controls men, not yet men the production process."3 Such high ideals of bourgeois society as that of the free, self-determining individual, freedom and equality of all citizens in the exercise of their political rights, and equality of all in the eyes 1 This point is best presented by Marx in Introduction, 1857, pp. 710 et seq. 2 See Hegel, Encyclopedia, § 209. 3 See Capital, I, p 48.
KARL MARX of the law, are now seen to be nothing but correlative concepts to the Fetishism of the Commodity, drawn from the existing system of exchange. All these far-flung additions to the basic form of the commodity-fetish which for a time had served as stimulators of material progress are to-day but ideological expressions of a particular type of production-relations that have degenerated into mere fetters of the further development of the productive forces of society. The great illusion of our epoch that capitalistic society is a society consisting of free and self-determining individuals can only be maintained by keeping the people unconscious of the real contents of those basic relations of the existing social order which by the fetishistic device of the economists had been disguised as objective and unchangeable conditions of all social life. Only by representing the real social relations between the classes of the capitalists and the wage labourers as an inevitable result of the free and unhampered "sale" of the commodity "labour power" to the owner of the capital, is it possible in this society to speak of freedom and equality. "The bourgeois law," said Anatole France, "forbids with the same majesty both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridge." 142 CHAPTER IX THE LAW OF VALUE THE social organization of labour which is hidden under the apparent value relations of commodities, is achieved in the bourgeois mode of production without the will and knowledge of the individual commodity producers. Bourgeois commodity production is, therefore, at the same time a private and social, a regulated and an unregulated ("anarchic") production. It seems as if by an undisclosed decree of "God" "Providence," "Fortune" or "Conjunction," it were laid down beforehand what kinds and what quantities of socially useful things should be produced in every branch of production. But the individual capitalist "producer" learns only subsequently – through the saleable or unsaleable quality of his commodity, through the price vacillations of the market, through bankruptcy and crisis — if and how far he has acted in accordance with that unknown rule, the economic "plan" of capitalistic reason. Bourgeois economists have over and over again referred in poetical metaphors to this inscrutable mystery of their own social existence. Just as Adam Smith spoke of an “invisible hand” which leads the individual trader to promote an end which was no part of his intention1 so other economists before and after him referred to the "play of free competition," to the “automatism of the market," or to a "law of value," which would apply to the movements of production and circulation of commodities in the same way as the law of gravity applies to the movements of physical bodies. In fact, the concept of an entirely automatic regulation of the whole industrial production brought about by the mere exchange of commodities among entirely isolated commodity producers on a national and a cosmopolitan scale 1 See Wealth of Nations Book IV, ii. 143 KARL MARX was not more than an "ideal type" even in those earlier periods when it first struck the eyes of the bourgeois classical economists. It was never fully realized in actual capitalistic production. Nevertheless, there is in bourgeois commodity production an unwritten law which rules the production and exchange of labour products as commodities. But this is by no means an unchangeable law of nature ; it is a "social law" which resembles a genuine physical law only in its apparent independence from our conscious volition and purpose. Like any other social rule, it holds good only under definite circumstances and for a definite historical period. Marx in dealing with the "so-called Primitive Accumulation of Capital" showed what enormous effort was needed to give birth to this fundamental law of the modem bourgeois mode of production and the other "eternal" law, connected with it. He exposed the series of more or less forgotten sanguinary and violent acts by which in real history the actual foundations of those so-called natural laws have been brought into existence. (The expropriation of the workers from their material means of production forms the basis of the whole-process.) Marx has likewise shown in detail that even in a completely developed commodity production the law of value does not apply in the sure and efficient manner of a genuine natural law or of a generally accepted Providence, but is realized only by a succession of frictions, vacillations, losses, crises, and break downs. He says that "in the haphazard and continually fluctuating relations of exchange between the various products of labour, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself as a regulating natural law just as the law of gravity does when the house collapses over our heads."1 With all these deficiencies, the law of value is the only form of social organization of production which exists to-day and is indeed, the only kind of "social planning" which conforms to the principles of modern competitive or commodity-producting
THE LAW OF VALUE society. It belongs to the ironical whims of History that just that self-contradictory belief in a "consciously planned commodity production" which lies at the bottom of the first Utopian schemes of a "National Bank", at which "any member of the community might lodge any kind of produce and take out of it an equal value of whatever it may contain,"1 and which was afterwards voiced in various forms by the successive schools of "social reformers," has been adopted to-day by the official spokesmen of the bourgeois class. But though this illusion is as old as capitalism itself and obstinately persists in spite of theoretical arguments and in spite of the breakdown of all projects brought forward for its realization, it is unsound both from the orthodox principle of bourgeois economic science and from the materialistic viewpoint of Marxism. It is interesting only as an ideological reflex of the deep-rooted contradictions inherent in the very principle of capitalistic commodity production. Such difference as there is between the earlier epoch when the progressive Free Traders regarded every “interference” of a State — not yet entirely their own - as an oppressive disturbance, and the present phase when even some of the most "orthodox” economists have turned from self-help to State subvention, does in no way indicate a gradual conquest of the animal-like "struggle for existence," prevailing among the isolated commodity producers of early bourgeois society, by the growing collective reason of all capitalists grouped together and organized in the "State" and in the more or less authentic institutions of a so-called "Public Opinion." There is thus only a difference of degree between the more or less numerous “interventions” of the early bourgeois State into the “free play of competition," and the increasingly rapid succession of ever more intrusive measures, by which to-day everywhere in the old and in the "new," in the fascist and in the still democratically governed 1 See John Gray, The Social System, A Treatise on the Priciple of Exchange, 1831 and, for a critical refutation, Marx, Critique of Political Economy, 1859. 145 KARL MARX capitalistic countries, an apparently new attempt is made to "control," to "correct," or to "steer" the existing economic system. Such measures serve at the utmost to weaken temporarily or even merely to disguise some of the most obstructive results of capitalistic production. Instead of ousting the planlessness resulting from the fetish-form of commodity-production, they merely stampede the unique form, in which production had been heretofore "planned" within capitalistic society, and utterly destroy the only "organization of labour" possible under capitalism. This increasing destruction of its own foundations is forced upon present-day capitalism by an objective development of its inherent tendencies. It is produced by the ever-increasing accumulation and concentration of capital ; by the growing monopolist tendencies of the big industrial and financial combines ; by the increasing appeal to the State to rescue "the community at large" from the dangers brought about by the impending collapses of hitherto proud and tax evading private enterprises ; and by hyper-ultra-super-dreadnought demands for subsidy raised by the various direct and indirect producers of armaments encroaching ever more on the field formerly occupied by the activities of the less directly war-producing industries. In trying to escape from the periodical crises which threaten more and more the existence of bourgeois society, and in a desperate attempt to overcome the existing acute crisis of the whole capitalist system, the bourgeoisie is compelled, by continually fresh and deeper "interferences" with the inner laws of its own mode of production, and continually greater changes in its own social and political organization, to prepare more violent and more universal crises and at the same time, to diminish the means of overcoming future crises. In organizing peace it prepares for war. The futility of any attempt to deal with "competition's waste" within the existing forms of production and distribution becomes 146 THE LAW OF VALUE: even more evident when we proceed from the elementary form of the "commodity" to the further developed form of "the worker transformed into a commodity," or from the general historical character of bourgeois production to its inherent class character. Just as the Utopian Exchange-Banks, Labour Certificates, and other endeavours to organize commodity production are repeated in the half-hearted "planning schemes" of the frightened economists and "socially minded" big capitalists to-day, so the first unwieldly attempts of the insurrectionary workers of Paris to wrest from the "revolutionary" government of 1848 some form of realization of the workers' "right to work" are echoed in the various measures by which the democratic and fascist countries try to dispose of the increasing menace of Unemployment by a more or less compulsory organization of the labour market. And just as in the first case Marxism answered the capitalist "planners" that the only organization conformable to commodity production is the law of value, so sober materialistic criticism of the schemes to supplant the glaring insufficiency of the free "labour market" by some form of public regulation must start from the premise that the transformation of the workers into a saleable commodity is but a necessary complement of that other "transformation" on which all modern capitalistic production rests both historically and in its actual existence — the transformation of the workers' tools and products into the non-workers' "capital." In fact, the most "benevolent" attempts to deal with the modern plague of mass unemployment have hitherto invariably led to an utter failure. There is more an apparent than a real progress in the new deals offered to the growing numbers of the unemployed by their capitalistic rulers to-day, as against those now almost forgotten times when the only cure foreseen by the most "philanthropic" spokesmen of the bourgeoisie was the Workhouse. Now as then, the final result of the endeavours to exterminate both the old form in 147 KARL MARX which unemployment periodically recurred in the industrial cycle, and the new "structural," "technological," "chronic" form in which it has come to stay, is one or another disguised form of that compulsory service whose real character is revealed in the Labour Camps and Concentration Camps of National Socialist Germany,"1 Behind these "normal" remedies offered in times of peace there stands, as ultima ratio, the mass-employment offered by a new war, and already partially anticipated by a hitherto unheard of extension of the direct and indirect armament industries both in the fascist countries and in democratic Britain and pacifistic U.S.A. The best form of "Public Works" under capitalistic conditions, as was most aptly remarked by a critic of Roosevelt's New Deal,1 is always War itself which over all other measures to "create work" has the incomparable advantage that it will never cause an undesirable glut of the market because it destroys the commodities it produces simultaneously with their production and, incidentally, destroys a considerable portion of the "excessive" workers themselves.2 The positive importance of all attempts made on the basis of the existing capitalistic conditions to create a so-called (lucus a non lucendo!) “organized capitalism” lies in another field entirely from that presumed by its ideological promoters — the "planning school" of modern capitalistic economics. The feverish endeavours to supplement the defects of "free" capitalistic commodity production confirm the gravity of those defects and thus inadvertently reveal the fettering character of the existing capitalistic production-relations. They put into sharper relief the incongruence between an ever more efficient organization of production within the single workshop or private capitalistic 1 See the remarks of Engels in a letter to Bernstein of 23.5.1884 which appear to-day as a prophetic anticipation of the ultimate capitalistic realization of the "right to work" in Nazi prisons, labour camps, and other forms of unpaid compulsory work. 2 See Stolberg and Vinton, Economic Consequences of the New Deal, 1935. 148 THE LAW OF VALUE trust and the "organic disorganization" prevailing throughout capitalistic production. The futile schemes to keep in "normal" proportions the increasing mass of unemployment and pauperism illustrate once more the capitalistic "law of population" first enunciated by Fourier and later scientifically demonstrated by Marx that within the capitalistic system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour coincide with an extension of the relative surplus population, or the industrial reserve army kept at the disposal of capitalistic industry as a potential supply of labour power for the rapid increases of population in times of prosperity and for the full utilization of the existing capacities of production in war.1 There is, furthermore, a considerable difference between the same measures when offered by the capitalists in distress and when thrust upon them by the conscious action of the workers themselves. That difference may, at first, not be a difference in the purely economic contents. Yet it is a difference of social significance. "The right to work taken in its bourgeois sense" said Marx with reference to the struggles of the Paris workers in 1848, "is a contradiction in terms, an impotent pious intention; but behind the right to work there stands the control of capital, and behind the control of capital the appropriation of the means of production by the associated working class, that is, the abolition of wage labour, of capital, and their mutual dependence. Behind the 'right to work' stood the insurrection of June."2 Finally, a few of the new developments which are to-day featured as achievements of the "planning idea" may serve to work out within the narrow bounds of the capitalist production-relations some of the formal elements which, after the overthrow of the existing mode of production, will be totally stripped of the residues of their capitalistic origin and thus usefully applied in building up a really co-operative and socialistic commonwealth. 1 See Capital, I, pp. 610-11. 2 Sec Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-50. 149 KARL MARX For the time being there remains, along with the imperfect social organization of material production in the structure of tin present bourgeois society, also the "reversed" form in which the social relations of men are now reflected as mere relations of things. There remain unchanged, even in the newest "as good as Socialism" models of a planned and steered State-Capitalism, and there will remain so long as the products of labour an produced as commodities, all the fetish-categories of bourgeois, economics: commodity, money, capital, wage-labour, increasing and decreasing total value of production and of export, profit-making capacity of industries, credits, etc., in short, all that which Marx in his philosophic phase called "human self-alienation," and in his scientific phase, "fetishism of commodity production." In spite of appearances such a system of production is not in the last analysis governed by a collective will of the associated workers but by the blind necessities of a fetishistic "Law ol Value." The apparent Fetish Character of the Commodity and with it the apparent validity of a fetishistic Law of Value, will not disappear - nor will the economic crises and depressions and the various forms of periodical and chronic mass unemployment, wars and civil wars cease to plague the modern "Civilized World," till the present mode of commodity production is entirely destroyed and human labour organized in a direct socialistic mode of production. "For this, however, a material groundwork is required, or a set of material conditions which are themselves the spontaneous outgrowth of a long and painful process of development."1 1 See Capital, I, p. 4.6. 150 CHAPTER X COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE MARXIAN DOCTRINE OF VALUE AND SURPLUS VALUE
KARL MARX whatever in the naive objection which now for almost a century has been raised against the objective theory of value by pointing to the real inequality of the various kinds of labour. Those well-meaning defenders of Marxism who, on the other hand, attempt to correct the apparent "flaw" in the Marxian doctrine of labour value by actually trying to represent the useful labour in every particular labour product as a strictly measurable quantity, merely present the sad picture of one who holds a sieve beneath the billy-goat while another keeps busy to milk him. According to Marx's critical teaching, the natural difference of the various kinds of productive human labour is by no means wiped out by the fact (unquestionable in itself) that a major part of the differences in rank, presumably existing between many kinds of labour in present-day bourgeois society, rest on "mere illusions, or, to say the least, on differences, which have long ceased to be real and continue only by a social tradition."1 The particular kinds of labour performed in the production of the various useful things are, according to Marx, by their very nature different, and just this difference is a necessary premise for the exchange of the labour products and the social division of labour brought about by it. Only on the basis of a qualitative division of labour arising spontaneously from the variety of social needs and the variety of kinds of useful labour performed to meet those needs, arises, by a further development, a possibility that this qualitative difference, for the purpose of an ever wider exchange, may gradually yield its place to the merely quantitative differences which the various kinds of labour possess as so many portions of the total quantity of the social labour expended in the production of all products consumed (or otherwise disposed of) at a given time within a given society. It is just this condition which has been first expressed theoretically by the "law of value" as formulated by the classical economists.2 Those minor followers in the wake of the great scientific founders of Political 1 See Capital, I, p. 160-61, footnote 18. 2 Ibid, pp. 39-40. 152 COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS Economy, no longer accustomed to such audacity of scientific thought, who have later pathetically bewailed the "violent abstraction" by which the classical economists and Marxism, in tracing back the value relations of commodities to the amounts of labour incorporated therein, have "equated the unequal," must be reminded of the fact that this "violent abstraction" does not result from the theoretical definitions of economic science, but from the real character of capitalist commodity production. The commodity is a born leveller. Over against this, it appears as a relatively unimportant fault in the construction of existing capitalist society that the theoretical principle of exchange of equal quantities of labour is no longer strictly realized in each single case but only, perhaps, on a rough average. Contrary to all adverse opinions prevailing in one or the other camp, it was never the intention of Maix to descend, from the general idea of value as expounded in the first volume of Capital, by means of ever closer determinants to that direct determination of the price of commodities, for which at a later time Walrus and Pareto set up their delusive systems of n millions of equations into which we need only introduce the required n millions of constants, to calculate with mathematical accuracy the price of a definite individual commodity at a given time. It was a catastrophical misunderstanding of Marx's economic theory when, after the appearance of the second and third volumes, of Capital, the whole dogmatic dispute between the bourgeois critics of Marx and the orthodox Marxists centred round the question whether, and in what sense, the transformation of the "values" of the commodities into "production prices," by means of the intermediary concept of an "average rate of profits," is consistent with the general definition of "value" in the fist volume. As shown by the MSS. and by the correspondence which were later published it was long before the appearance of the first volume, that Marx had finally laid down the principle that the "production prices" of commodities produced by capitals of 153 KAHL MARX various organic constitution can no longer be identical with their "values" as determined by the "law of value," either in individual cases or on the average, but are only a compound result of that main factor along with a series of other factors.1 The particular importance of the law of value within Marx's theory, then, has nothing to do with a direct fixation of prices of commodities by their value. It would be nearer the truth to say that the working of this law appears in the general development of the prices of commodities, in which the continuous depreciation in value of the commodities, effected by the ever-increasing productivity of social labour consequent upon the further accumulation of capital, constitutes the decisive factor. The ultimate meaning of this law as shown in its working by Marx in all three volumes of Capital does not consist, however, in supplying a theoretical basis for the practical calculation of the businessman seeking his private advantage, or for the economico-political measures taken by the bourgeois statesman concerned with the general maintenance and furtherance of the capitalist surplus-making machinery. The final scientific purpose of the Marxian theory is rather to reveal "the economic law of motion of modern society" and that means at the same time the law of its historical development.2 Even more clearly was this expressed by the Marxist Lenin when he said that "the direct purpose of a Marxist investigation consists in the disclosure of all forms of the antagonism and exploitation existing in present-day capitalist society in order to aid the proletariat to do away with them."3 Similarly, the doctrine of surplus value which is usually regarded as the more particularly socialist section of Marx's economic theory is not either a simple economic exercise in calculation 1 See Marx's letter to Engels, 27.7.1867 (MEGA, III, iii, pp. 403-04). 2 See Preface to first edition of Capital, 1867. 3 See Lenin, "Who are the 'Friends of the People' and how do they fight against the Social Democrats?" 1894, Collected Works, I (Russian).
COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS which serves to check a fraudulent statement of value received and expended by capital in its dealing with the workers, or a moral lesson drawn from economics for the purpose of reclaiming from capital the diverted portion of the "full product of the worker's labour." The Marxian doctrine, as an economic theory, starts rather from the opposite principle that the industrial capitalist under "normal" conditions acquires the labour power of the wage labourers by means of a respectable and businesslike bargain, whereby the labourer receives the full equivalent of the "commodity" sold by him, that is, of the "labour power" incorporated in himself. The advantage gained by the capitalist in this business derives not from economics but from his privileged social position as the monopolist owner of the material means of production which permits him to exploit for the production of commodities in his workshop the specific use value of a labour power which he has purchased at its economic "value" (exchange value). Between the value of the new commodities produced by the use of the labour power in the workshop, and the prices paid for this labour to its sellers, there is, according to Marx, no economic or other rationally determinable relation whatever. The measure of value produced by the workers in the shape of their labor products over and above the equivalent of their wages, i.e., the mass of "surplus labour" expended by them in producing this “surplus value;" and the quantitative relation between this surplus labour and the necessary labour, i.e., the “rate of surplus value" or the "rate of exploitation" holding good for a particular country do not result from any exact economic calculation. They result from a battle between social classes which assumes sharper and sharper forms just because no objective limits are set for the increase of the rate and mass of the surplus value under the conditions of an ever-increasing accumulation of capital at one pole, and the simultaneous accumulation of misery at the opposite pole of society. 155 CHAPTER XI ULTIMATE AIMS OF MARX'S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
ULTIMATE AIMS OF MARx's CRITIQUE Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|