Cooking the Books: Why capitalists are ‘greedy’ (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Attenborough: Curb capitalism to save Earth’ was how the Times (8 October) reported a podcast interview with David Attenborough on Radio 5 Live in which he said:

  ‘The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism is dead. I’m not an economist and I don’t know but I believe the nations of the world, the ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy.’

That’s a start. Capitalism has got something to do with it. It certainly encourages behaviour on the part of those in charge of capitalist production which comes across as ‘greed’ but is this an ‘excess’?

Marx devoted a section of chapter 24 of Capital to the question. Entitled ‘Separation of Surplus Value into Capital and Revenue: the Abstinence Theory’, it’s an amusing read as it mocks the theory that the capitalists are entitled to a profit on their capital because they abstain from consuming all their profits but re-invest most as new capital.

‘Except as personified capital,’ Marx wrote, ‘the capitalist has no historical value’ and went on:

  ‘But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle’.

Hence his conclusion that ‘so far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation.’

In other words, the capitalists’ ‘greed’ for accumulating profits is not a personal choice or a character defect but is performing an essential social role within the capitalist economic system.

In Marx’s day that role was filled by an individual person. Today it is filled by a fictitious legal person – mainly, the limited company or corporation – but which still has to carry out what being a personification of capital involves.

It should be clear, then, that ‘greed’ for making and accumulating profits as more capital – also called ‘growth’ – is built into capitalism. It is not an excess but rather the essence of capitalism. Those in charge of capitalist production cannot help being ‘greedy’.

This means that capitalism cannot be ‘curbed’ and, if attempted, would disrupt the system and cause mass unemployment (rather like the measures governments have taken to deal with the coronavirus pandemic). To save the Earth, capitalism will have to be culled not curbed.

Fortunately, the historical role of the capitalist has been completed as the material basis has long since been created for ‘a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.’ To save the Earth we need to move on to this next stage in the evolution of human society.