Are Means of Production Capital?

[OhYesIdid]

yeah, it just popped into my head and won't go away. No one has ever asked me this, but what should I answer if someone asks: "what's the difference between means of production and capital?"
I know our society is characterized by the bourgeois' ownership of the means of production (that with which workers create commodities) and capital (that which is invested in the MOPs to make commodities, making labor a form of capital). What am I missing here?

[Comrade Trotsky]

Doesn't sound like you're missing much.

Capital is what is used to purchase something, only to sell it again to make more money. It is wealth that comes from the process of circulation in itself.

The Means of Production are used within the capitalist mode of production to produce capital, but I don't think that the MoP could be considered capital itself.

[Tommy4ever]

Well, according to day 1 of economics class circa 2007 there are 4 things you need to produce a good:

Land - things that come naturally from the earth

Labour - those damn workers!

Capital - man made goods used in the production of other goods

Enterprize - the good friendly capitalist

I'm not sure how closely aligned this definition from mainstream economics is with Marxist economics (sometimes they define words differently) but I'm sure it is close.

[Zanthorus]

The answer to this, as with most of these things, can be understood by dogmatically quoting Marx texts. Incidentally, this is one of my favourite passages (I know I say that a lot but there are a lot of passages in Marx to like) in Marx's work, you can almost feel the wit and irony dripping from the page as he flips the traditional definition of capital by economists right onto it's head:


"Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are employed in producing new raw materials, new instruments, and new means of subsistence. All these components of capital are created by labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour that serves as a means to new production is capital.

So say the economists.

What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other.

A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.

[...]

Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and raw materials, not only as material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All products of which it consists are commodities. Capital, consequently, is not only a sum of material products, it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes. Capital remains the same whether we put cotton in the place of wool, rice in the place of wheat, steamships in the place of railroads, provided only that the cotton, the rice, the steamships – the body of capital – have the same exchange value, the same price, as the wool, the wheat, the railroads, in which it was previously embodied. The bodily form of capital may transform itself continually, while capital does not suffer the least alteration.

[...]

How then does a sum of commodities, of exchange values, become capital?

Thereby, that as an independent social power – i.e., as the power of a part of society – it preserves itself and multiplies by exchange with direct, living labour-power.

The existence of a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital.

It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labour over immediate living labour that stamps the accumulated labour with the character of capital.

Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value." (Wage-Labour and Capital (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm))

[OhYesIdid]

So capital is accumulated labour that living labour works upon to generate whealth?

[Zanthorus]

So capital is accumulated labour that living labour works upon to generate whealth?

Maybe the passage wasn't as clear as I thought. Basically, traditional economics has two conflicting definitions of what constitutes capital. One the one hand there is the definition of capital as consisting of instruments of production, and on the other there is also an understanding of capital as financial wealth. Marx points out that these two definitions of capital are contradictory. If capital consists of financial wealth or exchange-values, then it cannot be idenitifiable simply with the means of production, since means of production exist in every society, whereas they only take on the social form of exchange-value under definite historical conditions. Second of all, the products of wealth can exist as exchange-values in certain isolated instances without the existence of capital.

Marx's way out of the conundrum is to define capital as a sum of exchange-values which is exchanged against living labour in pursuit of the accumulation of surplus-value. The brilliance of this definition is that it is the reverse of the traditional economics definition in terms of means of production. Rather than being a means which serves living labour in current production, capital constitutes the rule of past, objectified labour over living labour. It is also possible from this basis to consistantly analyse the phenomenon of both financial and industrial capital without falling into contradiction.

[ZeroNowhere]

Marx's rejection of the identity of capital with the means of production as such wasn't simply an aesthetic dispute about preferred definitions, but rather had to do with the fact that this identification's purpose was to give the historically specific form of capital as value which produces more value a transhistorical character, for example by pointing out that the means of production is always wealth which allows for the creation of more wealth (ie. if we create tools we can create more of other things). This identification allowed capital to be rationalized away as something inherent to human practice ('stuff which allows the production of more stuff', etc.) rather than identified with a specifically historical and transient stage.

A similar thing happens with attempts by more recent economists (the Austrians do this sort of thing fairly often) to deduce capitalism from transhistorical axioms or precepts about human behaviour, so that it essentially becomes simply a realization of the principle of human behaviour, while on the other hand its limited and historical character cannot be grasped (the theory of the falling rate of profit and such hence formed a limit to the progress of classical political economy, for how can the ultimate realization of the principles of human practice be undone by precisely the development of this human practice?) For example, if it is said that people always value things, and this is always in a commensurable manner (subjective value, etc. One can find something similar in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, funnily enough), which may be justified by cobbling together ethical theories or what have you, and that the means of production are wealth which produces more wealth, then capital itself (M-C-M', etc.) can appear as simply a transhistorical process being adequately represented through money (since money simply represents the abstract nature of wealth).

Something similar happens when philosophers such as Hegel attempt to deduce the current order of society as more or less the culmination of reason's development, hence of the development of rational practice, while Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit shows that in actual fact capital, far from being the realization of rational practice, is in fact progressively undermined by it. It purports to synthesize individual and society, subject and object, and so on, as indeed does Hegel (Marx points out in his 1844 manuscripts that Hegel does not succeed in this, but rather reproduces the divorce on a higher level), but ultimately they come into blatant conflict during crisis, displaying capital to be simply a transient and historical phenomenon which humanity necessarily supercedes.

[Zanthorus]

Marx's rejection of the identity of capital with the means of production as such wasn't simply an aesthetic dispute about preferred definitions,

I didn't argue that it was? My point was that the textbook definition of capital is contradictory in that both financial wealth and means of production are identified as capital when there is no necessary link between these two phenomenon.

[ZeroNowhere]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to contradict you, I was just supplementing your posts. You've already said what needed to be said, but I was just adding a bit of a footnote for reference.

[Thirsty Crow]

Marx's way out of the conundrum is to define capital as a sum of exchange-values which is exchanged against living labour in pursuit of the accumulation of surplus-value. The brilliance of this definition is that it is the reverse of the traditional economics definition in terms of means of production. Rather than being a means which serves living labour in current production, capital constitutes the rule of past, objectified labour over living labour. It is also possible from this basis to consistantly analyse the phenomenon of both financial and industrial capital without falling into contradiction.
I don't know if the problem lies in your wording or my lack of knowledge (likely to be the latter), but this is somewhat confusing, especially the bolded part.

Now, it's clear to me why the traditional definition is in fact unscientific in its ahistorical character. How is the sum of exchange values "exchanged against" living labour (wage labour) in pursuit of the accumulation of surplus value? This "exchanged against" is the most confusing part because it appears as if capital is defined as wages (exchange values provided in exchange for labour productive of more value than the first cycle of this whole thing).
Can you help me out here?

[ZeroNowhere]

I suppose that one could say that labour-power by itself is only one aspect of living labour, the other being the means of production themselves. The purpose of capital investment in both wages and means of production is ultimately living labour, which requires both of them (and in a certain ratio determined by the composition of capital). I'll let Zanthorus explain exactly what he means by that, though.

[S.Artesian]

yeah, it just popped into my head and won't go away. No one has ever asked me this, but what should I answer if someone asks: "what's the difference between means of production and capital?"
I know our society is characterized by the bourgeois' ownership of the means of production (that with which workers create commodities) and capital (that which is invested in the MOPs to make commodities, making labor a form of capital). What am I missing here?


Capital is a specific social relation of production; a specific relation between labor and the conditions of labor, where the means of production -- those conditions of labor-- are constituted as "value-seeking," production. The means of production become capital only to the extent that they can exchange with, be animated by, command labor which is organized as "value-producing," and that organization is wage-labor.

The means of production become capital when the owners of the means of production can command the labor of others to animate and expand those means of production as values.

[UnknownPerson]

Doesn't sound like you're missing much.

Capital is what is used to purchase something, only to sell it again to make more money. It is wealth that comes from the process of circulation in itself.

The Means of Production are used within the capitalist mode of production to produce capital, but I don't think that the MoP could be considered capital itself.

What do you mean that it is wealth that comes from the process of circulation in itself? Doesn't this wealth come from the surplus value, which is stolen from the workers?

[Zanthorus]

I don't know if the problem lies in your wording or my lack of knowledge (likely to be the latter), but this is somewhat confusing, especially the bolded part.

It's most likely that my mouth, or rather my hands, ran away with themselves. I probably could've worded that more carefully (I could probably word everything I write more carefully but then it would be even more horribly boring than it is in itself). What I was trying to say I think, if I was trying to say anything at all, which is unlikely, is that capital cannot self-expand without wage-labour and hence the exchange of itself against labour-power.

[Tim Cornelis]

Well, n neoclassical economics the two definitions of capital (means of production capital and finance capital) can be used interchangeably, another one example of the flaws neoclassical dogma.