"The Road to Socialism - Kropotkin, Morris & Marx"

A transcript of an old talk from one of the speakers which may be of some interest to those interested in the subject of the debate:

What Marx should have said to Kropotkin

Football Fortunes

Cross-posted from the Socialist Courier blog

Every day in the newspapers and on television we are told of the fabulous incomes of some of the footballers in the Premier League. Some are reported to be earning £140,000 a week.

To most workers this appears a fortune and yet it is chicken-feed compared to the immense wealth of people like the Russian multi-millionaire who at present owns the Chelsea football club. Of course the majority of professional footballers have to struggle by on more ordinary incomes like most workers.

At the other end of the scale from the well-heeled Premier footballers and the millionaire owners we have the poor makers of the footballs. "The city of Sialkot in Pakistan produces as many as 60 million hand-stitched footballs in a World Cup year. The firms here are running out of new workers since child labour was abolished. Western buyers may have a clear conscience, but the children of Sialkot now toil in the local brickworks instead. ...Shaukat is a strong, 20-year-old man. He has been working for this independent stitching factory, Danayal, for eight years. Danayal produces handmade footballs for professional leagues. ...At the entrance to the factory there's a notice board showing the current rates of pay. Depending on the model, his employer pays between 55 and 63 Pakistan rupees per ball ($0.65 to $0.75). "On a good day I manage six balls," says Shaukat. That's eight hours work. "That's not a lot of money," he says as he pushes a needle through the thick synthetic leather and stitches together two patches. His boss is standing close by so he quickly adds: "But it's not little either." He gets paid every Saturday and has to feed a family of six with his wages.". (Spiegel on line, 16 March)

That is how capitalism operates - immense wealth for the millionaire owners and penury for the working class.

Richard Donnelly

Swing with The Internationale

From the closing credits of Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story', Tony Babino belts out what is now my favourite version of The Internationale:

"Speed it up", indeed.

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (3. Labor Theory of Value)

Cross-posted from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

We have seen, then, that capitalism is no different from any other form of society insofar as wealth must be produced through the productive activities of human beings. This goes without saying, for without such wealth production no society (or the people living in it) could continue to exist for very long.

The key difference in the case of capitalism, though, is that this indispensable wealth takes the form of commodities, which simply means that the things produced are exchanged on the market.

People today are so accustomed to this capitalist world, where everything has a price, that the word “commodity” itself has become more or less synonymous with “product,” but Marx draws an important distinction between the two terms and the reader of Capital needs to be aware of that specific usage.

A commodity, as a product produced for exchange, thus has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a thing that satisfies some human want or another, while on the other hand, it is a thing with a certain value or worth on the market. In other words, the commodity is a unity of “use-value” and “exchange-value,” as Marx puts it (borrowing the same basic terminology used earlier by Adam Smith and David Ricardo).

Use-value presents little mystery, as it is simply a matter of how the qualities or properties of a thing satisfy “human needs of whatever kind”—such as the usefulness of clothing in keeping us warm or food in satisfying our hunger.

Since the usefulness of things is hardly unique to capitalism, an examination of use-value does not shed much light on this specific mode of production. A tomato for instance would have the useful property of satisfying hunger whether it was a commodity sold in a supermarket or a non-commodity grown in someone’s backyard for personal consumption.

So Marx quickly turns from use-value, to consider the phenomenon of exchange-value, which is the aspect that characterizes the commodity as such. As exchange-value, any two commodities (of a given quantity) can be equivalent to each other. As an example, Marx ponders the significance of the following equation:

1 quarter corn = x cwt of iron

This sort of equation, Marx says, “signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things” so that both are “equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other.” The task, therefore, is to uncover the “third thing” that both commodities are reducible to. In other words: What is the common factor that determines or regulates the exchange of commodities?

The stock response to that question, which will earn a student good marks in Economics 101, is that this value depends on the fact of “supply and demand.” It is true that this explanation accounts for the rise and fall of prices, but Marx pointed out in a pamphlet entitled “Wages, Profit and Price” the limitations of this explanation:

“Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they will never account for that value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or the other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate. In inquiring into the nature of that value, we have, therefore, nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand.”

Supply and demand, however much it might account for price fluctuations, does not explain why prices fluctuate around a certain level. This means that we need to look elsewhere to find the common factor that fundamentally determines exchange-value.

One thing that commodities in common, as already mentioned, is that they each have some use-value or another. But it is precisely because their use-values are qualitatively different that the commodities are exchanged for each other in the first place. So it is fruitless, Marx argues, to look to some “geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities” as the common factor that regulates exchange.

After setting aside use-value as a possible explanation, Marx briefly presents his own conclusion: “If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor.”

Here Marx seems to be on rather shaky ground, for we know that there are things sold on the market that are the product of little or nearly no labor that still fetch high prices, like the autograph of a celebrity, for example. How can Marx reach this conclusion that labor is the only possible “common property” that can determine exchange-value?

It must seem to many people that Marx is trying to get by with a circular argument, where he limits the discussion to commodities created by human labor and then, lo and behold, discovers that “labor” is the common factor that regulates exchange.

That is how it appeared to the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914), who created the template for subsequent criticism of this labor theory of value. In Karl Marx and the Close of His System, Böhm-Bawerk described Marx as “one who urgently desiring to bring a white ball out of an urn takes care to secure this result by putting in white balls only.”

Marx of course, like anyone else, was well aware that there are all sorts of “commodities” that are the product of little or no labor. In Chapter 3 of Capital, for instance, he notes that, “things which in and for themselves are not commodities, such as conscience, honor, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price” (my italics). And later in Capital, particularly in Volume 3, Marx goes on to examine a number of these sorts of formal commodities, such as the price of land or stocks. But Marx draws an important distinction between those commodities in form only (i.e. anything with a price) and the commodity in the fundamental sense that is analyzed in the first chapter of Capital.

We need to return to the opening paragraph, examined earlier, to better grasp this conceptual distinction. There Marx reminds us that material wealth is necessary to sustain any form of society. And it goes without saying that this wealth is created through human labor of some kind or another. Marx pointed out this undisputable fact as follows in a letter to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann: “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish.” Here we have the great, precondition for any society: human beings must create useful things via labor.

The difference in the case of capitalism, of course, is that the material wealth created via labor takes the form of commodities. The commodity in the most fundamental sense is thus premised on the commodity as product of labor (or as the capitalistic form of material wealth).

At first glance it might seem that Marx is making an arbitrary premise to suit his argument, but in fact he is simply starting from reality as it exists under capitalism, as noted in the opening paragraph—namely, the fact that under capitalism the wealth necessary to sustain any society overwhelmingly takes the form of commodities. It is the commodity as the “elementary form” of wealth that Marx analyzes at the beginning of Capital.

So there is an absolutely crucial distinction between Marx’s key concept of the commodity as the capitalistic form of social wealth and the “commodity” in the superficial sense of anything with a price (whether a product of labor or not). Those who ridicule Marx for limiting his initial analysis of the commodity to products of labor are ignoring, or choosing to overlook, the great social fact that “every child knows” with regard to the need for labor to sustain a society. From this perspective, the conclusion that “labor” is the common factor underlying exchange-value should not seem as arbitrary as it might at first glance.

Marx defines this “labor” more exactly as the “socially necessary labor-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent to that society.” This is the labor that “forms the substance of value,” according to Marx.

Marx set out to uncover the common factor underlying the phenomenon of exchange-value and he does so by arriving at the underlying concept of “value,” determined by the quantity of labor expended to produce the given commodity. This concept, specific to commodity production and capitalism, would have no basis to exist in a socialist society, where the whole aim is simply to produce useful things to satisfy human needs, rather than commodities to be exchanged on the market.

But for the analysis of capitalism, the concept of “value” is central, for it is at the very core of an understanding of how things are produced and distributed in that society.

Michael Schauerte

Related Posts:

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)

Adam Smith: A Capitalist Icon?

Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism

How Capitalism Works (part 2)

Production for Use

Who bailed out the bankers? (2010)

From the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

They tell us that we “the taxpayers” did? But it’s not as simple as that

People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around.

Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not. Banks don’t produce anything useful, even if they perform a useful, in fact an essential role, under capitalism. On the other hand, they didn’t cause the crisis, even if they did overstretch themselves like any other capitalist business does when faced with easy profits. It is this general capitalist drive for profits that causes crises from time to time. They were bailed out, but not by us.

Not by us? Weren’t they bailed out by the taxpayers and aren’t we the taxpayers? Yes and no. They were bailed out by the government, whose main source of income is taxes, but, no, we are not “the taxpayers”.

True, anybody in employment can produce their payslip and point to a deduction for income tax. But who actually pays this to the state? You don’t. Your employer does. In fact you never see the money that is deducted from your gross pay. It was never really yours. Putting it on your payslip is a bit of creative accounting. What’s important is the bottom line – your net pay, what you actually take home.
Even if you did have to actually pay income tax yourself, as you do with some taxes (council tax, for instance), it wouldn’t make much difference since it’s your net pay – what you have to live on – that’s important for the labour market. Apart from the fairly short term this has to reflect the economic fact that, if you are not paid enough, you won’t be able to keep your working skills in proper working order and your employer won’t be getting what they are paying for.

If, instead of your employer paying “your” income tax, you had to pay it yourself the employer would have to let you take home more to cover this so as to allow you enough after-tax money to keep your skills in working order.

It’s the same with sales taxes such as VAT. This increases the cost of living, and so the amount of money you need to fully reproduce your working skills. It’s not really paid by you, but is passed on to your employer.

In the end, then, whoever physically pays them to the state, taxes fall on employers (and other property owners). We wage and salary workers are not the real taxpayers. They are.

It is true that the profits, out of which members of the capitalist class pay taxes, originate in the surplus value that productive workers create over and above the value of the mental and physical energies they sell to their employer for a wage or a salary. So, yes, ultimately taxes and bailouts to banks do come from the wealth workers produce. But not directly. We’ve already been fleeced. Taxes fall on those who have fleeced us. They are the ones who, via the state, bailed out the banks.

They didn’t like having to do this, even if they recognised its necessity. And they don’t like the banking capitalists exaggerating. Hence their attempt, via the media, to mobilise us against “the bankers”. But the excesses of the bankers, outrageous as they are, are not really our problem. It’s a case of thieves falling out, over what’s already been robbed from us. Certainly bankers are useless parasites, but parasites on parasites – on those who directly exploit productive labour.

Not all the money to pay for the bail-outs came from taxes. Some came from money the government borrowed – from other capitalists. The capitalist class, as taxpayers, don’t like this either because it means that a portion of the taxes that fall on them has to go to repay with interest those capitalists who lent the government the money. That’s what servicing the so-called ‘National Debt’ (actually the debt of the capitalist state) involves: a transfer of wealth from one section of the capitalist class to another section. So, again, not our problem. It’s their debt not ours.

Except that the capitalist class – and their political representatives in the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties who are vying with each other with talk of a ‘new Age of Austerity’ and ‘savage cuts’ – have started a campaign to defray some of the costs of these payments to their fellow capitalists by cutting down on the payments and services they reluctantly provide for the working class. But then, under capitalism, workers always get the shitty end of the stick. Which is one good reason why we should not put up with capitalism any longer.

Adam Buick

The Philosophy of Money (2010)

Book Review from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money by Eric Lonergan. Acumen, 2009

This is an unusual book, written by a hedge fund manager. It verges between conventional orthodoxy and the highly unorthodox. In many respects it is as much a book about philosophy, thinking and perception as it is about economics, and not unlike recent works by George Soros in that respect.

Lonergan has read Marx, Hayek and many of the key financial analysts of the contemporary era, from Markowitz to Shiller. He has provided a synthesis of their views about markets and money, underpinned by his philosophical readings from his earlier academic studies. These at times border on the insightful but ultimately disappoint.

His discussion of inflation is an obvious case in point. As early as the first chapter he writes:

‘Many people believe that their money is stored in a safe at the bank, if they think about it at all. Ignorantly, we think of a deposit with a bank as money; indeed, in most of economics deposits are referred to as “money”, and are categorized as such in official statistics, which is misleading. Deposits are not money: they are loans we make to banks’ (pp.11-12).

This is quite true and one of the reasons ‘credit creation’ ideas still peddled by some economists are erroneous, along with theories which try to explain rising prices with reference to the expansion of bank deposits. However, he also says:

‘…the solution to a banking panic is effortless and disconcerting: a central bank merely needs to say that it will create as much money as is needed, and provide this to the banks, and everyone should calm down’(p.12).

Later, he writes of ‘an irrational fear of inflation’ (p.133), but these fears are not necessarily irrational. This magazine has chronicled for decades how an excess issue of inconvertible paper currency (beyond that needed for production and trade) leads to an artificial bloating of monetary demand known as inflation. This has been a consistent phenomenon since the late 1930s/early 1940s and in some periods, such as at times in the 1970s, has been quite significant.

At present, the extent to which a tactic like ‘quantitative easing’ can lead to cost price bubbles and can lead to an excess note issue will be the extent to which underlying inflationary pressures will re-emerge with a vengeance within the capitalist economy. Lonergan clearly missed the relevant chapters in Marx’s Capital where the inflationary process – and the explanation for it – is discussed, or has at least failed to apply it to the contemporary situation. It would certainly help explain to him why inflation is a monetary phenomenon created by governments through central banks which cannot, of itself, solve any of the other economic problems endemic to capitalism.

DAP

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 139

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 139th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1562 friends!

Recent blogs:

Building a future

Free Trade, Fair Trade or No Trade?

Danger: capitalism at work

Quote for the week:

"As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10, 1867.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Solidarity (2010)

Cross-posted from the Vaux Populi blog

The world we live in. The Tories attack Unite for seeking solidarity from the American Teamsters Union (according to the BBC). Now, the international solidarity of the workers is a principle of trade unionism, so it is in fact a good thing that workers are seeking one anothers' support. Just look, though, at the vitriol being poured on the BA workers for daring to stand up for themselves. Compare with the flood of stories about government cuts being needed to restore 'confidence' in the economy (e.g. here. What they mean by confidence is giving in to the overall policy demands of financiers, who will withhold their economic resources until their demands are met.

We are in the grip of a sustained capital strike, and yet the press turn vicious on any attempt by workers to mount a strike to defend their own interests.

As a note, the Tories are attacking the link between Labour and Unite, because Unite as the biggest union in the country is basically shouldering the cost of the Labour Party now. Labour loyalist Luke Akehurst rebuts the allegations.

The point, though, is that the link is hurting both parties, the interests of political parties and trade unions are not the same. further, by linking themselves to a party that will form government under capitalism, the unions are signing a paycheque to those who will have to implement capitalism's attacks against the workers.

We support, fully and utterly, the BA workers and Unite and the Teamsters in their efforts to stand up to their employer, a struggle we all share an interest in. We share, though, an even greater interest in getting rid of the wages system all together, and Unite the Union would do better to try and raise their aims to Unite the Workers, for socialism. Unite members in Lambeth and Camden can do this by voting for our candidates.

Pathfinder: Brave New Epsilons (2010)

The Pathfinder Column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine going to a job interview in twenty years time. Chances are, you’ll have to take along your ID, your CV, and your personal genomic profile. One of the gene variants an employer might be looking for is Epsilon 4, which is thought to significantly increase your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Some notable genome self-publishers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker are choosing not to publish the Epsilon 4 part of their genome, perhaps understandably. As one researcher remarks, “I wouldn’t want to know whether I’ve got one and I certainly wouldn’t want other people to know” (New Scientist, 13 February).

The problem for workers is, genome-sequencing is already in the 3-figure dollar range and it won’t be long before we will be expected to provide a genome survey in order to get work, just like house sellers will now be required to provide the buyer with a house survey. The more privileged members of this brave new capitalism will no doubt ‘do a Pinker’, but workers in all probability will not be allowed to keep quiet about Epsilon 4, or anything else for that matter, and will be entirely at the mercy of what the bosses decide they don’t like. Unless more workers start inserting copies of this magazine into their jeans, we could all end up as Epsilon-class workers.

‘Just out driving my new Toyota Prius. Text later. Can’t stop.’
Possibly last month’s best SMS joke. In the midst of the fuss over the large-scale recall of the accursed vehicle, some engineers are doing the predictable thing and, with a knowing stroke of the greying whiskers, remarking that “O’course, they be too damn complicated these days, too much to go wrong. That’s their problem right there, I tell ‘ee.” Although the Prius problem was entirely and mundanely mechanical, speculation also centres round another of Toyota’s products, the Lexus. The more that modern car designs move from mechanical to electronic systems the greater the risk of electromagnetic interference (EMI), and designs like the Lexus with electronically-controlled acceleration or ‘drive by wire’ are now thought to be at risk of EMI-induced ‘sudden unintended acceleration’(New Scientist, 13 February).

Meanwhile, reports that increasing sunspot activity is likely to interfere with sat-nav systems provide a double-whammy (‘Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises’, BBC Online, 10 Feb). One can envisage whole convoys of flashy car drivers all roaring off down arbitrary highways like bats into hell, the blind leading the blindingly fast. Still, it could be worse. At least dodgy cars are being recalled these days. If the free-market capitalists got their way we might return to the unregulated days of the notorious Ford Pinto, whose manufacturers allegedly decided to pay off accident fatalities’ families rather than stop selling the dangerous car. All in all it makes you think about oiling that pushbike.

Public no longer believes poll findings, poll finds
Two recent polls commissioned by the Times newspaper and the BBC suggest that the UK public are becoming more climate sceptical, no doubt because they imagine the unusually heavy snow on their front lawn has blanketed the entire world and heralds a ten thousand year ice age. As the snow piled up, so did the column inches, with journalists speculating about why climate catastrophe has fallen so out of favour (see for instance ‘Climate scepticism 'on the rise'’, BBC poll shows’, (BBC Online, 7 February).

Favourite theories are the East Anglia email scandal, the hopeless effort at Copenhagen, and most recently the raw wet omelette served on the face of the International Panel on Climate Change by their careless and spectacularly erroneous claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, rather than the original and more accurate date of 2350. Interestingly this error has been traced back to an article in New Scientist, which observed that the panel has been ‘severely criticised for citing a non-peer-reviewed magazine’ (see New Scientist, 23 January, p5 – in a very small box).

But wait a moment, isn’t everyone getting a bit carried away? Scientists can make mistakes, can’t they? In fact the ability to make and identify mistakes forms the basis of all science. There may be some buffoons out there bonkers enough to think that if scientists get one thing wrong then they must have everything else wrong too, but that surely can’t apply to the whole population.

In all the journalistic hoo-ha about rising climate scepticism there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of poll scepticism, yet are the polls really significant or just a blip? As most people no doubt realise, polls are the journalist’s best buddy but make for unreliable real-world guides, especially in areas other than elections where they are unlikely to be corroborated later by hard facts. In the first place, they can be designed to produce the findings the poll-funders are looking for (or else, if they don’t, the funders don’t publish the findings). Even supposing the funder is genuinely disinterested in the findings (the BBC and Murdoch-owned Times are not climate sceptics so presumably weren’t hoping for this result, unless the idea was to manufacture some controversial headlines) there is no peer-review or general oversight of the polling methodology employed. What suggests the polls are a blip is the timing. One would, for instance, have to question the wisdom of asking people standing in two feet of snow whether they were especially concerned about global warming at the present time. One further wonders whether the BBC and the Times will be doing follow-up polls in flaming June or blue-sky July. Finally there is the question, admittedly a cynic’s recourse: do people tell pollsters the truth anyway, or merely make a little devilment out of the business? Why would they lie, you might ask? But equally, why shouldn’t they? Anyone who doesn’t believe this is possible has clearly never filled in a market survey report on branded products. In view of all this, does anyone apart from material-hungry journalists actually believe in polls? Maybe we should have a poll and find out.

Note to self
Lastly and a propos none of the above, a quick word from our BBC economics advisor Robert Peston:“It's plainly better for banks to make profits, than not (unless you are actively working for the destruction of capitalism)” (BBC blog entry, 16th February). Ok Bob, now there’s an idea...

Paddy Shannon

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)

Cross-posted from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph:

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its [wealth’s] elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.” (Penguin edition; p. 126)

The term “wealth” is used here not to refer to riches in the form of money, but rather to the material wealth essential to any form of society: the products produced and consumed by human beings to sustain and improve their lives.

Material wealth is the basis for the existence of any society, including socialism, but only under capitalism does wealth overwhelmingly take the form of products that are bought and sold on the market; which is to say, only under capitalism does wealth appear as a “vast accumulation” or “vast heap” [1] of commodities.

Commodities of course existed prior to the emergence of capitalism, as did money, but it is only under the specific mode of production of capitalism that the bulk of material wealth—the vast majority of products of labor—take the commodity form.

It is true that some things produced under capitalism are for the direct consumption of the producer rather than for exchange (like tomatoes grown in a backyard garden), but such products are clearly an exception to the prevailing commodity production. A quick glance down the aisles of Wal-Mart is enough to confirm Marx’s observation that capitalist wealth appears as a vast accumulation of commodities. It was true in 1867 when Capital was published and is even more the case today.

There is nothing arbitrary, then, about Marx’s starting point, as it is based on two undisputable facts: (1) material wealth must be produced in any form of society; (2) material wealth overwhelmingly takes the commodity form in the specific case of capitalism.

Marx is not starting with some abstract concept that only exists in his own mind, but rather with an objective observation concerning capitalist society. (We will see later that nearly every misinterpretation of Marx’s “labor theory of value” is based on an inability to appreciate his starting point in Capital.)

In examining capitalism, Marx naturally concerns himself primarily with understanding the specific functioning of this mode of production, which sets it apart from other forms of society. So he begins with the examination of the commodity as the specific form of products of labor under capitalism or “elementary form” of capitalist wealth.

The defenders of capitalism, in contrast, attempt to present the commodity and other economic forms of capitalism as if they were common to any form of society; which is to say, they try to portray capitalist production as synonymous with social production in general—or argue that it is a reflection of some unchanging human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (Adam Smith).

That first paragraph of Capital teaches (or at least reminds) us though that the commoditization of wealth is only a widespread phenomenon “in those societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails.” There is no iron-clad law, in other words, that products of labor need to pass through the market before their useful qualities can be enjoyed.

The “unchanging law” of human society is not commodity exchange, or the need for money to mediate that exchange, but rather the simple fact that material wealth must be produced and consumed in order for a society and the people within it to continue to exist.

There are specific reasons—specific social or class relations—that account for why products of labor take the commodity form under capitalism (as Marx explains later in Chapter one). And once we understand those reasons why commodity production is necessary under capitalist social relations, we can already begin to understand what sort of different social relations will be necessary to move beyond the historical stage of commodity production.

The fact that we are so immersed in capitalism, however, where we have to pay for almost everything we consume, often blinds us to this simple historical fact that human beings under feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of society managed to produce and distribute (the bulk of) material wealth in a way that did not involve buying and selling.

Marx overcomes this capitalist-induced myopia by treating capitalism as one historical mode of production (among others), which functions in specific ways under its specific social relations. He teaches us to distinguish between what is general to any form of society, and what is specific to capitalism—as in the distinction mentioned earlier between “material wealth” and its “commodity form.”

Footnote

[1] This is from the translation of Hans Ehrbar, available on his website (http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.htm). Ehrbar has translated Capital and other works by Marx; and in the annotated version of his translation he guides the reader through the text, while pointing out many of the mistranslations of the Penguin and International Publishers editions of Capital. His website is an essential resource for anyone interested in studying Capital.

Michael Schauerte

Related Posts:

1. Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (3. Labor Theory of Value)

2.What Marx wrote about the credit system

3. Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism

4. Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (1. Intro)

5. Labor Theory of Value

Ordinary People (1999)

A Short Story from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

From as far back as I can ever remember, probably from the first time I became aware of my social environment, I have found myself wincing at the term "ordinary people". Politicians use it when speaking of the electorate. It is used mostly to delineate the working class and it has become a derogatory description either for people who are not members of the establishment, or for those who do not get themselves in the news. What the word conjures up, for me at any rate, is a picture of thousands upon thousands of dull, drab powerless people, hollow-eyed and mindless, trudging to work with no other thought in their heads than sullen obedience to their masters. Perhaps somewhere there are workers who appear like characters from Brave New World, but that is not my experience.

There have always been people who crave attention; they become local councillors, trade union leaders, MPs. Maybe some of them start out with altruistic motives and, are therefore, surprised at how being in the limelight makes them feel extraordinary. Surprise must soon turn to elation because it could be tempting to feel, once you are in the news, that you are in some way an authority, that your every word is received like pearls of wisdom escaping from the lips of the Oracle. Yet it is a myth that leaders know better than we do and possess the God-given right to direct our lives.

I once heard a man on a radio programme announce, when asked a question about the preparation of vegetables before cooking them, that, yes, it is preferable to rinse them lightly under the tap. Now isn't that something? I didn't know that, did you? He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. He was an expert. Another time I listened with horror to Paul Boateng telling parents that it was perfectly all right to smack their children, when I had spent most of my life believing that it wasn't. But he is one of those with the authority (and the audacity) to inform the rest of the nation that a belt round the ear does our kids the world of good. Some people will believe him. He is extraordinary, after all.

My dictionary says: Ordinary—usual, common, normal, not specially good. I don't know anyone like that. In my street lives a builder. Among other things he builds marvellous flint walls, poetry in themselves. He erected the conservatory which acts as an extension on the back of my house and he worked with a skill which I found fascinating. When Henry plies his trade he does it lovingly and gracefully and so for the first time in my life I began to value people who built things. But that is not all that Henry does. He has an allotment where he grows spectacular vegetables, row-upon-row of whatever is in season. I am on the receiving end of some of those vegetables and they are wonderful to behold. Sometimes he will take a cabbage, a green pepper or a bunch of carrots from the proffered bag and comment on how fine it is. He says it with pride and I know he is remembering buying the seeds and sowing them in the ground. He would have nurtured them as tenderly as if they were his own children until they were ready to be harvested. And at the end of the season he would set about preparing the soil for his next act of creation. Henry doesn't say much, but is he ordinary? Never. Scratch the surface of anyone you know and you will see what I mean.

My own mother would have come under that awful heading "ordinary". Though bowed down by poverty and five kids she played the piano. Neighbours would come to our front gate to listen to her. I would be moved to tears at the pieces she played with such feeling. I used to wonder that if she hadn't been my mother then who would she have been? I felt a little jealous that inside my mother dwelt another person—a woman who could produce such beautiful musical sounds. She wasn't ordinary.

Ordinary under capitalism means you haven't been discovered or there isn't a market for you. It means, too, that you are there to be told what to do. Your opinions are of no consequence unless the powers-that-be have created you or you are rich and powerful enough to create yourself. You are mostly not defined by your uniqueness but by your market value. When I give an acquaintance the Socialist Standard to read and they come across something I have written, they will often ask "Do they pay you?" When I answer in the negative they quickly lose interest in my modest efforts as though there can be little merit in them unless they bring in the filthy lucre. My response to people who ask what I like doing is always that I like writing. They invariably ask "Are you a professional?" So little in life has real value unless it is rewarded with money. Yet the majority of us would surely blossom without the daily grind.

My little daughter once wanted to be a nurse. She spent happy hours heaping blankets upon her father as he snoozed in his armchair, sticking imaginary hypodermic needles into his arms and wiping his brow with a tea towel. All this soon altered as her working life loomed large. True she could have grown out of her desire to heal the sick but in the end what must focus our minds is how much we can get paid for the countless hours spent away from home for the best part of our lives. Most of us do it without understanding that there is another way of organising our time. But that does not mean we are ordinary.

Heather Ball

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 138

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 138th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1564 friends!

Recent blogs:

What is common ownership?

The social revolution

America and the S-word

Quote for the week:

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are." H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Pieces Together (2010)

From the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

PEACE PRIZE ?

"President Obama is planning to increase spending on America's nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them. In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal - £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year. The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security. The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’." (Daily Mail, 29 January)

DEBT RIDDEN BRITAIN

"There has been a huge rise in the amount of money that banks are writing off as bad debts on their credit cards. Bank of England figures show that the total value of the write-offs doubled to £1.6bn in the third quarter of 2009. In each of the two preceding quarters, the figure had been about £800m. It totalled £3.2bn during 2008. The figures reflect the impact of the recession and are an acknowledgement by the banks that the money will never be repaid by defaulting borrowers. By contrast, the value of mortgages written off in 2008 was just £408m, and has averaged £260m in each of the first three quarters of 2009." (BBC News, 19 January)

THE GAP WIDENS

"The richest 10% of the UK population are now more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10%, according to the Anatomy of Economic Inequality. The study shows that by 2008 Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality since soon after the second world war. Household wealth (including cars and other possessions of the top 10% amounts to £853,000 or more, while the poorest 10% amass £8,800 or less." (Observer, 31 January)

"CARING" CAPITALISM

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals." Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor (of South Carolina), made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents. "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said." (Greenville News, 23 January)

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (1. Intro)

Cross-posted from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism.

I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to arrive at an anti-capitalist position. Life under capitalism is negative advertisement enough for that social system.

Who knows, there may have been a budding capitalist at some point in time who mistook Capital for a how-to guide, and part-way through reading it saw the error of his ways and converted to socialism. But it is not a polemical work aimed simply at fostering a hatred of capitalism (even though there are memorable passages throughout that attest to Marx’s own steady-burning hatred for this class-divided system).

Capital is not a book in which Marx simply lists up a bunch of social problems under capitalism to stir up the reader’s moral outrage against that system. Rather, he clarifies how problems (for workers) emerge inevitably from the fundamental nature of capitalism; from its irresolvable contradictions and insurmountable limitations.

One might wonder, though, why socialists would need to exert such effort to better understand a social system they are seeking to replace? Doesn’t it make more sense to concentrate on explaining socialism than wasting time analyzing capitalism?

Certainly it is true that some Marxian economists have carved out a nice career for themselves as experts on capitalism, to the point where they might even be reluctant to bid farewell to that object of study. Revolutionary socialists do not necessarily share the mania of some academics for examining capitalism in its minutiae; nor do they think that such scholarship offers tremendous benefits to the revolutionary movement.

Yet socialists do need to have the clearest understanding possible of the nature of capitalism as one historical “mode of production” among others that have existed up to now. This is because once we have arrived at a deeper understanding of the capitalist system of production, to the point where we have a clear idea of its essential limitations, we will be well on our way to a better understanding of what socialism means and how this new form of society resolves problems that can never be resolved (even though reformists never give up trying!) under capitalism.

So it is not a question of choosing between examining capitalism or explaining socialism — the two tasks are completely interrelated. This series will attempt to examine and explain some important aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism presented in Capital as a means of arriving at a better understanding of what socialism means, how it is a realistic possibility, and why it is so necessary.

Michael Schauerte

Related posts

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)

Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (3. Labor Theory of Value)

Debating the “S” Word

What Marx wrote about the credit system

Capitalism in Crisis: Reforms, Collapse — Or a Socialist Revolution?

Greasy Pole: “...Less Equal Than Others...” (2010)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the snowdrops and daffodils signal an approaching spring – and another general election – anyone who has doubts about the government being in a panic should remind themselves that one of Labour's top electoral strategists, plotting to steer the party to another term of chaotic fumbling across the face of British capitalism, is Harriet Harman. Yes – she who alone survives of those breezy, achingly ambitious Blair Babes who so cheerily arranged themselves for the cameras on that May morning in 1997 when nothing seemed beyond them. There were Margaret Beckett; Ruth Kelly; Patricia Hewitt; Hazel Blears; Caroline Flint...but none of them hung on to a place near the top of the greasy pole. Only Harriet Harman, whose very name once had John Prescott displaying his stock of seaman's expletives like flags at a ship's mast, got there. Notwithstanding that while declaring herself an opponent of selective education she took care to get her son into an exclusive grammar school some way from her home saying that “we did it for our son.” Or that she voted in February and March 2003 in favour of attacking Iraq but feebly excused this, when she was campaigning for Labour's Deputy Leadership in June 2007, as due to her not being in possession of the full facts.

Survivor

Meanwhile, apart from now being Deputy Leader and Chair of the Labour Party, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman has taken on the monstrously demanding job of trying to dissuade a betrayed electorate from descending into a sense of outraged alienation and political apathy. But perhaps all of this has followed because, reacting to what has befallen her, Harman has become a survivor. In 1998 it seemed to be all over for her when, after just a year in charge at the Department of Social Security – notable for persistent clashes with junior minister Frank Field over Labour's plans to “reform” the “welfare” system – she was abruptly sacked. Yet three years later she bounced back as Solicitor General since when, if we disregard some typically indiscreet gaffes, her progress has been pretty – although at times bewilderingly - smooth. Which is not to say there may not be trouble ahead; Labour has decided that the class system is a likely vote winning issue in the election and Equality Minister Harman has been chosen to spearhead their campaign.

Class

This was an interesting choice, if only because of her secure family background and social connections – apart from anything else she is the niece of an earl and (according to an “amateur genealogist”) related through her aunt's marriage to none other than Old Etonian David Cameron. Harman has done her best to re-assure us on this matter, arguing inside the Labour Party against an all-male leadership on the grounds that men “cannot be left to run things on their own” and suggesting that in the next parliament there should be 39 openly gay MPs. More significant are her views on class society, its nature and effects: “Persistent inequality of socio-economic status – of class – overarches the discrimination or disadvantage from your gender, race or disability...The public wants an equal society, one where there is not a yawning and growing gap between the bottom and the top”. While the first part of this statement is valid enough it avoids the question of how “the public” views class society and how susceptible they are to the argument, tirelessly pumped at them by their leaders, that it is the very inequality in the class structure, protective and enhancing, that drives capitalist society to the benefit of everyone whatever their class. This all avoids the vital question of why this Minister with the job of adjusting us into an “equal” society is a member of a government which over 13 years of power has failed to deal with this “overarching” problem – and why it should suddenly be so urgent.

Poverty

There has been no lack of promises, explicit or otherwise, from the Labour government since 1997 but let the most recent, in their 2005 election manifesto, suffice: “Our vision is clear; a country more equal in its opportunities, more secure in its communities, more confident in its future”.That drivel would have impressed only the most impenetrably blinkered; the rest would have preferred to rely on their real experiences of Blair and his government. There is plenty of evidence about this, the most recent being the National Equality Panel report An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK. Among the report's findings are: the richest ten per cent are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest; the top one per cent each possess a total household wealth of £2.6 million or more; being born into a disadvantaged class does intensive damage to a person's chances in education and beyond, affecting whether they realise their potential and so improve their life chances. At the same time Save the Children told us that 13 per cent of UK children are living in severe poverty.

When politicians like Harman hold forth on this situation they offer only confusion, encouraging an assumption that a person's social situation and prospects can only be judged by reference to insignificant changes in their income. But this does not even approach the heart of the matter, the key to which is the ownership of the means of life by a minority class who live off their privileges while the other class depend on employment with all that means in terms of class misery – insecurity in their livelihood, homes, survival and expectations. This is the authentic meaning of class society and of the inequalities which will endure despite the politicians' rhetoric.

Ivan