14, జనవరి 2012, శనివారం

An Introduction To Marx’s Capital—Part-4


(This is based on and mostly from “Marx’s Capital” written by Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho)


(For Part-3, please see the blog entry dated 13-1-2012)

Besides the German philosophy, another influence on Marx was the French Socialism. In the French revolution took place during  1789, the emerging bourgeoisie class (comprising of  capitalists, traders and professionals, and intellectuals)which did not have political power, mobilised the urban workers and rural peasants and  revolted against the king,  nobles, and the church. In this revolution the political power was seized by the bourgeoisie and the monarchy (rule of the king), the domination of the nobles and the church was abolished. The king was executed; lands of the nobles and the church were confiscated and distributed to small peasants. The state was separated from the Church and the state was declared as secular, without any link to religion. The bourgeoisie mobilised the workers and peasants under the slogan liberty, equality and frarnity. But after the revolution and seizure of political power, the bourgeoisie did not go further to bring economic equality. The oppression of the worker and peasant continued. The French socialists were inspired by the radicalism of the French revolution. But they noted the failure of the bourgeoise to implement the demand of liberty, equality and fraternity. Many of them believed in the necessity and possibility of revolutionary seizure of political power by the workers in order to establish a just and equal society.

The third source for the development of the ideology of Marx was the British political economy. Political economy is the study of the production, buying, selling,and their relations with the law, custom, government and distribution of national wealth including the budget. After his settlement in London in 1849, Marx turned his study to economics in order to understand contemporary capitalist society, and identify its strengths and limitations and its potential for transformation into a socialist society. He particularly developed the labour theory of value from the writings of the classical British political economists Adam Smith and, especially David Ricardo. The labour theory of value was stated by David Ricardo as, “ The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for the labour” (Ricardo, 1817).

Marx found that these classical economists were wrong in content (for example, the commodities do not often exchange at the value of their labour time of production) and inadequate in their intent( they have not asked and answered the question why the commodities are there at all. They assumed certain timeless features for humans and societies. Therefore he was determined to understand the historical context of commodities, wages, and prices, profits in their origin, development and demise.  He also was determined to develop the labour theory of value further.

Society always has the need to work in order to produce and consume. But how this production is organised has to be revealed both structurally and historically ( Means how the society was organised in different forms in the history for organising the production). Marx argues that when working—producing the material conditions for their individual and social reproduction (production of the materials and services required for individual and social sustenance and continuous reproduction of human beings and society)---people enter into definite relations with each other, as slave or master, lord or serf (peasant without independence and tied to a lord) capitalist or wage earner, and so on. Patterns of life are determined by existing social conditions, in particular the places to be filled by the individuals in the process of production. These relations –capitalist or wage worker, etc-are existing independently of individual choices. But they are established in the course of the historical development of production.

The social relations of production specific to a particular mode of production (feudalism, capitalism and so on) are best studied as class relations (capitalist or worker, landlord or peasant, slave or slave owner) except in primitive society where there are no classes. These class relations are the basis on which the society is constructed. Freedom to buy and sell is a fundamental legal characteristic of capitalistic society. In feudal society, divine rights of the kings and lords were the legal foundation. Self justified political, legal, intellectual forms are established to justify the existing society. These blinker and discourage all other views except the most conventional view of society, whether by force or by habit or otherwise. The peasant in feudal society was bound by loyalty to the lord or king and any vacillation could be punished severely. The wage earner has the freedom and compulsion to sell his labour power. He is free to sell his labour power to any capitalist by bargaining. But inorder to survive, he has the compulsion to sell his labour power. There can be struggle for higher wages, but this does not question the wage system itself. The mindset will be nurtured and prepared in the capitalist society in such a way that the wage system is assumed as natural and eternal. The probing into the nature of the capitalist system is frowned upon by the authorities. Whereas individual dissent is often tolerated, the anti capitalist mass movements are invariably repressed.

In this context, Marx castigates the classical political economists for assuming that certain characteristics of human behaviour, like greed, are permanent features of ‘human nature’ when, in reality, they are characters generated in individuals by particular societies. They also took it for granted the features of the capitalist society for granted, ever existing—like monopoly of the means of production by a few, wage employment for the majority, the distribution of products by the means of exchange, and the remuneration involving the economic categories of prices, profits and wages. Marx felt that it is necessary to see these features in their origin and development and demise.

Marx’s value theory of labour is a penetrating contribution to social science in that it concerns itself with the relations that people set between themselves, rather than the technical relationship between things or the art of economising. Marx is not interested primarily in constructing a price theory, a set of efficiency criteria or a series of welfare propositions; he never intended to be a narrow ‘economist’ or even a political economist. Marx was a critical social scientist, and his works reject the barriers separating academic disciplines.

The crucial questions for Marx concern the sources of stability and crises in capitalism, and how the will to change it can develop into a successful transformative (revolutionary) activity. These questions remain valid into the twenty first century, and now, the present recession and crises faced by all the advanced capitalist countries forcefully bring these questions into focus—whether the capitalism has the crisis in built or as accidental and what are the possibilities for transforming capitalism by a revolution into a higher stage, socialism.

(These 4 parts I uploaded in the blog so far comprise the first chapter “ History and Method”  in the book “Marx’s Capital”by Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho. Tomorrow, we will summarise this first chapter.)

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