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THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM

In this lecture I am going to focus entirely on capitalism, and I want to say right away that in this area it seems to me Marxist theory has made important forward strides in recent years. These advances have of course not been evenly assimilated, and it may even be true that an appreciation of their scope and importance has hardly penetrated to what may be called the textbook level, where what is taught seems generally to be a more or less adequate summary of selected parts of Marx’s Capital. Not that this is necessarily bad: a good case could be made that the best introduction to Marxism will always be Capital itself. But capitalism has greatly changed and expanded in the last hundred years, and its analysis requires that the theory expounded by Marx should be supplemented and to some degree modified to take account of these developments as well as of the vastly increased amounts of knowledge that a century of accumulated research has provided. My purpose in this lecture and the one to follow is to try to sketch, in desperate brevity as Schumpeter used to say, the main outlines of an overall Marxist theory of capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

A commodity is something—a good or a service—produced for sale, not for use. All societies since the most primitive have been characterized by some commodity production, but only under capitalism has it become the dominant type of production; and only under capitalism has labor power, the capacity of the worker to perform useful labor, become a commodity, not exceptionally but in general. Workers, however, would not sell their capacity to perform useful labor to others if they possessed the means and materials of production necessary to produce goods and services for their own account, i.e., either for direct consumption or for sale on the market. It follows that the very existence of capitalism implies that a tremendous and indeed traumatic upheaval has already taken place in the structure of social relations. Producers, especially peasants, have been uprooted and separated from their traditional means of producing and acquiring a livelihood, with the result that they are obliged to sell their labor power in order to keep alive and reproduce their kind. And, for this to be possible, there must be another class of people in existence who possess means of production and enough money or capital to buy labor power and materials that can be combined in a process of producing commodities for sale on the market. Capitalism, therefore, comes into the world in the wake of two great and more or less contemporaneous historical processes—the formation of a propertyless working class on the one hand and of a property-owning capitalist class on the other (the former’s lack of property as well as the latter’s ownership of it presuppose and necessitate a coercive state that is, therefore, as essential to the existence of capitalism as the workers and capitalists themselves).

These twin processes of class formation are what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” He described and analyzed it in its classical Western European setting, but this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that its occurrence there was by no means a unique historical experience: wherever and whenever capitalism has made its appearance on the face of the globe, it has been preceded and accompanied by a process of primitive accumulation, varying from case to case in significant respects but always identical in content. In an important sense this is the key to world history from the sixteenth century on.

No understanding of capitalism is possible without an understanding of capital. This is as true today as it was a hundred years ago and as true of capitalism on a local or regional scale as it is of capitalism on a national or global scale. Here Marx’s exposition of the theory as presented in the first volume of Capital is as valid as ever and has never been surpassed. For present purposes we shall have to be content with the briefest possible summary.

We follow Marx in using a comparison between the circulation processes of simple commodity production (in which producers own their own means of production and satisfy their needs by exchanging products against those of other similarly situated producers) and capitalist production (in which the means of production are owned by capitalists). In simple commodity production, the producer goes to market with a commodity C, exchanges it for money M, and in turn buys other commodities C that are required for the satisfaction of producers’ families’ needs. Symbolically, this process can be represented by the formula C-M-C where the first C stands for a specific commodity being marketed by the producer, the M for the money the producer gets in exchange, and the second C for the bundle of useful commodities he buys with the money. Here we are obviously talking about a system of production for use, though the link is indirect: producers do not use their own products (or at least by no means all of them), but all the same their purpose in producing is to satisfy their needs, not to add to their wealth.

Matters are radically different when we come to capitalism, a society in which those who do the actual producing own no means of production, are unable to initiate and direct a process of production, and hence must sell their labor power to capitalists who do own means of production and therefore control the processes of production. Here the defining formula C—M—C must be replaced by its “opposite,” M—C—M. What this symbolizes is that the capitalist who initiates the process of production starts with money M. With this, the capitalist purchases commodities C, consisting of means of production and labor power which are transformed through a process of production into finished commodities ready for sale. When the sale has been completed, the capitalist is left once again with money: the circuit is closed. This does not mean, however, that the C—M—C circuit is absent from or irrelevant to capitalism. Under capitalism the commodity labor power that the capitalist buys is not produced by capitalists but rather is produced within the working-class household and is possessed by the workers as a use value. But lacking means of production, they are unable to turn this use value into what they need in order to live and reproduce. They are therefore obliged to treat it as a commodity C that they sell to capitalists for money M, and with this in turn they buy other commodities C that possess for them a greater use value. This then is a C—M—C circuit formally identical to that which characterizes simple commodity production. The difference is that in simple commodity production the workers use their own labor power and means of production to produce commodities that they sell for money, while under capitalism they sell their labor power directly to capitalists for money.

Wherever the C—M—C circuit obtains, the first and last terms can be, and indeed normally are expected to be, quantitatively equal, i.e., to have the same exchange value. The rationale of the operation lies not in the realm of exchange value but in that of use value: for simple commodity producers, the C at the end has greater use value than the C at the beginning, and it is this increase in use value that motivates their behavior. Nothing of the sort exists in the M—C—M case. The first and last terms are both money, qualitatively homogeneous and lacking use value of its own. It follows that if the two M’s are also quantitatively equal, the operation totally lacks a rationale: no capitalist is going to lay out money and organize a process of production in order to end up with the same amount of money possessed at the outset. We can therefore rewrite the formula as M—C—M′ where M′ = M + ∆ M. Here ∆ M represents more money, or as Marx called it, surplus value (Mehrwert).

Before going any further we should ask where this surplus value comes from. Marx’s answer—and here he was following a line of reasoning pioneered by the classical economists, especially David Ricardo—was that the value of labor power (which he identified with the value of the worker’s means of subsistence) measured in hours of work is less than what the worker produces also measured in hours of work. Or, to put the point in other terms, that a part of the working day replaces the value of what the worker consumes, while the remainder of the working day produces surplus value. Thus if the working day is ten hours and it takes workers five hours to produce a value equivalent to their daily consumption, they will produce five hours’ worth of surplus value for the capitalist. Marx called the first five hours “necessary labor” and the second five hours “surplus labor,” and the ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor (in this case 100 percent) he called the “rate of exploitation” or, translated into value terms, the “rate of surplus value.” Note that, other things remaining equal, if the length of the working day is increased, the worker produces more surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of surplus value is raised. Marx called this the production of “absolute surplus value.” Conversely, and once again assuming everything else remains equal, if the productivity of workers is increased (through introduction of machinery, reorganization of the work process, speed-up) and the time required to produce their subsistence thereby reduced, the proportion of the working day devoted to necessary labor will fall and that devoted to surplus labor will rise. In this case too, the rate of surplus value will go up. Marx called this the production of “relative surplus value.”