Blake's Baby
17th May 2010, 09:54
The state doesn't arise to regulate capitalism. The state proceeds - I mean precedes obviously - capitalism by a long way. The state is the expression of class society, which for Marx had existed since chiefs first ruled tribes (though before that, when tribes were egalitarian, there was no state).
Capitalism is a method of organisation of surplus. It is based on collective labour (workers come together to make things) and the surplus (what they make that doesn't just go to pay them) being stolen by the capitalist - private expropriation. The expropriation of surplus labour is the basis of our system.
If a worker makes $100 of product for a capitalist in a day, he will be paid perhaps $25 in wages. So each day the worker gives the capitalist $75 dollars of his time, which the capitalist uses to buy new plant and materials, pay taxes and bills, and buy yachts and cigars. This is expropriation of surplus labour.
Capitalism however produces the working class, who bound together by their collective labour and having no stake in the system, only have an interest in destroying capitalism and sharing the results of their effort (the working class makes everything so produces the wealth; the capitalist class is essentially parasitical).
Capitalism is a problem because, though it did lead to increases in the standard of living - by concentrating wealth in few hands, it allowed investment to be targetted at increasing production. A good thing for the capitalists because they made more profit, but also a good thing for everyone in the long run because of more material goods. However, at a certain point, capitalism runs into a problem; the working class can never buy all of the goods capitalism produces, because there can never be enough money in the system (the capitalists cannot pay the workers more than the workers make, so the workers cannot buy back their own products).
This leads to a situation where, in order to realise the potential of capitalism (production to satisfy need) it is necessary to do away with the things that inhibit further development. This is private property, in other words, the private expropriation of wealth from the producers. As Marx says, the means of production (technological potential of industrial production) come into conflict with the relations of production (how different groups of people - workers v owners - relate to the machines and their products).
For Marx the contradiction between the many workers together making wealth, and the few owners individually taking wealth, is the primary motor of human development. This is 'the class struggle' under capitalism.
That's the most concise summing up of Marxism I've ever done. Thanks.
ZeroNowhere
17th May 2010, 15:22
What is Marx's theory of the state? Include in your discussion why it arises, its role in a socialist society (the lower stage of communism) and its structure in a socialist society, and its fate in a communist society (the higher stage of communism).
What is Marx's theory of human nature? How does human nature evolve under capitalism, socialism and communism?One of the best treatments of the first question, which also touches on the second, is Colletti's introduction to Marx's Early Works, which may be found online here (http://libcom.org/library/intro-Marx-early-writings-Colletti). It's not particularly long, so I figure that linking it would be permissible.
I'm not on very firm ground when discussing Marx and the State so someone else correct me if I'm wrong. The State arises to regulate the worse parts of Capitalism during that phase of preparation for Socialism/Communism, it is by popular demand that is arises essentially. In Socialism the role of the State is to protect the Revolution and defend it from imperialist or otherwise Capitalistic powers seeking to destroy the Revolution. Once Communism is achieved the State is no longer needed and so "withers away"It is probably worth noting that Marx never differentiates between 'socialism' and 'communism' as forms of society, and indeed Engels took to using 'socialism' more often once the utopian socialists and such had largely faded away. What does exist, however, is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the use of political power by the proletariat during revolution, that is, the enforcement of the expropriation of the expropriators by law. It takes place within capitalism, and thus ceases once capitalism does. This is gone over here in the German Ideology:
And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration – such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other interests – and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another (of this the German theoreticians have not the faintest inkling, although they have received a sufficient introduction to the subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and Die heilige Familie). Further, it follows that every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them as in its turn a particular, peculiar “general” interest; or they themselves must remain within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory “general” interest in the form of the State.This ties his views in with the rest of his analysis of the state, which was explained by Colletti in the link. It is worth noting that the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat' originated in opposition to Blanquist ideas of an 'educational dictatorship', hence the use of the word 'dictatorship'; Marx otherwise referred to it as the political rule of the proletariat, and so on. Hal Draper had covered this before, I believe, as well as dismissing the myth that the phrase had originated with Blanqui, which is not the case.
What are Marx's criticisms of capitalist society? How does capitalism contribute to the rise of socialism and what are the defining characteristics of socialism?Well, this is in many ways a question of political economy more than political philosophy. I suppose that I shall sum up briefly, though Capital is necessarily better. You probably know quite a bit of this:
Basically, the majority of wealth under capitalism takes the form of commodities. A commodity is a use-value (something useful), but also has an exchange-value (it may be exchanged for a certain amount of another thing. Marx gives the example of 1 coat = 20 yards of linen. Its use-value may also be expressed in $100, say). Yet these exchange-values imply a qualitative equality; the two commodities must have something in common in order for 1 coat to, in fact, be equal to 20 yards of linen, or $100; so that the equation can be written coat = linen. Thus, the coat and linen have a qualitative equality, despite being very different in terms of physical properties, although the differences between coats and coins are even more extreme.
On the other hand, they also have a quantitative equality. If 1 coat = 20 linen = $100 = 13 tons of steel = 500 cars = 1 shoe, then all of these things are being equated quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Marx's concept of value is basically as a 'third thing', which lies behind exchange-value; thus, exchange-value is the 'form of appearance' of value, which is that which the above things would have in common. It would also seem that commodities gain value through the production process, and hence profits may be made, as otherwise the capitalist would simply receive in return for his investment exactly what he spent, this not being very useful to him when there are far more profitable ventures. Now, what he lays this money out on are on the one hand the means of production (machines, etc), raw materials, and so on, the 'constant capital', and on the other wages, 'variable capital'. Marx discusses this, and determines that value must be added through the socially necessary labour-time dispensed in the production process, so that more value is added than the money paid out as wages. I will not go into that, as it seems that you are more interested in knowing the outline of his argument, which is more appropriate to the question.
Anyhow, the excess of the value of a product over the capital expended is the source of profit, and the motivation behind production. While Marx's analysis of prices of production does explain that prices are not generally equal to value, as capitalism tends to shift supply and demand so that rates of profit are equal (though they generally will not end up as such, this is a tendency), total price equals total value, and thus the source of profit remains surplus-value, albeit now redistributed somewhat among the capitalist class. Surplus-value, if expended in consumption, ceases to be capital; thus the cycle of capital, with money being invested in wages and means of production, and then these functioning as productive capital to produce commodities, which are then sold in order to realize the surplus-value in money form.
The money initially spent, however, is now spent, possibly incremented with the surplus value, in order to continue and expand production, and re-hire the workers. Therefore, they are being hired by that which they have produced. The means of production, rather than simply being a 'tool' used in production of a useful thing, become a means to soak up surplus-value. The power of the capitalist appears in his ability to control the means of production, whereas the worker owns none, but only their own capacity to labour. However, as we have seen, the means of production that 'employ' them, and extract surplus-value from them, are merely their own product standing over them; hence, alienation. It is the rule of past labour, the labour spent upon the means of production in the past, over living labour, over the labour carried on now; in the usual production process, one would expect to see the opposite, with past labour serving as merely an aid to living labour, and often a necessary one, whereas here living labour is subjugated to past labour, and the worker becomes an appendage of the machine. And yet this cycle of capital subjugates the capitalist also, so that inasmuch as he a capitalist, "his soul is the soul of capital." More or less, value production, the progress of value as it practically valorizes itself continually, possesses the capitalist, so that he himself must generally serve blind and impersonal forces in order to remain on top of things, as if some bloke Lovecraft may have found interesting.
Marx goes into quite a bit more detail on that, but that's a fairly straightforward example. Another example could be seen in the current crisis, in which people were suffering, and yet nobody was entirely sure what the hell had just happened. The economy is, it would seem, out of human control, and yet it is humans who are being affected. Money and commodities did not exist on their own, they could not exist outside of certain social relations; if man* were to die out, no money would remain. Yet these things come to stand over people; as Colletti once put it, man's social relations come to take the form of objects, and stand over them. What's the gold doing today?
Now, for Marx, the existence of value resolves to a fundamental relation, that of labour which is not directly social. "Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production to not manifest themselves as "values of "things". Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labour, the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others [and corresponds to] a certain mode of social labour or social production." Where labour is not directly social, and individual labour takes the form of private labour ("the only products which confront one another as commodities are those produced by reciprocally [I]independent enterprises" (Capital)), then, "corresponding to the reciprocal disassociation or atomization of the producers amongst themselves there is a separation of social unity from the individuals themselves - ie. the paradox arises of a relationship that posits itself for itself independent of the entities that it ought to relate and mediate" (Marxism and Hegel, by Colletti).
In the case of communal labour, "it was the specific kind of labour performed by each individual in its natural form, the particular and not the universal aspect of labour, that constituted then the social tie." However, in the case of commodity production, concrete labour only becomes social through becoming abstract labour, it requires the mediation of value. Thus to use-values formed of concrete labour are added values formed of abstract labour, so that the social relation exists only with labour in the abstract, labour considered apart from the subjects that carry it out, 'undifferentiated human labour'. Hence the various working individuals appear as simply organs of labour. Value appears as a property of things, and yet, as has been seen, it is a social relation, yet it comes to separate itself from the involved humans, and instead stands over them, shedding its various manifestations of commodity, productive and money capital in an endless push towards self-valorization; for if the cycle of capital were to cease, value would no longer be value-in-motion, capital.
However, this own search for profits forms its own limit, due not to any external influence, but as part of its own internal logic, if you will (it is permissible to talk of capitalism's internal logic; as you will recall, it is more or less a 'rule of things over people', and thus was Marx able to speak of its 'laws of motion', which act as if the force of gravity when one slips off a steep cliff). I think that Anwar Sheikh has a pretty good and brief explanation of this here (http://homepage.newschool.edu/%7EAShaikh/Shaikh%20-%20History%20of%20Crisis%20Theories.pdf), in the section on Marx. There is also a section on Malthus, Luxemburg, and other proponents of underconsumption theory, which I believe someone was advocating above. Andrew Kliman's research (http://akliman.squarespace.com/persistent-fall) recently does indeed display a fall in the rate of profit, and he views it as underlying the crisis, something which I generally agree with. To be honest, I have never been thoroughly convinced of the ability of 'subjective theory of value' proponents to explain the falling rate of profit without drifting into inanity. For some more in-depth information on credit and the like, you can check out Michael Egoavil's talk (http://libcom.org/library/fictitious-capital-new-fangled-schemes-public-credit) on fictitious capital, although that is probably too economics-oriented for political philosophy. Nonetheless, it's worth adding, for interest, if nothing else.
Now, returning to the notion of communal labour, what then is communism? Well, Marx explains this in the first chapter of Capital. "Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson [Crusoe]'s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson's products were exclusively the result of his own personal labour and they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally. The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way in which this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities that the share of each individual in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution." He was here describing what he called the 'initial phase of communism', which was the form of exchange that he viewed as being necessary in a communist mode of production until certain conditions were met, "after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" It is worth keeping in mind that this 'initial phase of communist society' is still a communist society. Thus Marx points out that commodity production would no longer exist, rather production for use, and labour would be communal.
* Gender-neutral, incidentally. If aesthetics could never trump politics, all literature would be a load of shite.
** Still gender-neutral.
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