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Capital
refined - Introduction
Developing
policies in the interests of working people calls for the precision
about our enemy that Marx offered throughout Capital.
For Marx, the practice of science required penetrating beyond
appearances to specify the structured dynamics in the accumulation of
capital. His critique isolated the forms and stages through which
capital expands.
This
sequence on ‘Capital refined’ introduces most of the distinctions
that Marx drew. The material will be split into eight items:
1.
capital-in-general and capital-within-capitalism;
2.
individual capitals and their aggregation;
3.
individual, aggregate and social;
4.
competitive, yet monopolising, and 4a. Lenin’s Imperialism;
5.
money-capital, production-capital, and commodity-capital;
5a.
lessons from their different mobilities;
6.
variable and constant;
7.
fixed and fluid;
8.
production and productive.
After
unpeeling these layers, the sequence wraps up by asking ‘what is
capital?’ and ‘who can become a capitalist?’
The
manifestations of money capital as merchants’, usurers’, finance and
fictitious will be presented in a separate sequence, as will be more
about value, surplus value, profit, turnovers and their rates.
The
present items provide no more than a checklist for activists embarking
on Marx’s investigations. Introductory remarks are no substitute for
hard reading, pen in hand. More importantly, Marx’s distinctions carry
a political significance. Without his insights, we are more likely to be
misled about manoeurvrings by our enemy. Only the keenest understanding
of capital will let workers develop the policies needed to advance our
interests. Chatter about greed drags us under.
The
objective of our inquiries will be the actuality of capital. That is
what Marx went after. Yet, it is also worth knowing what Marx wrote and
what his words mean. But materialists do not engage in bibliomancy.
Hence, the items do not push any of the versions of Marx enshrined by
this cult or that grouplet.
Before
going on, three cautions need to be sounded:
A.
The distinctions sketched below are only first approximations of the
richness that Marx brings to his account of the forms through which
capital passes to expand. The following pages will have served their
purpose once activists can bridge the gulf between this schematic
treatment of Marx’s categories and the structured dynamics of the
current crisis in accumulation.
B.
Memorising definitions of capital is no guarantee of understanding
what is happening in any given situation. The distinctions between the
forms of capital are not set by any intrinsic qualities. On the
contrary, knowing how to identify each form of capital depends on
recognising its function in the social patterns of exploitation.
C.
The particularities of capital change. They have kept shifting since
Marx and Lenin wrote. New things happen. That rule is how
capital-within-capitalism appeared. That is what keeps socialism
possible.
1.
capital-in-general/capital-within-capitalism
The notion of capital-within-capitalism is itself controversial. Apologists for
exploitation portray capital as timeless, universal, eternal, a part of
nature. They pontificate about circulation-in-general, as if bartering
were part of our genetic inheritance. Marx grounded his critique of
political economy by demonstrating that capitalism is specific to one
epoch. He mocked capital-in-general
as a ‘very impressive method – for swaggering, sham-scientific,
bombastic ignorance and intellectual laziness’.
Plenty
of bourgeois scholars have traced the origins and spread of capitalism.
Marxists attempt more than painting a different version of that
backdrop. We take a revolutionary approach to history as shaped by a
struggle between classes - every second of every day for control of
labour-time.
Nonetheless,
instances of capital-in-general can be extracted from across the millenia. Marx
mentioned the opposable thumb and language. In terms of physical
objects, the Via Appia Antica in
Rome
has done service during slavery, feudal times and now under capitalism,
although its cobblestones probably are like the seven heads and eight
handles to the proverbial axe.
To
pursue elements found in all systems of production deflects our
attention from the distinct pathways to exploitation in chattel slavery
or feudalism. By contrast, in focusing on capital-within-capitalism,
Marxists confront capital as a particular relationship of power. On one
side of that contest are capitalists as the personification of capital.
Against them are wage-slaves who embody labour-time.
Capital-within-capitalism
emerged over long periods via usurer’s capital and merchant capital,
taking centuries to become the dominant mode. Just as there is no capital-in-general so there is no generality of capital-within-capitalism.
Instead, it passes through stages. Lenin made a stab at tracking one of
those transitions in his 1916 pamphlet on Imperialism,
the newest stage of
capitalism. (see 4a below)
Similarly,
capital-within-capitalism
mixes chattel-slavery with wage-slavery either inside a
nation-market-state, or globally. The domestic mode is always present.
(see item 8 on production).
Marxists
do not slice the past into chronological periods, such as by century, or
rely on descriptors such as Late or Post-Modern. We distinguish the
moments within capitalism by rearrangements of the dynamic elements in
exploitation to accumulate.
Capital-within-capitalism
is also specific to places, that is, for nation-market-states.
Capitalism operates differently in
Sweden
and in
Guatemala
. The pair have one key point in common: namely the exploitation of
labour power under the watch of the state as it organizes capital and
disorganizes labour. However, Swedish labourers live very much better
than do Guatemalan labourers because, since the 1940s, the Swedish
working class has been able to tilt the balance of class forces in its
favour.
We
must remain alert to these specifics of time, place and manner, because
it is through them that we struggle. Socialists need to stick to the
truths about exploitation and power while responding in our practices to
their peculiarities. In doing so, we dare not mistake the crux of
capital expansion for one of its manifestations.
2.
individual and aggregate
We now trace some of the lines between individual
capital(s) and aggregate
capital.
By individual,
Marx meant particular. An individual
capital is rarely a personal fortune. More often, individual
is a collective, as in a firm/enterprise/business. These days, an individual
capital is likely to be a global conglomerate, such as
Toyota
.
Socialists
cannot gain support from workers if we overlook the particular ways in
which exploitation, competition and accumulation operate for their
individual employer. When we call to ‘open the books’ we need to be
able to interpret their numbers. The necessity that all capitals have to
expand takes many routes. To devise appropriate responses, activists
therefore need to drill through the global economy, past sectors and
industries and on to the circumstances of each firm. We need to identify
the problems and possibilities facing each business.
For
example, how does it raise its investment funds? Coca-Cola moved in and
out of franchising to spread the costs of raising capital to expand
distribution. A mining corporation waits years before it gets any
earnings whereas the cash-flow of the franchisee of a fast-food outlet
starts within minutes of opening the door. Construction firms risk
bankruptcy because of the short roll-over periods for their funds; they
usually depend on progress payments which arrive only if they have met
three-monthly targets.
QANTAS
is extremely unusual among airlines since it has to raise all of its
money capital in the market whereas most of its competitors have some
government shareholding to fall back on. The US-based carriers take
refuge in Chapter 11 bankruptcy while continuing to trade while
insolvent, which is a offence under Australian law.
Aggregate
capital is the adding together of all the individual capitals within an
economy, whether a nation-market-state or an imperium.
The
difference between individual
and aggregate is significant for responding to the crisis. What is
advantageous for one or more individual capitals is not necessarily
rewarding for their aggregation, and vice versa. Rolex wants its staff
to earn zero, but dreams of customers with a million to spend a year
each.
Recognising
the gap between the needs of one firm and those of the system as a whole
is part of nutting out socialist responses under the rule of capital.
For instance, is it better for the working class if taxes go to
recapitalize banks and thereby keep credit flowing through the economy,
or does our class benefit more by allocating those monies to protecting
jobs at individual capitals such as GM-H?
These
questions do not come with ready-made answers. They do, however,
highlight the dilemmas imposed on workers by the il-logic of capital.
Under its rule, we must seek ways to use its internal conflicts against
itself.
Now,
we move past aggregate, and
onto ‘social’ capital,
which is not what Radio National says it is.
3.
Social capital
This third item in refining the definitions of capital distinguishes
both individual and aggregate
from social.
As a
preliminary, we must clear away Marx’s concept of social capital from how the phrase ‘social capital’ has been
popularised. Progressives tied the term ‘capital’ to ‘social’ in
the sense of community connections. They adopted the lingo of the enemy
in order to get a hearing for activities they fear are being
marginalised by ‘free-market’ economic correctness. From Marx’s
viewpoint, there is nothing sociable about social
capital.
Waffle
about this bourgeois version of ‘social
capital’ has become so widespread that confusion is likely to follow
from our using social for the
sum total of capitals. Marx sometimes wrote about ‘social
aggregate capital’. Perhaps we should too.
Social capital is the
subject of Marx’s inquiry throughout Capital.
Social capital covers the
same collection of capitals as aggregate
but Marx conceptualises social
capital in qualitatively different ways.
Capital
becomes capital-within-capitalism only when it is social.
Once understood in this way, the term ‘social
capital’ could be seen as tautological.
Any
substitution of ‘aggregate’ for Marx’s social
is acceptable only for as long as ‘aggregate’ speaks to its
differences from ‘individual’, as illustrated in the previous item.
However, to treat an individual capital as autarkic is to ignore capital
as a relationship of power. To picture individual capitals as no more
than their aggregation is to see them as potatoes in a sack. Social
capital, however, is far from being a plate of mash. Within social capital,
individual capitals retain their identity, yet penetrate each other.
Capitals
interact through the exchanges that distinguish
capital-within-capitalism from capital-in-general. The key pair are (a)
the exchange of money for commodities to accumulate more capital, and
(b) as one instance of (a), the exchange of money for labour power to
add more value to produceever more commodities.
Surplus
value displays its social
character because not all of it ends up as profit for the original
exploiter. Some of the surplus value extracted by that capitalist will
be distributed around several others, mostly his service providers.
The social
nature of capital manifests itself inside factories where a variety of
machines operate as arms of one vast machine, forcing labour and
materials through a society of continuous processes to emerge as ‘the
commodity’. The global chains of supply and for distribution, are
further expressions of this social nature.
Social capital is no
abstraction from aggregate capitals, or an archetype for capital as some
disembodied form. Hence, the expansion of social
capital is attained through individual capitals, which are its material
forms.
The
survival of capitalism as a system depends on the expansion of social
capital at the expense of certain individual capitals. The outlay of
money to achieve more money to outlay weaves individual capitals into
each other while competition casts them against each other. The pressure
on every firm to attain the average rate of profit will cut funds off
from those that do not meet that expectation. One result is the
concentration of capital, our next topic.
4.
Monopolising capitals
This fourth item in the refining of capital considers how competing
capitals give rise to monopolising capitals which, in turn, intensify competitiveness. We
shall consider how individual capitals operate within social aggregate
capital by relating competitive capital to monopolising
capitals.
Before
going down that path, a few dictionary-style definitions are in order:
monopoly
– prices are set by one producer, eg
Intel;
duopoly
- dominance by two – eg Pepsi and Coca-Cola;
oligopoly
– dominance by a few as in the auto
industry. From time to time, these few will form a cartel to set
prices, as OPEC fails to maintain.
monopsony
– one buyer is so large as to set the price for competing sellers;
to persist, this expanse of power requires coordination by the state,
as happened when Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry rode
shot-gun on the contracts for Australian iron ore and coals;
duopsony
– Coles and Woolworths versus the suppliers of fresh produce.
Concentration
of economic power runs along two lines: the horizontal and the vertical.
In horizontal integration, one firm buys up all competitors in that
sector; in the vertical kind, a firm owns all the firms with which it
does business, up and down the supply chain. The vertical prevents other
capitalists getting a share of the surplus value produced by the
firm’s wage-slaves. However, this internalising can become so
cumbersome that much of the surplus value is eaten up by ‘bureaucratic
rent’. In that case, the firm experiments with ‘out sourcing’.
Monopolising is a cycle of these ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ , but always
for capital accumulation.
Monopolising
is usually some combination of both horizontal and vertical. Many of
their benefits can be gained without ownership by price-fixing cartels
such as Visy and Amcor on packaging, and by QANTAS over freight rates.
Moreover, monopolising would be greater were it not for laws on banking
and the media.
Instead
of talking about ‘monopoly capital’, Marxist-Leninists should use
‘monopolising capitals’. Monopolising
is written with the –ing to
highlight that we dealing with a process, never a completed condition.
Capitals are in the plural.
It is very rare for only one firm to dominate for any length of time.
Hence, we combine ‘ing’
with an ‘s’ to think in terms of
monopolising capitals.
Monopolising is, therefore, more accurately called oligopolising.
This
item has raised a vexed question among Marxists. How can capitalism be
both competitive and monopolistic? In brief, the answer is that the
competition leads towards monopolising without ever installing a single
firm with total and permanent dominance.
Bourgeois
economists, for their part, are wedded to a model of perfect
competition. In the 1930s, Joan Robinson demonstrated that imperfect
competition is the rule, through which bouts of competition erupt to
re-jig the pecking order among the monopolisers.
4a.
Lenin’s Imperialism
Because monopolising reduces the number of rivals, it increases the
competition between the survivors. That intensification leads to strife
between nation-market-states, including wars. The outbreak of the Great
European War in August 1914 drove Lenin to sketch an analysis of
monopolising capitals in
Imperialism, the latest stage of capitalism. The translation of Novosti as ‘highest’ is misleading since the Russian means
‘newest’ or ‘latest’, not highest or final. History did not come
to an end with monopolosing capitals from the 1870s.
It
is equally important to see that Lenin’s imperialism is not the same
as colonisation, as his five-point summary should make clear, but rarely
does:
…
without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all
definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations
of a phenomenon in its complete development, we must give a definition
of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic
features:
1)
the concentration of production and
capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created
monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
2)
the merging of bank capital with
industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this
‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy;
3)
the export of capital as
distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional
importance;
4)
the formation of international
monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among
themselves; and
5)
the territorial division of the
whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
Most
of what goes on in the first four elements of Imperialism has happened
inside or between metropolitan centres. To smash imperialism is to put
an end to monopolising capitals at home, not just to block their
neo-colonialism.
There
is no colonialism-in-general, just as there is no capital-in-general.
The carve-up of
Africa
in the 1890s, like the apportioning of the Middle-East after 1918, took
place within an altered pattern of accumulation in the era of
monopolising capitals.
Monopolising
was the hidden side of the latest wave of globalisation, and is being
accelerated by the current crisis. Indeed, one benefit to social capital
from crises is to purge capitalism of weaker firms. We are not seeing
that today with governments taking the toxic debts from financiers and
auto-makers onto budgets.
5.
money-capital, production-capital and commodity-capital
This fifth item in refining the definition of capital approaches the
three forms through which capital passes in order to expand. Marx traced
their circuits in Volume II of Capital. The three forms are:
>
money-capital, which is the
investment made to start the process;
this
money-capital pays for
>
production-capital, which
is plant and equipment, raw materials, semi-finished goods, ancillary
supplies (such as electricity) and labour power;
these
means of production are combined into
>
commodity-capital, which
has to be sold so that the originating money-capital can increase.
Commodity capital comes
into two kinds. The raw materials, semi-finished goods and labour power
that go into production capital
are commodities just as much as are the items produced out of them, in
farms or factories or on construction sites.
The
money (M) goes into commodities (C) that pass through production (P) to
make commodities (C¹) for sale to increase the money (M+). This circuit
of money-capital is given by the symbols M>C>P>C¹>M+.
This
circuit is the one available to social capital expands. However,
individual capitals short-circuit the process whenever they can. First,
they speculate in commodities without going to the trouble and expense
of producing any. Here the formula is M>C>M+. Secondly, they
speculate on money itself and leap from M to M+. In both cases, the
increments to turn M into M+ still have come from those capitals that
persist in exploitation according to M>C>P>C¹>M+.
Recognising
the differences between money-capital,
production-capital and commodity-capital is only a start in wisdom.
The three forms are not just tied together, like beads on a string. The
key to understanding them is in how they are integrated.
The
second item in this series raised distinctions between
capital-in-general and
capital-within-capitalism. Now we go further into the latter.
First,
the three forms of capital – M, P and C - exist only when they are
parts of a process. None of the forms of capital is
capital-within-capitalism if it is outside this metabolism. A miser’s
horde is not capital, capital of the future.
In
other words, each form of capital is capital-within-capitalism only
while it is transmuting to the next form. Capital must be moving through
the circuit in order to be capital-within-capitalism. Interruptions to
that process mean that capital ceases to expand. That blockage suspends
the form’s existence as capital-within-capitalism.
Hence,
bank deposits that cannot find a borrower are not money-capital. A factory closed for the night is not production-capital.
Vehicles in a car-dealer’s yard are not commodity-capital.
They are latent or potential capital.
This
treatment of capital defies bourgeois common sense which is based on the
appearance of capital as if it were always and only capital-in-general.
The
transmuting of capital through its forms is one of the two keys to
understanding Marx’s analysis. The other key is ‘variable’
capital, discussed in Item 6 below. Before proceeding to that pivotal
aspect, a political caution will be interposed.
5a.
the three circuits in political practice
Failure to delineate the forms of capital derails policy responses. For
instance, phrases such as ‘a flight of capital’ and ‘mobility of
capital’ became prominent in critiques of the latest wave of
globalisation. Such talk is silly since the three forms of capital
cannot take flight with equal ease.
Capital
in the form of a book entry for money-capital
can now flit around the world at a keystroke. Capital in the form of
consumable commodities jet
between continents. Capital in the form of production commodities have
long been made in order to shipped around the globe to producers,
whether in manufacturing, transport, agriculture or construction. By
contrast, General Motors today has to think twice before shifting its production-capital
from
Adelaide
to
Guangzhou
. Hence, policies to limit the ill-effects on workers from the flight of
one form of capital are not transferable to the other pair.
[These
distinctions are but some of the easier to grasp differences between
what Marx details in Volume Two as Department I and Department II, which
we won’t investigate further here.)
Moreover,
different branches of the same form of capital also have distinct
capacities to move. It is easier for Pacific Brands to ship its sewing
machines to
Burma
than for Blue Scope Steel to lift up its rollers. Both transfers are
technically possible as happened when plant and machinery in
Germany
were taken apart, shipped and reassembled to feed the construction boom
in
China
.
However,
during a crisis of the accumulation of capital, the plant and equipment
for production-capital
becomes worth little more than scrap metal. Excess capacity is so great
that a firm could buy up abandoned production capacity in
Asia
for less than it would cost to move its machines. This option is at the
core of the current crisis which is now stripping the plant and
machinery components of production capital of the congealed labour-time
that went into their production. Warren Buffett makes Marx’s point
beautifully when he says that he takes over a company for the value he
can still take out of it, not for how much went into it.
Emerging
from the circuit with a larger quantum of money capital is not an end in
itself. On the contrary, the aim is to get that extra money to buy more
commodities to throw into expanded production …and so it goes ….
round and round
The
expansion of money-capital from M to M+ happens because of the
appropriation of surplus value. To maintain our focus on capital, items
presenting ‘value’ and ‘surplus value’ are in another series.
This convenience in exposition risks deflecting attention from the
actualities of exploitation but that weakness is countered by our now
distinguishing variable from constant
capitals.
6.
variable and constant
This item in refining definitions of capital, and in the next one on
fixed and fluid,
move into ever greater complexities.
Before
going there, readers will have to take it on trust that our getting
clear the distinctions between variable
and fluid (or circulating) and between constant
and fixed is essential.
Failure to do so helps bourgeois ideologues to conceal the exploitative
nature of the relations between capital and labour.
Variable
capital starts life as the antithesis to capital in any its forms. This
antagonism arises because variable
capital enters the circuits of expansion as labour power. Capitalists
buy this commodity from wage-slaves. As a result of that exchange,
labour power becomes a form of capital.
At
first, the notion of labour becoming capital seems absurd. Yet, this
transmutation counts for most in the expansion of capital. None of the
practices sketched in this series could exist without this turning of
human capacities into capital to oppress their bearers. Here is the
crucible of alienation and reification.
Labour-power
starts as a commodity owned by wage-slaves. When we sell it, it becomes variable
capital. That capital is then embodied in produce reappearing as a
different kind of commodity-capital, one now owned by the capitalist.
Marx
calls ‘labour power’ variable
capital because it alone can produce more value than has gone into
producing its value. That is to say, labour power varies the sum of the
values of all the other commodities that are purchased for production
capital and which come out of the production process as commodities to
be sold.
Wage-slaves
use money-wages to buy the bulk of consumable commodities. Our purchases
are necessary to reproduce the labour power that we need to sell in
order to put food on the table. The capitalists need us to buy these
commodities so they can realise the surplus value lodged in them. After
that exchange some profit can reach the capital that appropriated the
surplus value.
To
exist, labour needs the use values embedded in commodities just as
capital needs to realise a profit through their sale. Only then can
social money-capital expand.
Constant capital stands
in contrast to variable
capital. Constant capital
covers the other means of production - plant and equipment, raw
materials, semi-finished goods and ancillaries such as electric power
that go into the production form of capital. Marx called them constant
because, by themselves, they can do nothing to expand the values that
went into their production. At most, they add the same value to the new
values as they brought.
All
the components of constant capital, and all of the variable capital, end
up together in commodity-capital. However,
they get there in different ways, and at differing rates, as we shall
see in the next item on fixed and fluid capitals.
7.
fixed and fluid
The distinction between fixed
and fluid (or ‘circulating’) is the hardest to unravel. This
difficulty arises because the distinctions between them depend on their
differing turnover times.
Hitherto,
these items in refining capital have presented each component in
Marx’s critique of political economy in ways that have not required
knowledge of concepts yet to be explained. Now, it is necessary to
indicate the importance of turnover times without stopping to explore
them in detail.
The
money-capital that pays for plant and machines (means of production)
takes years to turnover. The bulk of the value embodied in this
production capital does not enter into each circuit of capital
expansion. Marx attached fixed to this element of production-capital.
Fixed
is not a question of immobility. A railway track and the engine that
runs on it are equally fixed capital
because they both yield up their
value very slowly.
To
repeat: Marx wrote about fixed capital
for the form embodied in plant and machinery. Only a small portion is
transferred by wear and tear to each item of produce. In other words, fixed capital has a very long turnover time.
By
contrast, each firm needs to have ready access to funds to pay for its
raw materials and wages. The turnover times for those elements can be as
brief as a working day. Marx calls this capital fluid
or circulating.
The
value that passes out of fixed
capital into the production of commodities got there by previous
circuits of expansion, that is, by the accumulation of value from some
earlier exploitation of labour-power.
All
capital derives from the wealth of nature congealed in a multiplicity of
forms through the application of human capacities.
Now
for the even harder part:
Our
penetration of the connections and disjunctures between fixed
and fluid can be strengthened
by relating them to variable
and constant.
>
all fixed capital is constant
capital. Put another way, fixed
capital cannot add more value (that is, labour time) than went into its
production.
>
only some constant capital is fixed.
For example, plant and machinery are both fixed
and constant. However, the
bulk of constant capital is fluid.
Raw materials, semi-finished goods and ancillaries such as water and
electric power are either absorbed into, or used up by, commodities,
which then circulate in search of money.
>
Most fluid capital is constant.
The constant elements in fluid
capital supply the physical form in which the variable
capital (that erstwhile labour power) can go about as commodity-capital
in order to return as a larger quantum of money-capital.
>
all variable capital is fluid.
All labour power (variable
capital) passes into the commodity-capital produced to venture forth in
order to yield a larger sum of money-capital.
Variable
capital is the element that makes this expansion possible. All the other
elements exchange – on average - at their values.
8.
production and productive
This eighth and final item distinguishes production-capital
from productive for both
labour and capital. To affix production
to one of the forms of capital is not the same as using productive
to describe either
capital or labour. We saw in item five that production-capital
is the form of capital out of which come the commodities that embody
surplus value. However, to say that a capital is productive
means that it is productive
of surplus value.
Hence,
money-capital becomes productive
when it goes into production-capital
but not when it is spent on champagne baths.
Yet not all of the production-capital,
or of the money capital, is productive
of surplus value. Only the variable component of production capital adds
more value than it brings to the making of commodities. (Item 6 above.)
Two
disputes arise when this definition of productive
is presented. One is a technical question which we won’t interrogate
here. Suffice it so say that the point at issue is illustrated by asking
whether the work of an Archbishop or an advisor to Gillard is productive
of surplus value, or do they merely re-circulate the surplus value
produced and realised elsewhere? Marx says ‘No’, they do not add
value. Nonetheless, he accepts that train-drivers can add surplus value.
Much ink has been spilt over whether the clerks who sell train tickets
also contribute surplus value. We might leave that puzzle till after the
revolution.
The
question of un-productive
labour has a second face. Bourgeois feminists get upset on hearing that
domestic labour is unproductive. It seems not to occur to them that the
domestic labour of a male who repairs his own car is also unproductive.
Bourgeois ideologues stumble when separating sentiment from science. The
matter of un-productive labour has to be considered from the vantage
point of capital-within-capitalism and not as a-historical moralising.
No
activity is productive or un-productive by its nature. Its designation is decided by its role in
the capitalist relations of power. Indeed, the human capacities that go
into domestic labour – whether cooking or sewing - become productive when their providers present them as labour power at a
cafe or sweatshop. The housewife who was un-productive in her own home becomes productive by performing comparable tasks to add value for the woman
who exploits her.
The
bourgeoisie assume that being ‘unproductive’ is a Bad Thing. If
ethics enter into the debate, surely it is productive
labour which is malignant because the production of surplus value
requires exploitation.
In
addition, domestic labour is essential to the reproduction of the labour-power
sold by wage-slaves. The performance of tasks at home, such as growing
vegetables, building one’s own house and caring for children,
contributes to the reproduction of labour power, on a daily basis and
across generations. These efforts keep down living expenses and, hence,
cut the socially necessary costs of reproducing labour power. Therefore,
un-productive domestic labour
indirectly benefits the expansion of capital by reducing wages. At the
same time, that household production inhibits capital expansion by
supplying use values outside the realm of exchange values;
self-sufficiency limits the realisation of any profit on the surplus
value embedded in the commodity-capital. In this sense, household labour
can be seen as anti-productive as well as un-productive.
Capital
refined -
a reprise
What
is capital? Who is a capitalist?
In
asking ‘what is capital?’, this item seeks to clear away three
misconceptions. After that, we consider the relevance of intent in
becoming a capitalist. This series concludes by pointing to the critical
mass of capital that is essential to transform any employer into a
personification of capital.
1.
Three common mistakes concern: a. micro-loans; b. home ownership, and c.
your toothbrush:
a)
the Gremin Bank restores its borrowers to pre-capitalist
self-sufficiency. Those loans do not make them capitalists because the
recipients do not live off the surplus value of others. Indeed, most
of the customers still engage in self-exploitation.
b)
my item on ‘The housing question’ in the series on the Crisis
showed why owning one’s own dwelling does not make you into a
capitalist. That possession is not productive property, and therefore
cannot be used to extract surplus value and hence adds nothing to an
expansion of capital.
c)
Apologists for capitalism rave that, under socialism, the state will
own your toothbrush. To puncture this nonsense, Marxists distinguish
property from possessions.
The
factories in which toothbrushes are made, all the toothbrushes in all
the warehouses and all the toothbrushes in all the supermarkets are
property. On the other hand, the toothbrushes in our bathrooms are
possessions. Property is productive of surplus-value: a possession is
not. Only a fool or a liar can believe that owning a toothbrush factory
is the same as owning your own toothbrush. Socialism is the collective
ownership of property, not of possessions. Of course, the volume of
needed possessions will be less.
2.
No one can become a capitalist of and by one’s own efforts. A wannabe
capitalist must exploit others. But employing a few others is not the
same as being the personification of capital. Four employees are likely
to produce enough surplus value for one employer and dependents to live
without working. Yet four wage-slaves are unlikely to produce enough
surplus value for their employers’ money-capital to go on expanding.
If Grollo had done no more than run a single truckload of cemintistas,
Grocon would not exist.
3.
To get up and running as the personification of capital, an employer
needs access to vast quantities of money-capital to produce more
production goods. The capitalist needs a reserve of all the forms of
capital: money, production and commodity.
4.
Intention
Consider a pair of parallel careers from post-war
Australia
. On the one hand is Loui Grollo who fathered Grocon, and on the other
is Franco Belgiorno-Nettis who headed Transfield Corporation. Their
starting points could hardly have been further apart, yet their common
outcome highlights how intentions are subordinate to the laws of
accumulation.
Grollo
arrived in the late 1920s and spent more than a decade labouring in
forestry work-camps around
Eastern Victoria
. He moved to town to work for a cemintista.
After the war, he went into business for himself. His wife did the books
while he employed a couple of off-siders, laying house foundations and
paths. The business grew with the economy. Yet Grollo could have been
driven out of business by the ready-mix octopus. He had to expand to
survive. He moved from concreting to construction. In 1969, he returned
from an overseas holiday to find that he had become a corporation.
His
sons had long harboured that intention, and the change from a firm
supporting his family into a business for the self-expansion of capital
had taken place years earlier. Loui did not foresee what his employment
of labour had wrought.
By
contrast, before Franco Belgiorno-Nettis had arrived in
Australia
as the manager for an Italian company, he knew that he wanted to run his
own business. He also knew that, to survive, that business would have to
become a big one. Of course, wishing and doing are miles apart.
exploitation of labour power, swindles and thuggery got Transfield to
where its founder always had intended it to be.
This
boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after
exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while
the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a
rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which
the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from
circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly
throwing it afresh into circulation.
Karl
Marx, Capital I, (
Moscow
, 1958), p. 153
…his
expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily
restricting the other. But along with this growth, there is at the
same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the
passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.
Karl
Marx, Capital I, (
Moscow
, 1958) p. 594
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