question abotu chapter 5 of wage labour and capita

[Nathan_Morrison]

Hello i've just not been able to get what he marx means by saying "capital is a social relation"

[gilhyle]

I'll give you my simple version: we tend to think of 'capital' as an amount of money available for investment, or as a set of assets available for production.. In other words we tend to see it as a term for a physical thing. But Marx's point is that Capital IS a way in which people relate to each other; it is a convention that society in a certain phase is built on.

What is that relation ? Critically it is the relation of dividing people between those who own the instruments of labour and those who 'own' the capacity to labour. Naturally, you would thing that the owner of the capacity to labour would also be the owner of the tools of labour also. How else would he/she learn how to do the job if not practicing using his/her tools ? But no, we have got to the situation where we can actually separate ownership of the tools from ownership of the skill.

Now supporters of alienation theory might see this as a bad thing - the human aliented from his externalised essence - his tools which are an extention of his nature. But that is a static and a-historical view. In fact, the separation of the labourer from his tools was a key pre-condition of the development of the tools of labour to the very advanced status they now have. You need to separate the tools from the labourer to transform personalised tools into advanced production systems and to design advanced divisions of labour.

We have achieved that by having a society where I can own the tools of labour without having to be a labourer - and live off those tools by entering the labour market to recruit labour to use those tools.

For that to happen, not only do I have to have the legal right to retain those tools, but there need to be a mass of people dispossessed of their own tools who make themselves available to me to work for me. So the dispossession of the labourer on a mass scale is a key element of the social relation that is capital. Mere occasional commodity production cannot be generalised into capitalism without this.

Skipping on a bit, I also need to be able to value those tools, buy and sell them so I can change the tools I own or even turn myself into a finance capitalist who holds no tools but holds instead the debts of others who do hold tools but who financed their purchase of those tools by borrowing off me.

So a picture of a whole set of social relations emerges: you relate to me as the legitimate owner of the tools you use, I relate to another person who holds my debts and whose mortgage rights over my tools I cannot repudiate etc. Thus the social relation that is capital is born.

The point of emphasising this ? Simply that the social relation of capital is not some timeless, fixed entity. It is historical. By convention we created capital, by change we can end it.