We have to be very careful when we read chapter 4 because words are tricky little things that twist and distort. So, rather than reading his words from our own internal dictionary, we have to read them with what Marx tells us those words mean to him. He's going to define "capital" and "capitalist" in a very specific way. It's a fun little gameshow: Bottle of Beef presents You're Not A Capitalist. You almost certainly participate in the thing we all call "capitalism," but probably not in the way you thought you did.
Capital comes from the markup of a commodity, and it exists only in the act of obtaining a commodity in order to sell it at a higher price for a profit that you do not intend to spend. In his own words, you invest $100 in some commodity you don't actually care about simply to get back $110. Then take that $110 and do it again to get back $130, and so on, all the while refusing to spend any of that profit for things you will consume. A capitalist is a person who practices this type of money hoarding at the expense of the market, draining the market itself for power. In other words, a capitalist intentionally destabilizes the market itself for monetary gain. That is a radically different notion than our modern day usage of the term capitalism. For us regular everyday people the hoarding of money as Marx describes it is a perfectly acceptable practice because we are 1) saving in order to spend for much more valuable commodities than simple barter can support, and 2) we have no intention of radically damaging the market itself for personal gain. Scrooge McDuck is a capitalist, Papa John is just an extravagant doofus.
Jokes aside, we have to understand what is and isn't capitalism according to Marx. The simple fact that each person who handles a commodity adds value to the final price of that commodity is not capitalism, per se. Rather, it is simply the accumulation of labor. Fruit from 1,000 miles away that came on two trains and a semi should obviously cost more than fruit grown 2 miles away by a local farmer (the difficulty of growing fruit in your specific location notwithstanding). That's because there are many more people exchanging their labor for money along the way. That is what Marx lumps under the term "coincidental," because the consumer cannot reasonably predict those fluctuations on a day to day basis. So long as they eventually even themselves out, everything is as good as it can be.
In contrast, a Marxian capitalist is someone who intentionally manipulates that entire process in order to pull the commodity of money out of the system for purely monetary gain. That is a large part of the reason he equates a capitalist with a miser.
Are you simply buying and selling things to amass more money than everyone else so that they can't afford to buy the things they want? No? Congratulations! You're not a capitalist, according to Marx.
Totally worth it to see the balloons and confetti popup on screen.
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You might be surprised that that's it. That's the end of Capital.
But, but, what about the next 2,000 pages?
There's no easy way to tell you this, but Marx is dead. What follows is at best Christopher Tolkien's loving continuation of his dad's notes about Middle Earth, and at worst Lenin telling his goons to go ahead and murder the Romanov's in the basement where they are being held captive under false pretenses of rescue. But, he died well before that. That was Lenin's idea.
Volume 1 of Capital is simply a description of capitalism, what it is and how it develops. This is a materialist description, meaning that it focuses on describing the actual historical events that lead to a particular situation rather than philosophies and ideals. It does not pretend to solve those problems, it simply elaborates how they come to be a problem.
So, Marx is describing the abstract concept of commodity markets and he breaks the whole thing down into two binary relationships. There are producers of commodities, call them workers, craftsmen, laborers, whatever. They stand in opposition to merchants, not because there is any conflict or animosity between the two, but because trading commodities involves both a seller and a buyer, both operating from fundamentally different points of view. The producer is interested in exchanging for equivalence and the merchant is interested in maintaining that equivalence in the broadest sense. The producer compares wants, the merchant compares values. This whole market stands in another opposition to the owners of the market itself, that is "the state." Whatever form that state takes, it has the job of not letting the commodity of money grow wildly out of proportion to the entire quantity of commodities, money being the universal equivalent.
Marx the person sees this as a form of internal conflict. That conflict manifests in antagonism between the participants in a market and the shall we say regulators of the market itself. Marx is obviously referring to workers and factory owners (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie). The closest modern equivalent, in my opinion, is the conflict between everyday people and major corporations. I don't mean the people in offices doing their jobs like you, i mean that imaginary human that we have come to associate with the corporation itself.
Kevin in accounting is no more a Capitalist than Helen punching rivot holes on the line. They are both trading their commodity (abstract labor) for money and intend to spend that money for other commodities. Their individual salaries are theoretically irrelevant. I think the confusing part is that we forget that Helen isn't selling those rivot holes to the company for their equivalent value of money any more than Kevin is looking to steal some part of Helen's paycheck. Instead, Helen and Kevin and everyone else are simply contributing to the total amount of labor in the same way that everyone in your family might have specific daily chores. The general price of an airplane is determined by the amount of labor involved in producing it compared to other commodities.
So, can we construct a scenario that will give us some insight into Karl's opinion of this situation? I think so, we just can't get too carried away.
Let's say they make airplanes, and for all sorts of reasons nobody wants airplanes anymore. They can't sell their airplanes, so there isn't much point in working there anymore and they close up shop and head off in separate directions to find a different thing to make. That sucks, but such is life.
But if instead, Barry the boss only cares about turning his 5 million investment into 7 million, he might invent all sorts of ways to manipulate the system. He might cut everyone's paycheck in half regardless of the final selling price without any concern for what that will do to the larger economy. That would make me mad, so i can see why Marx would be mad too. Marx would probably blame that terrible thing on Barry's Capitalist greed because there was no market reason to do it other than money grabbing. Helen and Kevin might be pretty mad too and kill Barry. Marx is saying he's seen it happen a thousand times and trying to describe why he thinks it happens. Obviously he doesn't want people like Barry to do that, but he doesn't have any sure fire plan to stop it from happening a thousand more times. All he's saying is that he thinks it is an inherent danger of Capitalism in general.
That's my interpretation of what we've read. Do you disagree with my interpretation? Have i unknowingly made some crazy assumption? Do we need to go backward and read The Communist Manifesto for historical perspective?
If you need some deeper explanation of why i'm doing this, it's because today's general daily banter about Marxism and Communism and lefty righty revolutions don't make any sense to me. People in general are saying things backward from how i understand them, and i think that's because no one has actually read any of this stuff. It's just empty headed regurgitating of third or fourth hand gossip.
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