MARX, ENGELS, LENIN, TROTSKY - IN THEIR OWN WORDS

              

 

 

               MARXIAN ECONOMICS

              Let's Learn Marxism (part3 )

       Marx's  Economic Accomplishments

   Marx stands in the same relation to his predecessors in the theory of surplus-value as Lavoisier stood to Priestly and Scheele. The existence of that part of the value of products which we now call surplus-value had been ascertained long before  Marx. It has also been stated with more or less precision what it consisted of, namely, the product of the labour for which its appropriator had not given any equivalent. But one did not get any further. Some- the classical bourgeois economists- investigated at most the proportion in which the product of labour was divided between the labourer and the owner of the means of production. Others - the socialists -  found that this division was unjust and looked for utopian means of abolition of this injustice. they all remained prisoners of the economic categories as they had come down to them.

   Now Marx appeared upon the scene. And he took a view directly opposite to that of all his predecessors. What they had regarded as a solution, he considered but a problem. He saw that he had to deal neither with dephlogisticated air nor with fire-air, but with oxygen - that here it was not simply a matter of stating an economic fact or of pointing out the conflict between this fact and eternal justice and true morality, but of explaining  a fact which was destined to revolutionize  all economics, and which offered to him who knew how to use it as the key to an understanding of all capitalist production. With this fact as his starting-point he examined all the economic categories which he found at hand, just as Lavoisier proceeding from oxygen,has examined the categories of phlogistic chemistry which he found at hand. In order to understand what surplus-value was ,Marx had to find out what value was. He had to criticize above all the Ricardian theory of value.Hence he analysed  labour's value-producing property and was the first to ascertain what labour it was that produced value, and why and how it did so.He found that value was nothing but congealed labour of this kind, and this is a point which Rodbertus never grasped to his dying day. Marx then investigated the relation of commodities to money and demonstrated  how and why, thanks to the property of value immanent in commodities, commodity and commodity-exchange must endanger the opposition of commodity and money. His theory of money, founded on this basis, is the first exhaustive one and has been tacitly accepted everywhere . He analyzed  the transformation of money into capital and demonstrated that this transformation is based on the purchase and sale of labour power. By substituting labour-power, the value-producing property for labour, he solved with one stroke one of the difficulties which brought about the downfall of the Ricardian school, viz, the impossibility of harmonizing the mutual exchange of capital and labour with the Ricardian law that value is determined  by labour. By establishing the distinction of capital into constant and variable he was enabled  to trace the real course of the process of the formation of surplus-value in its minutest details and thus to explain it, a feat which none of his predecessors had accomplished. Consequently he established a distinction inside of capital itself with which neither Rodbertus nor the bourgeois economists knew  in the least what to do, but which furnishes the key for the solution of the most  complicated economic problems, as is strikingly proved again by Book 2  and will be proved still more by Book 3. He analyzed surplus-value further and found its two forms, absolute and relative surplus-value. And he showed that they had played a different, and each time a decisive role, in the historical development of capitalist production. On the basis of this surplus-value he developed the first rational theory of wages we have, and for the first time drew up an outline of the history of capitalist accumulation and an exposition of its historical tendency.

  ( Engel's Preface - Capital - Vol.2 - pp.15/16 (1893 ) 

                    

                            On Capital vol.1

   At last, in 1867, there appeared in Hamburg: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. This work contains the result   of studies to which a whole life was devoted. It is the political economy of the working class, reduced to its scientific formulation. This work is concerned not with rabble-rousing phrase mongering , but with strictly scientific deductions. Whatever  one's attitude to socialism, one will at any rate have to acknowledge that in this work it is presented for the first time in a scientific manner, and that it was precisely  Germany that accomplished this. Anyone still wishing to battle with socialism, will have to deal with Marx, and if he succeeds in that he really does not need to mention the dei minorum gentium. ( God of lesser stock. )

      ( Engels . MECW- Vol.21 - p.63 July 28, 1869 )

                    On Capital  Vol.3

    The third book of Capital is receiving many and various interpretations ever since it has been subject to public judgement. It was not to be otherwise expected. In publishing it, what I was chiefly concerned with was to produce as authentic a text as possible, to demonstrate the new results obtained by Marx in Marx's own words  as possible, to intervene myself only where absolutely unavoidable, and even then to leave the reader in no doubt as to who was talking to him.This has been deprecated. It has been said that I should have converted the material available to me into systematically written book, en faire un livre, as the French say; in other words, sacrifice the authenticity of the text to the reader's convenience.But this was not how I conceived my task. I lacked all justification for such a revision , a man like Marx has the right to be heard himself, to pass on  his scientific discoveries to posterity in th full genuineness of his own presentation. Moreover, I had no desire thus to infringe- as it must seem to me - upon the legacy of so  preeminent a man; it would have meant to me a breach of faith. And  third, it would have been quite useless. For the people who cannot or do not want to read, who even in volume 1, took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary  to understand it correctly- - for such people it is altogether  useless to put oneself out in any way.But for those who are interested in real  understanding, the original text itself was precisely the most important thing; for them my recasting would have had at most the value of a  commentary, and what is more, a commentary on something unpublished and inaccessible. The original text would have had to be referred to at the first controversy, and at the second and third its publication in extenso would have become quite unavoidable' 

     (Engels - Supplement to Capital - Vol .3 3 - p.889 )

 

                                 Production

   Whenever we speak of production, then,  what is meant  is always production at a definite stage  of social development - production by psocial individuals, it might seem , therefore, that  in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as , e.g. , modern bourgeois production , which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general  is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction, in so far as it really bring out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented  many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. Some determinations will be shared  by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production will be thinkable without them.  (Marx - Grundrisse - P. 85 )

         The Capitalist Mode of Production

  

   The capitalist process of production is a historically determined form of the social process of production in general. The latter is as much a production process of material conditions of human life as a process taking place under specific historical and economic production relations , producing and reproducing these production relations themselves, and thereby also the bearers of these process, their material conditions of existence and their mutual relations, i.e. , their  particular socio-economic form. For the aggregate of these relations, in which the agents of this production stands with respect to Nature and to one another, and in which they produce, is precisely  society, considered from the standpoint of its economic structure. like all its predecessors,  the capitalist process of production under definite material conditions, which are, however ,simultaneously the bearers  of definite social relations entered into by individuals in the process of reproducing their life. These conditions, like the relations, are on the one hand prerequisites, on the other hand results and creations of the capitalist process of production; they produced and reproduced by it. We saw also that capital and the capitalist is merely capital personified and functions in the process of production solely as the agent of capital in its corresponding social process of production, pumps a definite quantity of surplus labour out of the direct producers, or labourers; capital obtains this surplus labour without an equivalent, and in essence  it always remains forced labour - no matter how much it may seem to result from free contractual agreement. This surplus labour appears as surplus-value, and this surplus-value exists as a social product. Surplus-labour in general, as labour performed over and above the given requirements, must always remain. In the capitalist as well as in the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by complete idleness of a stratum of society. A definite quantity of surplus-labour is required as insurance against accidents , and by the necessary and progressive expansion of the process of reproduction in keeping with the development of the needs and the growth of population, which is called accumulation from the viewpoint of the capitalist. It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it enforces this surplus-labour in a manner and under conditions which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces, social relations , and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom etc.Thus it gives rise to a stage, on the one hand, in which coercion and monopolization of social development (including its  material and intellectual advantages ) by one portion of society at the expense of the other are eliminated; on the other hand, it creates the material means and embryonic conditions ,making it possible in a higher form of society to combine this surplus-labour with a greater  reduction of time devoted to material labour in general. For, depending on the development of labour-productivity, surplus labour may be large in a small total working-day,and relatively  small in a large total working-day... The actual wealth of society and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus labour, but upon its productivity and the  more less copious  conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life,  so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity  expands as a result of his wants; but at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in the field can only consist in socialized  man , the associated producers, rational regulating their interchange with Nature , bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as  by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human  nature.But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is and in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite. 

         (Marx - Capital - Vol. 3 - pp.818/20 )

 

                             Bourgeois Society

  By bourgeois society, we understand that phase of social development in which the bourgeoisie , the middle class, the class of industrial and commercial capitalist, is . socially and politically, the ruling class; which is now the case more or less in all the civilized countries of Europe and America. By  the expressions:Bourgeois society, and; industrial and commercial society, we therefore propose to designate the same stage of social development; the first expression referring. however, more to the fact of the middle class being the ruling class, in opposition either to the class whose rule in superseded ( the feudal nobolity ) , or to those classes  which it succeeds in keeping under its social political dominion (the proletariat or industrial worlkng class, the rural population, etc.) while the designation of commercial and industrial society more particularly bears upon the mode of production and distribution characteristic of this phase of social history. 

          ( Marx - MECW - Vol. 21 -p.191 ) 

 

  Three Cardinal Facts of Capitalist Production

 01) Concentration  of means of production in a few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers  and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.

 02 ) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through cooperation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences. In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms.

 03) Creation of the world market

    The stupendous productivity developing under the capitalist mode of production relative to population, and the increase, if not in the same proportion of capital-values ( not just of  their material substance) which grow much more rapidly than the population, contradict the basis, which constantly narrows  in relation to the expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works. They also contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital augments its value. Hence the crisis.

 ( Marx- Capital- Vol3- p.266 )

 

                                  Capital

 

   Capital consists of  raw materials, instruments of labour  and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are utilized in order to produce new raw materials, new instruments of labour  and new means of subsistence. All these component parts of capital are  creations of labour, products of labour , accumulated labour. Accumulated labour which serves as a means of new production is capital.

   So say the economists. What is a Negro slave ? A man of black race. The one explanation is good as the other.

    A Negro is a Negro. he only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton-spinning Jenny is a machine for spinning cotton.It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships  it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar.

   In production men enter into relation nor only with nature They produce only by co-operating  in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their relation with nature, does production, take place.

   these social relations into which the producers enter with one another, the connections under which they exchange their activities and participate in the whole act of production, will naturally, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production.With the invention of a new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal organization  of the army necessarily changed; the relationships  within which individuals can constitute  an army and act as an army were transformed and  the relations of different armies to one another also changed.

    Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production change, are transformed, with the  with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically,  a society at a  definitive stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. ancient society, feudal society,  bourgeois society are such totalities  of production relations, each of  which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind.

   Capital also, is a social relation of production. It is bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society...

   Capital consists  not only of  means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All  the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of  commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes.

 Marx - Wage Labour and Capital -MECW - Vol.9- pp.211/12 (1849 ) 

                    Capital - A Social Power

  To be  a capitalist is to have not only a purely  personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort , only by the united action of all members of society,  can it be set in motion.

   Capital is , therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

   When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, ,personal  property is not thereby, transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

 ( Marx- Engels- Manifesto  of the Communist Party - MECW -Vol.6 -p.499 (1848)

 

                           Userer's Capital 

    Interest-bearing  capital, or,  as we may call it in its antiquated form, usurer's capital, belong together with its twin brother, merchant's capital , to the antediluvian forms of capital, which long preceded the capitalist mode of production and are to be found in the most diverse economic formations of society.  

    The existence of usurer's capital merely require that at least  a portion of  products should be transformed into commodities , and money should have developed in its various functions along with trade  in commodities.

   The development of usurer's capital is bound up with the development of merchant's capital and especially that of money-dealing capital. In ancient Rome, begining  with the last years of the Republic, when manufacturing stood far below its average level of development in the ancient world, merchant's capital, money-dealing capital, and usurer's capital developed to their highest point within the ancient form.

   ... hoarding necessarily appears along with money. But the professional hoarder does not  become important until he is transformed into  a usurer.

   (Capital Vol. 3 -p. 593 )

 

  Usurer's Capital in Pre-Capitalist Systems

   The  characteristic forms, however, in which usurer's capital exists in periods antedating capitalist production are of two kinds. I purposely say characteristic forms. The same forms repeat themselves on the basis of capitalist production, but as mere  subordinate forms. They are then no longer the forms which determine the character of interest bearing capital. These two forms are : first, usury by lending money to extravagant  members of upper classes, particularly land owners: secondly, usury by lending money to small producers who posses their own conditions of labour - this includes the artisan, but mainly the peasant, since particularly under pre- capitalist conditions, in so far as they permit of small independent individual producers, the peasant class necessarily constitutes the overwhelming majority of them...

   Usurer's capital as the characteristic form  of interest-bearing  capital corresponds to the predominance of small-scale production of the self-employed peasant and small master craftsman. When labourer is confronted by the conditions of labour and by the product of labour in the shape of capital, as under the developed capitalist mode of production he has no occasion to borrow any money as a producer. When he does any money borrowing, he does so, for instance, at pawnshop to secure personal necessities. But wherever  the labourer is the owner, whether actual or nominal , of his conditions of labour and his product, he stand as a producer in relation to the money lenders capital, which, confronts him as usurer's capital 

        (Marx- Capital  - Vol.3  - p. 594 ) 

 

          The Circular Movement of Capital 

   The circular movement of capital takes place in three stages, which.. form the following series.

   First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the  commodity and labour market. his money is transformed into  commodities, or it goes through the ciculation act M-C.

   Second stage: Productive consumption of the  the purchased  commodities by the capitalist. He acts as  acapitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production.The result is a commodity of more value than that of the  elements  entering into its production.

   Third stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are turned into money; or they pass through the circulation act C-M. 

   Hence the formula , for the circuit of money-capital is: M-C...P- C'-M'.,the dots indicating  that the process of  circulation is interrupted, and C' M' designating C and M increased by surplus value.

       ( Marx - Capital - Vol.2- p.23 ) 

 

             The Starting Point of Capital

    The circulation of commodities is the starting of capital.The production of commodities, their circulation and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these formed the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world embracing commerce and world embracing market.

 (  Marx - Capital - Vol.1 - p.146 )

 

The Starting Point of Capitalist Production

   Capitalist production only then really begins....when each individual capital employs  simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently the labour-process is carried on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of products. A greater number of labourers working together at the same time, in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour ) in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting point of capitalist production. With regard to the mode  of production itself, manufacture , in its strict meaning, is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from handicraft trades of the guilds, otherwise than  by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual capital. The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman is simply enlarged.

   Marx- Capital -Vol.1. - p.322 )

 

        The Law of Capitalist Accumulation 

   The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended ''natural law of production'' reduces itself simply to this:  the correlation between accumulation of capital and rate of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid labour transformed into capital, and the additional paid labour  necessary for the setting in motion of this individual capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes, independent one of the other; on the one hand, the magnitude of capital; on the other, the number of the labouring population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same labouring population. If the quantity of  unpaid labour supplied by the working class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires  an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in; a smaller part of of revenue is capitalized, accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a check.The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but  also secures its reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into a pretended law of Nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual production, on an ever-large scale, of the capitalistic relation.It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the product of his own han

         (Marx - Capital - Vol.1 - PP.620/21 ) 

 

        The Primitive Accumulation

....The accumulation  of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence  of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation ( previous accumulation of Adam Smith ) preceeding capitalistic accumulation; and accumulation not the result of the mode of production but its starting-point. 

   This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell upon the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past.In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theoretical original sin tell us certainly  how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell their own skins. And from this original  sin dates the poverty of the great majority, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few increase constantly although they have long ceased to work.such insipid  childishness is everyday preached to us in the defense of property.. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development.In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery , murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and labour'' were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but adyllyic.

   ...the so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

   (Marx - Capital - Vol. 1 _ Pp.713/14 )

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  The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation  of the state domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital and creatd for the town industries the necessary supply of a ''free'' and outlawed proletariat.

   (Marx - Capital _ Vol.1 - pp.732/33 )

 

                            Commodity

   A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfy human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. 

                         (Marx - Capital - Vol. 1 - p.35 ) 

 

              Circulation of Commodities 

               The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C - M- C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically differet form; M - C - M, the transformation of money into commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is alreafy potential capital. 

             ( Capital -Vol. 1 _ pp.146/47 )  

 

                Cost Price of Commodities 

   What the commodity  cost the capitalist and its actual production cost are two quite different magnitudes. That portion of the commodity-value making up the surplus value does not cost the capitalist anything simply because it cost the labourer unpaid labour. Yet, on the basis of capitalist production, after the labourer enters the production process he himself  constitutes an ingredient of operating productive capital, which belongs to the capitalist. Therefore, the capitalist is the actual producer of the commodity. For this reason, the cost price of the commodity necessarily appears to capitalist as the actual cost of the commodity.

                    (Marx -Capital - Vol. 3 -p.26) 

 

                Fetishism of Commodities  

    A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour;because the relations of the producers to the sum totalof their ownlabour is presented to them as a social relation, existin not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way thelight from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of lightfrom one thing to another, from the external objct, the eye.there is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamp them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore,  to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped  regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independant beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. Soit is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands.. This I call Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

  The Fetishism of commodities has its origin,as the foregoing analysis  has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

 ( Marx - Capital  Vol 1 - p.72 )

 

                                         Use-Value 

    The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn , or, diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities... Use values become a reality only by use or consumption; they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.

     (Marx- Capital - Vol.1 - p.36) 

                               *****************

   A use-value has value only in use , and is realized only in the process of consumption. One and the same use-value can be used in various ways. But the extent of its possible applications is limited by its existence as an object with distinct properties. It is, moreover, determined not only qualitatively but also quantitatively . Different use-values have different measures appropriate to their physical characteristics; for example, a bushel of wheat, a quire of paper, a yard of linen.

     (Marx- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - p.27(1859)

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   ..Although use-values serve social needs and therefore exists within the social framework, they do not express the social relations of production.For instance, let us take as a use-value  a commodity such as diamond. We cannot tell by looking at it that the diamond is a commodity. Where it serves as an aesthetic or mechanical use-value on the neck of an courtesan or of in the  hand of a glass- cutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the  commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value  whether it is a commodity. Use-value as such, since it is independent of  determinate economic form, lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs in this sphere  only when it is itself a determinate form. Use-value is the immediate  physical entity in which a definite economic relationship - exchange value - is expressed.

         ( Marx- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - p.28 )

 

                       Exchange-Value

   Exchange-value, at first sight, present itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion  in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence the exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. 

     ( Marx _ Capital - Vol.1 - p.36 )

                         **************************

  Exchange-value seems at first to be a quantitative relation, the proportion in which use-values are exchanged for one another, Inthis relation they constitute equal exchangeable magnitudes. Thus one volume of Propertius and eight ounces of snuff  may have the same exchange-value, despite the dissimilar use-values of snuff and elegies.  Considered as exchange value, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided the two are available in the appropriate proportion... Quite irrespective, therefore, of their natural form of existence and without regard to the specific character of the needs they satisfy as use-values, commodities is in definite quantities  are congruent, they take one another's place in the exchange process, are regarded as equivalents, and despite their motley appearance have a common denominator. 

( Marx - A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - p.28 ) 

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        Labour Embodied in Exchange- Value 

    Let us suppose that one ounce of gold, one ton of iron, one quarter of wheat and twenty yards of silk are exchange-value of equal magnitude. As exchange-value in which the qualitative difference between their use-values is eliminated, they represent  equal amounts  of the same kind of labour. The labour which is uniformly materialized in them must be uniform , homogeneous, simple labour; it matters as little whether this is embodied in gold, iron, wheat or silk, as it matters to oxygen whether it is found in rusty iron, in the atmosphere , in the juice of grapes or in human blood. But digging gold , mining iron, cultivating wheat and weaving silk are qualitatively different kinds of labour. In fact what appears objectively as diversity of the use-values , appears, when looked at dynamically, as diversity of the activities which produce those use values.since the particular material of which the use-values consist is irrelevant to the labour that creates exchange-value, the particular form of this labour is equally irrelevant. Different use-values are, moreover, products of the activity of different individuals, and therefore the result of different kinds of labour. But as exchange-values they represent the same homogeneous  labour, i.e., labour in which the individual characteristics of the workers are obliterated. Labour which creates exchange-value is thus abstract general labour.

  ( Marx -  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - p.29 )  

 

              General Formula of Capital 

   The general formula of capital is M-C-M. In other words,  a sum of value is thrown into circulation to extract a larger sum  out of it. The process which produces this larger sum is capitalist production. This process that realises it is circulation of capital. The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use-value, or his personal consumption. The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it. The capitalist advances the total capital without regard to the different roles played by its  components in the production of surplus-value.He advances all these components uniformly, not just to reproduce the advanced capital, but rather to produce value in excess of it. The only way in which he can convert the value of his advanced variable capital into a greater value is by exchanging it for living labour and exploiting living labour. But he cannot exploit this labour unless he makes a simultaneous advance of the conditions for performing this labour,, namely means of labour and subjects of labour, machinery and raw-materials, i.e., unless he converts a certain amount of value in his possession into the form of conditions of production: for he is a capitalist and can undertake the process to exploiting labour only because, being owner of the conditions of labour, he confronts the labourer as owner of only labour-power.. It is precisely the fact that non-workers own the means of production which turns the labourers into wage-workers and non-workers into capitalists.

    (Marx - Capital -Vol.3 - p.41)

 

                          Variable and Constant Capital

           The capitalist does not care whether it is considered that he advances constant capital to make profit out to his variable capital, or that he advances variable capital to enhance the value of the constant capital; that he invests money in wages to raise the value of his machinery and raw materials, or that he invests money in machinery and raw materials to able to exploit labour. Although it is only the variable portion of the capital which creates surplus value, it does so only if the other portions, the conditions of production, are likewise advanced, Seeing that the capitalist can exploit labour only by advancing constant capital and that he can turn his constant capital to good account only by advancing variable capital, he lumps them altogether  in his imagination, much more since the actual rate of his gain is not determined by its proportion to the variable, but to the total capital, not by the rate of surplus-value but by the rate of profit. And the latter, as we shall see, may remain the same and yet express different rates of surplus-value.

    (Marx - Capital Vol.3 - p.42 )  

                                   Paid and Unpaid Labour

   The Value contained in a commodity is equal to the labour-time expended in its production , and the sum of this labour consist of this paid and unpaid portions. But for the capitalist the cost of that portion of the labour- materialised in it for which he has paid. The surplus labour contained in the commodity costs the capitalist nothing, although , like the paid portion, it costs the labourer his labour, and although it creates value and  enters into the commodity as a value - creating element quite like paid labour. The capitalist's profit is derived from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has paid nothing. The surplus value, or profit, consists precisely in the excess value of a commodity over its cost price,i.e., the excess of the total labour embodied in it . The surplus value, whatever its origin, is thus a surplus over the advanced total capital. The proportion of this surplus to the total capital is therefore expressed by the fraction s/c in which C stands for total capital. We thus obtain the rate of profit s/c= s/c+v as distinct from the rate of surplus value s/c.

                         (Marx- Capital - Vol 3- p.42 )

 

         The rate of  Surplus Value  and the Rate of Profit 

     The  rate of surplus value measured against the variable capital is called the rate of surplus value.The rate of surplus value measured against the total capital is called the rate of profit.These are two different measurement of the same entity, and owing to the difference of the two standards of measurement they express different proportions or relations of this entity.

     The transformation of surplus value into profit must be deduced from the transformation of the rate of surplus value into the rate of profit , not vice versa. And in fact it was the rate of profit which was the historical point of departure. Surplus value and rate of surplus value are , relatively the invisible and unknown essence that wants investigating, while the rate of profit and therefore the appearance of surplus value in the form of profit  are revealed on the surface of phenomenon. 

      So far as the individual capitalist is concerned, it is evident that he is only interested in the relation of the surplus value, or the excess value at which he sells his commodities, to the total capital advanced for the production of the commodities, while the specific relationship and inner connection of this surplus with the various components of capital fail to interest him, and it is, moreover, rather in his interest to draw the veil over this specific relationship and this intrinsic connection.

   Although the excess value of a commodity over its cost-price is shaped in the immediate process of production, it is realised only in the process of circulation, and appears all the more readily  to have arisen from the process of circulation, since in reality, under competition, in the actual market, it depends on market conditions whether or not and to what extent this surplus is realised... 

In the process of circulation  the time of circulation comes to exert its influence alongside the working-time, thereby limiting the amount of surplus-value realisablewithin a given timespan.Still other elements derived from circulation intrudedecisively  into the actual production process. The actual process of production and the process of circulation intertwine and intermingle continually, and thereby adulterate their typical distinctive features. The production of surplus-value and of value in general, receives new definition in the process of circulation...Capital passes through  the circuit of its metamorphoses . Finally, stepping beyond its inner organic life, so to say, it enters into relations with outer life,into relations  in which it is not capital and labour which confront one another, but capital and capital in one casa, and individuals, again simply as buyers and sellers, in the other. The time of circulation and workin time cross paths and thus both seem to determine the surplus value. the original form in which capital and wage-labou  confront one another is disguised through  the intervention of relationships seemingly independent of it. Surplus-value itself does not appear as the product of the appropriation of labour time, but as an excess of the selling price of commodities over their cost price, the latter thus being easily represented as their actual value, while profit appears as an excess of the selling price of commodities over their imminent value.

 (Marx-Capital- Vol.3-pp.43/44)

Trade 

   When the economic Luther, Adam Smith criticised past, economic things had changed considerably. The century had been humanised; reason had asserted itself; morality began to claim its eternal right. The exhorted trade treaties, the commercial wars, the strict isolation of the nations, offended too  greatly against advanced consciousness. Protestant hypocrisy took the place of catholic condour. Smith proved that humanity too, was rooted in`the nature of commerce; that commerce must become "among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship'' instead of being '' the most fertile source of discord and animosity;that after all it lay in the nature of things for trade,taken overall, to be advantageous to all parties concerned.

Smith was right to eulogies trade as humane. There is nothing absolutely immoral in the world. Trade, too has an aspect wherein it pays homage to morality and humanity. But what homage1  The law of the strong hand, the open highway robbery of the Middle Ages became humanised when its first stage characterised by the prohibition of the export of money passed over into the mercantile system.Then the mercantile system itself was humanised. Naturally , it is in the interest of the trader to be on god terms with the one from whom he buys cheap as well as with  the other to whom he sells dear.A nation therefore acts very imprudently if it fosters feeling of animosity in its suppliers and customers  The more friendly, the more advantageous. Such is the humanity of trade. And this hypocritical way oh misusing morality for immoral purposes in the pride of the free-trade system."Have we not overthrown the barbarism of the monopolies'' exclaim the hypocrites.''Have not carried civilisation to distant parts of the world? have we not brought about fraternisation of the peoples, and reduced the number of wars?" Yes, all this you have done - but HOW! You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the ONE  great basic monopoly, property, may function the  more freely and unrestrictedly.  You have have civilised the ends of the earth to win new terrain for the deployment of your vile avarice.You have brought about  the fraternisation of the people - but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves. You have reduced the number of wars- to earn all the bigger profits in peace. to intensify to the utmost the enmity between individuals, the ignominious war of competition!When you have done anything out of pure humanity, from consciousness of the futility of the opposition  between the general and the individual interest/ When have you been moral without being interested, without honouring at the back of your mind immoral, egoistical motives?

   By dissolving nationalities, the liberal economic system  had done its best to universalize enmity, to transform mankind into a horde of ravenous beasts (  for what else are competitors?)  who devour one another just because each has identical interests with all others - after this preparatory work there remained but one step to take before the goal was reached, the dissolution of the family. To accomplish this, economy's own beautiful invention. the factory system came to its aid. The last vestige of common interests, the community of goods in the possession of the family, has been undermined by the factory system. 

 (Engels - Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy - Marx-Engels- Collected Works -Vol pp.422/24)

                       ( Marx- Capital - Vol.3 - p.43 )

 

                    Competition and Monopoly

   The opposite of competition is monopoly. Monopoly was the war cry of the Mercantalists; competition the battle-cry of the liberal economists.It is easy to see that this antithesis is again  a quite hollow antithesis. Every competitor cannot but desire to have te monopoly, be the worker, capitalist or landowner.Each small group of competitors cannot but desire to have the monopoly for itself against all others. Competition based on self-interest and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of of competition indeed, is itself breeds competition; just as a prohibition of imports , for instance, or high tariffs positively breeds the competition  of smuggling. The contradiction of competition is exactly  the same as that of private property.It is in the interest of each to posses everything, but in the interest of the whole that each possesses an equal amount. Thus, the general and the individual interest are diametrically opposed to each other. The contradiction  of competition is that each cannot but desire the monopoly, whilst the whole as such is bound to lose by monopoly and must therefore move it.Moreover, competition already presupposes  monopoly - namely, monopoly of property ( and here the hypocrisy of the liberals comes once more to light ); ans as long as the monopoly of property exists, for so long as the possession of monopoly is equally justified for monopoly, once it exists, is also property. What a pitiful half-measure, therefore,  to attack the small monopolies and to leave untouched the basic monopoly! And if we add to this the economist's proposition mentioned above, that nothing has value which cannot be monopolized - that nothing, therefore, which does not permit of such monopolization can enter this arena of competition- then our assertion that competition presupposes monopoly is completely justified. 

(ibid- pp.432/33) 

                             Money and Stealing

    Money is the god of this world; the bourgeois tales the proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder then, if the proletarian retains his atheism  and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God. And when the poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of life, to want and  hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain power.  ... Want leaves the working man the choice between starting slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking  what he needs where he finds it- in plain English- stealing. There is no cause for surprise that most of them prefer stealing to starvation and suicide. 

 ( Engels- The condition of the Working Class in England - ibid -Vol. 4 -p.412) 

                                          Money

   Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man - and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has therefore robbed the  whole world - both the world of men  and nature - of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man's work  and man's existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it. 

   The god of Jews has become secularized and has become the god of world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

    the view of Nature attained under the dominion of private property and money is a real contempt for and practical debasement of Nature; in the Jewish religion Nature exists, it is true, but it exists  only in imagination.

   Contempt for theory, art and history and for man as an end in himself, which is attained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man and money. the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc. becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold

    The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the natonality of merchant, of the man of money  in general. 

 (Marx - On the Jewish Question -MECW - Vol 3-p.172 )

                                   Money and Christ

   Christ represent originally:

     1. Men before God

     2. God for Men

     3. Men to Man

   Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money.

    1.Private property for private property;

    2. Society for private property 

    3.Private property for society

   But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money. 

 (Marx- Comments on James Mill- MECW- Vol. 3- p.212)

                         The Circulation of Money

 

   The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this  constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.

   As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money become capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or mainspring of the circulation. M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit making alone is what he aims at. this boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value. is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is a 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.

 (Marx - Capital -Vol.1 -pp.151/53) 

                                 Money Market

      The money market man sees the movement of industry and of the world market only in the inverted reflection of the money and stock market  an so effect becomes  cause to him. I noticed that already in the forties  in Manchester; the London stock exchange reports were utterly useless for understanding the course of idustry and its periodical maxima and minima because these gentry tried to explain everything by crises on the money market, which of course were themselves generally only symptoms. At that time  the point was to disprove temporary over-production as the origin  of industrial crises, so that the thing has in addition its tendentious side,provocative of distortion. This point now ceases to exist - for us, at any rate, for good and all- beside which it is indeed a fact that the money market can also have its own crises, in which direct disturbances of industry play only a subordinate part or no part at all. Here there is still much to be established and examined, especially in the history of the last twenty years.

   Where there is division of labour on a social scale there the separate labour processes become dependent of each other.In the last instance production is the the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products become independent of production proper, it follows a movement of its own, which, while governed as a whole by that production, still in particulars and within this general dependence again follows laws of its own inherent in the nature of this new factor; this movement has phases of its own and in its turn reacts on the movement of production...

   ...So it is, too, with the money market. As soon as trade in money become separate from trade in commodities it has - under certain conditions imposed by production and commodity trade and within these limits - a development of its own, special laws determined by its own nature and separate phases.If this is added that money trade, developing further, comes to include trade in securities and that these securities are not only government papers but also  industrial and transport stocks, so that money trade gains direct control over a portion of the production by which, taken as a whole, it is itself controlled, then the reaction of money trading on production becomes still stronger and more complicated. The traders in money are the owners of railways, mines, iron work etc. These means of production take on a double aspect; their operation has to be directed sometimes in the interest of direct production but sometimes also according to the requirements of the shareholders, so far as they are money traders. With these few indications of my conception of the relation of production to commodity trade and of both to money trade, I have answered, in essence, your questions about "historical materialism" generally. 

 ( Engels to C.Schmidt - Selected Correspondence - pp-419/20) 

                                    Stock Exchange

   The stock exchange is an institution where the bourgeoisie exploit not the workers but one another. The surplus-value which changes hands on the stock exchange is surplus-value already in existence, the product of past exploitation of labour. Only when the process is finished can the surplus-value serve the ends of stock exchange swindling. The stock exchange interest us primarily only indirectly just as its influence, its reaction on the capitalist exploitation of the workers, is felt only indirectly, asserts itself  only in a roundabout way. To ask that the workers should take a direct interest and wax indignant over the way the Junkers, manufacturers and petty bourgeois are fleeced on stock exchange means demanding that the workers should take to arms in order to protect their direct exploiters in the possession of the surplus-value which they had filched from these selfsame workers .No, thank you. But as the finest fruit of bourgeois society, as the hearth of extreme corruption, as the hothouse of Panama and other scandals, and therefore also as an excellent medium for the concentration of capitals, the disintegration  and dissolution of the last remnants of naturally formed interconnections in bourgeois society and at the same time for the annihilation and conversion into their opposites of all orthodox moral conceptions, as an incomparable element of destruction, as a most powerful accelerator of the impending revolution - in this historical sense  the stock exchange is also direct interest to us.

 (Engels to A. Babel -ME Selected Correspondence - pp.454/55)

 

   The perpetual fluctuations of price such as is created by the condition of competition completely deprive trade of its last vestige of morality.It is no longer a question of value; the same system which appears to attach such importance to value, which confers on the abstraction of value in money form the honour of having an existence of its own, this very system destroys by means of competition the inherent value of all things, and daily and hourly changes the value-relationship of all things to one another. Where there is any possibility remaining in this whirlpool of an exchange based on a moral foundation. In this continuous up-and-down, everyone must seek to hit upon the most favourable moment for purchase and sale; everyone must become a  speculator - that is to say , must reap where he has not sown; must enrich himself at the expense of others, must calculate on the misfortune of others, or let chance win for him. The speculator always counts on disasters, particularly  on bad harvests.He utilizes everything, for instance, the New York fire in its time - and immorality's culminating point is the speculation on the stock exchange, where history, and with it mankind, is demoted to a means of gratifying the avarice of the calculation or gambling speculator. And let not the honest ''respectable'' merchant rise above the gambling on the stock exchange  wit a "pharsiac "I thank thee. O Lord," Etc. He is as bad as the speculators in shares and stocks. He speculates just as much as they do. h e has to: competition compels him to. And trading activity therefore implies the same immorality as theirs. The truth of the relation of competition is the relation of consumption to productivity.  In a world worthy of mankind there will be no other competition than this. The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means  his disposal; and in accordance with the relationship of this productive power  to the mass of consumers  it will determine how far it has to raise or lower production, how far has to give way to, or curtail luxury.

 ( Engels- Outlines of a critique of Political Economy- MECW- Vol. 3 pp. 434/35) 

                                Machines and Value

   Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yield up its own value to the product that it serves to beget.in so far as the machine has value, and, in consequence, parts with value to the product, it forms an element in the value of that product. Instead of being cheapened, the product is made dearer in proportion to the value of the machine. And it is clear as noon-day, that machine and systems of labour of Modern industry, are incomparably more loaded with value than the implements used in handicrafts and manufactures.

   I n the first place, it must be observed that the machinery , while always entering as a whole into the labour process, enters into the value-begetting process only by bits. It never adds more value than it loses, on an average, by wear and tear. Hence there is a great difference between the value of a machine, and the value transferred in a given time by that machine to the product.The longer the life of the machine in the labour-process, the greater is that difference.

 (Marx- Capital- Vol.1-p.387)

 

Machinery and Agriculture

   In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason , that annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer.Thus the desire for social changesand the class antagonisms are brought to the same level in the country as inthe towns. The irrational, old-fashioned methods of agriculture are  replaced by scientific ones. Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. but at the same times it creates the material conditions for a higher syn thesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms that they have each acquired during their temporary separation.Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the one hand  it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, ie., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions  for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production , and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation  of labour processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman's individual vitality, freedom and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture , as in urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover,all progrss is capitalistic agriculture is a progree in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, bot of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the  United States, for example, the more rapid is the process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore develops technology. and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

 Marx -Capital_ Vol. 1 -pp.505/07 )

                                 Productive Labour

.. On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production of commmodities is not merely  the production of commodities; it is essentially the production of surplus-value... If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer , when, in addition  to belabouring tha head of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the the school proprietor . that tha latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead  into a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but als a specific sacial relation of production, a a relation that has sprung up  historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece  of luck, but a misfortune.

 (Marx - Capital - Vol.1 - p.509) 

 

             Productive Labour and Unproductive Labour 

   The capitalist process therefore is not merely the production of commodities. It ia process which absorbs unpaid labour, which makes raw materials and means of labour - the means of production - into means for the absorption of unpaid labour.

   It follows from what has been said that the designation of labour as productive labour  has absolutely nothing to do with the determinant content of the labour, its special utility, or the particular use-value in which it manifest itself.

   The same kind of labour may be productive or un productive.

   For Example, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost for five Pounds, was an unproductive labourer.On the other hand the writer who tyrns out stuff for his publisher in factory style, is a productive labourer.Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produced silk. it was an activity of his nature. Later he sold the product for 5 Pounds. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig, who fabricates books (for example, Compendia of Economics) under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer , for his product is from the outset subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of increasing the captal. A singer who sells her song for her own account is an unproductive labourer. But the same singer commissioned by  an entrepreneur to sing in order to make money for him is a productive labourer; for she produced capital,

 (Marx- Theories of Surplus-Value- Part 1-Vol.of capital - pp.388/89)

 

                                     Public Debt 

   The system of public credit, ie., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages,took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing house for it.Thus it first took root in Holland. National debt , ie., the alienation of the state whether despotic, constitutional or republican marked with its stamp  the capitalist era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern people is- their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. and with the risk of national debt making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. the state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable , which go on functioning in their hands just as much hard cash would. But  further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation - as also apart from the taxfarmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven - the national debt has given rise to joint-stock0 companies to dealings in negotiable  effects of all kinds and to agiotate, in a word, to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

 ( Marx - Capital -Vol.1 -pp.754/55) 

 

 

 

 

 

. Why a capitalist country needs a  foreign market. Certainly not because the product cannot be realised at all under the capitalist system. That is nonsense. A foreign market is needed because it is inherent in capitalist production to strive for unlimited expansion - unlike all the old modes of production, which were limited to the village community, to the patriarchal estate, to the tribe, to the territorial area, or state. Under allthe old economic systems production was every time resumed in the  same form and on the same scale as previouly; under the capitalistic system, however , this resumption in the same form becomes impossible, and unlimited expansion, perpetual progress, becomes the law of production.

 (A Characterrisation of Economic Romanticism - Lenin- Collected Works - Vol. 2 - p.164 (1897) 

 

                                        Foreign Trade 

   Since foreign trade partly cheapens the elements of constant capital, and partly the necessities of life for which the variable capital is exchanged, it tend to raise rate of profit by increasing the rate of surplus-value  and lowering the value of constant capital. It generally acts in this direction by permitting anexpansion of the scale of production. It thereby hastens the process of accumulation, on the one hand, bu because the variable capital to shrink in ralation to constant capital, on the other, and thus hastens a fal in the rate of profit.

  (Marx - Capital - Vol 3- p.237)

 

                  Foreign Trade and Rate of Profit 

   Capitals invested in foreign trade can yield the higher rate of profit, because, in the first place, there is competition  with commodities produced in other countries with inferior production facilities, so that the more advanced country sells its goods  above their value though cheaper than the competing countries. In so far as the labour of the more advanced country is here realised as labour of a higher specific weight, the rate ofprofit rises, because labour which has not been paid as being of a higher quality is sold as such.

   This same foreign trade develops the capitalist mode of production in the home country, which implies the decrease of variable capital in relation to constant, and on the other hand, causes over-production in respect to foreign markets, so that in the long run it again has an opposite effect. 

 (Marx - Capital - Vol 3 -pp.238/39) 

 

                                   Private Property 

   .. . We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance  and reproduction  of human labour, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

   In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society , accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

   In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

   And the  abolition of this state f things is called by the bourgeois-abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at...

   You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society  private property is  already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to the non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. you reproach us , therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property , the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for immense majority of society...

    Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

 (Marx -Engels - Manifesto of the Communist Party - MECW- Vol.6 -pp 498/500)

 

                                   Economic Crises

     So far as crises are concerned, all those writers who describe the real movement of prices, or all experts , who write in the actual situation of a crisis, have been right in ignoring the allegedly theoretical twaddle and in contenting  themselves with the idea that what may be true in abstract theory - namely, that no gluts of the market and so forth are possible - is, nevertheless, wrong in practice. The constant recurrences of crises has in fact reduced the rigmarole of J.B.Say and others to a phraseology which now only used in  times of prosperity but is cast aside in times of crisis.

   In the crisis of world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed. Instead of investigating the nature of the conflicting elements which erupt in the catastrophe, the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting, in the face of their regular and periodic recurrence, that if production were carried on according to the textbooks, crises would never occur. Thus the apologetic consist in the falsification of the simplest economic relations, and particularly in clinging to the concept of unity in the face of contradiction....

   In order to prove that capitalist production cannot lead  to general crises, all its conditions and distinct forms, all its principles and specific features - in short, capitalist production itself - are denied.In fact it is demonstrated that if the capitalist mode of production had not developed in a specific way and become a unique form of social production, but were mode of production dating backto tha most rudimentory stages, then its peculiar contradictions and conflicts and hence also their eruption in crises would not exist....

   Here therefore, firstly commodity, in which the contradiction between exchange-value and use-value exist, becomes mere product (use-value)  and therefore the exchange of commodities is transformed into mere barter of products, of simple use-values. This is a return  not only to the time before capitalist production, but even to the time before there was simple commodity production: and the most complicated phenomenon of capitalist production - the world market crisis -is flatly denied, by denying the first condition of capitalist production, namely, that the product must be a commodity and therefore express itself as money and undergo the process of metamorphosis. Instead of speaking of wage-labour, the term "services" is used. This word again omits the specific characteristic  of wage labour and its use - namely, that it increases the value of the commodities against which it is exchanged, that it creates surplus-value and in doing so, it disregards the specific relationship through which money and commodities are transformed into capital. "Service" is labour seen only as use value (which  is side issue in capitalist production) just as the term "productions" fails to express the essence of commodity and its inherent contradiction. It is quite consistent that money is then regarded merely as an intermediary in the exchange of products and not as an essential and necessary form of existence of the commodity which must manifest itself as exchange-value, as general social labour. Since the transformation of the commodity into mere use-value (product)  obliterate  the essence of exchange-value, it is just as easy to deny, or rather it is necessary to deny, that money is an essential aspect of the commodity and that in the process of metamorphosis it is independent of the original  form of commodity.

   Crises are thus reasoned out of existence here by forgetting or denying the first elements of capitalist production; the existence of the product as a commodity, the duplication of the commodity in commodity and money, the consequent separation which takes place in the exchange of commodities and finally the relation of money or commodities to wage labour.

   Incidentally, those economists are no better who ( like John Stuart  Mill)  want to explain the crisis by simple possibilities of crisis contained in the metamorphosis of commodities - such as the separation between purchase and sale, These factors which explain the possibility of crises, by no means explain their actual occurrence . They do not explain why the phases the process come into such conflict that their inner unity can only assert itself through a crisis, through a violent process. This separation appears in the crisis, it is the elementary form of the crisis. To explain the crisis on the basis of this, its elementary form, is to explain the existence of the crisis by describing its most abstract form, that is to say, to explain the crisis by the crisis.

   .. In the first place, no capitalist produces in order to consume his prduct. And when speaking of capitalist production. it is right to say that: "no man produces witha a view to consume his own product",  even if he uses portions of his product for industrial consumption. But here the point in question is private consumpton. Previously it was forgotten that the product is a commodity. Now even the social division of labour is forgotten. In a situation where men produce for themselves, there are indeed no crises, but neither is there capitalist production. Nor have we ever heard that the ancients, with their slave production ever knew crises, although individual producers among the ancients  too, did go bankrupt. The first port of the alternative is nonsense.The second as well. A man who has produced, does not have the choice of selling or not selling. He must sell. In the crisis there arises the very situation in which he cannot sell or can only sell below the cost-price or must even sell at a positive loss. What difference does it make, therefore, to him or to us that he has produced in order to sell? The very question we want to solve is what has thwarted this good intention of his?

   .. Ricardo even forgets that a person may sell in order to pay, and that these forced sales play a very significant role in the crises. The capitalist's immediate object in selling, is to turn his commodity, or rather his commodity capital, back into money capital , and thereby to realise his profit. Consumption -revenue- is by no means the guiding motive in this process, although it is ` for the person who only sells commodities in order to transform them into means of subsistence. But this is not the capitalist production, in which revenue appears as the result and as the determining purpose. Everyone sells first of all in order to sell, that is to say, in order to transform commodities into money. 

   During the crisis, a man may be very pleased, if he has sold his commodities without immediately thinking of a purchase. On the other hand,  if the value that has been realised is again to be used as capital, it must go through the process of reproduction, that it must be exchanged for labour and commodities. But the crisis is precisely the phase of disturbance and interruption of the process of reproduction. And this disturbance cannot be explained by the fact that it does not occur in those times when there is no crisis...

   With regard the contradiction between partial and universal over-production, in so far as the existence of the former is affirmed in order to evade the latter, the following observation may be made.

   Firstly: Crises are usually preceded by a general inflation in prices of all articles of capitalist production. All of them therefore participate in the subsequent crash and at their former prices they cause a glut in the market. the market can absorb a larger volume at commodities at falling prices, at prices which have fallen below their cost-prices, than it could absorb at their former prices. the excess of commodities is always relative, in other words, it is an excess at particular prices. The price at which the commodities are then absorbed are ruinous for the producer or merchant

   Secondly: For a crisis ( and therefore also for over-production ) to be general, it suffices for it to affect the principal commercial goods..

   In periods of over-production a large part of the nation ( especially the working class ) ie less well provided than ever with corn shoes,etc., not to speak of wine and furniture. If over production could only occur when all the members of a nation had satisfied even their most urgent needs, there could never, in the history of bourgeois society up to now, have been a state of general over-production or even of partial over-production. When, for instance , the market is glutted by shoes or calicoes or wines or colonial products, does this perhaps mean that  four-sixth of the nations have more than satisfied their needs in shoes, calicoes etc? What after all  has over-production to do with needs? It is only concerned with demand that is backed by ability to pay. It is not a question of absolute over-production - over-production as such in relation to the absolute ned or the desire  to possess commodities. In this sense there is neither partial  nor general over-production; and the one is not opposed to the other.

   But - Ricardo will say - when there are lot of people who wants shoes and calicoes, why do they not obtain the means to acquire them, by producing something which will enable them to buy shoes and calicoes? Would it not be even simpler to say: Why do they not produce shoes and calicoes for themselves?  And even stranger aspect  of over-production is that the workers, the actual producers of the very commodities which glut the market , are in need of these commodities.It cannot be said here that they should produce things in order to obtain them, for they have produced them and yet they have not got them. Nor can it be said that a particular commodity gluts the market, because  no one is in want of it. If, therefore, it is even impossible to explain that partial over-production arises because the demand for the commodities that glut the market has been more than satisfied, it is quite impossible to explain away universal over-production by declaring that needs, unsatisfied needs, exist for many of the commodities which are on the market..

   The possibility of crisis, which became apparent in the simple metamorphosis of the commodity, is once more demonstrated, and further developed, by the disjunction between the (direct)  process of production and the process of circulation.As soon as these processes do not merge smoothly into one another, but become independent of one another, the crisis is there.

   The possibility of crisis is indicated in the metamorphosis of the commodity like this: 

   Firstly, the commodity which actually exists as use-value, and nominally, in its price, as exchange-value, must be transformed into money, CM. If this difficulty, the sale, is solved then the purchase, MC, presents no difficulty, since money is directly exchangeable for everything else.The use-value of the commodity, the usefulness of the labour contained in it, must be assumed from the start, otherwise it is no commodity at all..

   ...Crisis results from the impossibility to sell. The difficulty of transforming the commodity - the particular product of individual labour - into its opposite, money, ie., abstract general social labour lies in the fact that money is not the particular product of individual labour, and that the person who has effected a sale, who therefore has commodities in the form of money , is not compelled to buy again at once, to transform the money again into a particular product of individual labour. In barter this contradiction does not exist: no one can be a seller without being a buyer or a without being a seller. The difficulty of the seller - on the assumption that his commodity has use-value- only stems from the ease with which  the buyer can defer the re-transformation of money into commodity. The difficulty of converting the commodity into money, of selling it, only arises from the fact that the commodity must be turned into money but the money need not be immediately turned into commodity, and therefore sale and purchase can be separated. We have said that this form contains the possibility of crisis, that is to say , the possibility that elements which are correlated, which are inseparable, are separated and consequently are forcibly reunited, their coherence is violently asserted against their mutual independence. Crisis is nothing but the forcible assertion of the unity of phases of the production process which have become independent of each other. 

   The general, abstract possibility of crisis denotes no more than the most abstract form of crisis, without content, without a compelling motivating factor. Sale and purchase may fall apart. They thus represent potential crisis and their coincidence always remain a critical factor for the commodity. The transition from one to the other may, however, proceed smoothly. The most abstract form of crisis ( and therefore the formal possibility of crisis) is thus the metamorphosis of the commodity itself; the contradiction of exchange-value  and use-value, and furthermore  of money and commodity, comprised within the unity of the commodity, exist in metamorphosis only as an involved movement. The factors which turn this possibility of crisis into (an actual) crisis are not contained in this form itself; it only implies that the framework  for a crisis exists

   And in consideration of the bourgeois economy,that is the important thing. The world trade crisis must be regarded as the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy. The individual factors, which are condensed in these crisis, must therefore emerge and must be described in each sphere of the bourgeois economy and the further we advance in our examination of the latter , the more aspects of this conflict must be traced on the one hand, and on the other hand it must be shown that its more abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms.

   It can  therefore be said that the crisis in its first form is the metamorphosis of the commodity itself, the falling asunder of purchase and sale. 

   The crisis in its second form is the function of money as a means of payment, in which money has two different functions and figures in two different phases, divided from each other in time. Both these forms are as yet quite abstract, although the second is more concrete than the first... 

   The general possibility of crisis is in the process of metamorphosis of capital itself, and in two ways in so far as money functions as means of circulation (the possibility of crisis lies in) the separation  of purchase and sale; and in so far as money functions as means of payment, it has two different aspects, it acts as measure of value and as realisation of value. These two aspects (may) become separated. If in the interval between them the value has changed, if the commodity at the moment of its sale is not worth what it was worth at the moment when money was acting as a measure of value and therefore as a measure of the reciprocal obligations, then the obligation cannot be met from the proceeds of the sale of the commodity, and therefore the whole series of transactions which retrogressively depend on this one transaction, cannot  . If even for only a limited period of time the commodity cannot be sold then, although its value has not altered, money cannot function as means of payment, since it must function as such in a definite given period of time. But as the same sum of money acts for a whole series of  reciprocal transactions and obligations here, inability to pay occurs not only at one, but at many points, hence a crisis arises.

   These are the formal possibilities of crisis. The form mentioned first is possible without the latter, that is to say, crises are possible without credit, without money function as a means of payment. But the second form is not possible without the first, that is to say, without the separation between purchase and sale. But in the latter case, the crisis occurs not only because the commodity is unsaleable, but because it is not saleable within a  particular period of time, and the crisis arises and derives its character not only from the unsaleability of the commodity, but from the non-fulfillment of a whole series of payments which depend on the sale of this particular commodity within this  particular period of time. this is the characteristic form of money crises. 

   If the crisis appears, therefore, because purchase and sale become separated, it becomes a money crisis, as soon as money has developed as means of payment, and this second form of crisis follow as a matter of course, when the first occurs. In investigating why the general  possibility of crisis turns into a real crisis, in investigating the conditions of crisis, it is therefore quite superfluous  to concern oneself with the forms of crisis  which arise out of the development of money as a means of payment. This is precisely why economists like to suggest that this obvious form is the cause of crises...

   In so far as crisis arise from changes in prices and revolutions in prices, which do not coincide with the changes in the values of commodities, they naturally cannot be investigated during the examination of capital in general, in which the prices of  commodities are assumed to be identical with the values of commodities.

   The general possibility of crisis is the formal metamorphosis of capital itself, the separation, in time and space, of purchase and sale. But this is never the cause of the crisis. For it is nothing but the most general form of crisis, ie., the crisis itself in its most generalised expression. But it cannot be said that the abstract form of crisis is the cause of crisis. If one asks what its cause is, one wants to know why its abstract form, the form of its possibility, turns from possibility into actuality. 

 ( Marx - Theories of Surplus Value =Vol.4 of Capital Part 11-pp.500/515) 

  

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

      ( to be continued