[Marxism] (no subject)

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ahmet:

> As we (Sungur and I) reflect on your general comment on the "non-economic
> or direct
appropriation or transfer of existing income/capital" issue, I should point
out that we already explicitly stated that tax collection involves the
expenditure of labor and classified the latter type of labor within the
activities of social reproduction.

Just to elaborate on my prior (clumsy) note, here's some additional food for
thought.  Forgive my repeating some obvious things.

Direct appropriation is *essential* to understanding capitalist production,
its dynamics, and -- therefore -- historically-concrete capitalist societies
(whose modes of production mix relations of capitalist production proper
with other relations).

Start by thinking of appropriation by analogy with circulation.  Circulation
is the shifting of value from form to form.  In the narrow sense, the
elements of circulation are simple acts of exchange.  (In the broader sense,
the circulation of capital also includes the process of production, M-C {LP,
MP} ... P ... C'-M'.  But think of M-C or C-M in isolation).  Each act of
exchange entails the transfer of ownership of commodities: a quid pro quo.
Likewise, direct appropriation entails the transfer of ownership of
commodities (or, more generally, wealth).  But, unlike exchange where each
act implies a counter-party (i.e., for every M-C or sale there's a C-M
purchase), direct appropriation is a unilateral transfer of wealth.

What allows you to appropriate wealth unilaterally, violating the laws of
private ownership?  Superior force.  And to deploy superior force you need
to deploy superior assets: a fist, a gun, an army, a strategy, brains and
guts.  These are all endowments of wealth ("physical" or "human," i.e.,
embodied in human beings, gifts of nature and/or humanly reproduced).  In a
market society, these all tend to be commodities.

Now, just like circulation needs to be assisted by the deployment of
unproductive labor, direct appropriation also needs to be assisted with
labor.  Although unproductive, the labor spent assisting circulation is
socially necessary, since the need for circulation (the change of forms)
arises from the structure of a commodity producing society.  Labor spent in
the direct appropriation of wealth is also socially necessary to the extent
it stems from the social structure (private ownership).

In modern societies, a lot of wealth is spent (consumed) in the business of
appropriation, both defensively and offensively.  It's a lot of
private-ownership, class-society waste: shields and swords, locks and guns,
armies, etc.  There is a rough but clear law between (an inverse relation
linking) the proportion of wealth wasted in appropriation activities
(defensive and offensive) and the stability (credibility, legitimacy, etc.)
of the legal and political superstructure of capitalism.  (By the way, I
love Marx's metaphor of base-superstructure.  It's really illuminating.  If
we get so confused with it, it is because we don't care to study the whole
of Marx's work and to reflect on what we study.)  The weaker the rule of
capitalist law, the more people will waste social labor in vigilante crime
"prevention," criminal activities, subversion, anti-subversion, etc.

In all societies with private ownership there is direct appropriation of
wealth.  In classless societies, to the extent the pool of existing wealth
is co-owned by their members, we're talking about the distribution of
collectively owned wealth.  When there is private ownership, we can think of
different types of forms of direct transfer: voluntary (e.g., gifts) versus
mandatory (confiscation of property).  Mandatory appropriation may be
legitimate (morally acceptable in a given society and time) or not (e.g.,
charity donations versus most so-called "soft campaign money").  Mandatory
transfers may be legal or not (taxes or welfare transfers versus theft).
Etc.

Prima facie, distribution is about the allocation of income to different
classes and groups of people.  But, under the rules of the game of
capitalist production, income ownership results from wealth ownership.  You
own wealth or capital, you receive profits, interest, rents, etc.  You own
only your own personal, subjective conditions of production, then -- if you
have a job -- you earn wages.  Etc.  By analogy with distribution, direct
appropriation determines how wealth is distributed among different groups of
people.  But here the distributive mechanism is not the rules of the game of
capitalist production, but the rules of the fiscal, legal, political, or
criminal game.

But deep down, appropriation plays a key role in the very structure of
capitalist production.  Let me try and briefly trace its analytical place in
Marx's Capital.  It enters in the over-exploitation of labor (by
over-extending the labor day or increasing intensity) that Marx purposefully
treats as exceptional under strict capitalist production, and thus
deliberately excludes as he poses the problem of the transition of property
laws (from exchange of equivalents to capitalist exploitation) in vol. I,
part 2, chapters 4-6.  Abuses in the extension of the labor day and the
intensity of work, over and above the social norms, are forms of outright
theft (part 3, chapter 10).

And appropriation enters *essentially* in clarifying the basic law of motion
of capitalist production (i.e., surplus value production *and
appropriation*, part 7).  Since the production of surplus value presupposes
its immediate and direct appropriation by the owner of productive capital,
even though surplus value as such is the product of the expenditure of
living labor.  The ownership of capital allows for (entitles) the
capitalists to appropriate the surplus value (the productive capitalist
first, who then share it with others).  In the context of relative surplus
production, the ownership of capital allows for the capitalists to
appropriate all the benefits that result from the increasing productive
force of labor: the gains from cooperation and labor division (what
conventional economists, usually in the context of trade theory, call "gains
from trade" are in fact "gains from cooperation and specialization") and
from the technical applications of science and knowledge in general.  The
other side of the coin is the alienation of the worker from the fruit of
their labor.  And the reproduction of capital is also the reproduction of
these conditions.

And what's the formal source of the right of appropriation of the surplus
value and all the juices of living labor by the owners of capital?  Marx
says that it is derived from "the economic laws of commodity production."
You own a commodity (say, you buy it in the market), then in the context of
such social structure, you are entitled to its use value.  The capitalist
buys labor power in the labor market.  The capitalist is entitled to its use
or consumption value.  Therefore, the surplus value belongs to him.  But it
is the process of *accumulation* (indeed, another term for direct
appropriation) that this dirty secret reveals itself.  And I could quote
here the five or ten final paragraphs of Capital, vol. I, part 6, chapter
24, section 1 (transition of the laws of property, etc.).

In the process of accumulation, direct appropriation enters as a
pre-historical form of accumulation: primitive accumulation.  But throughout
modern capitalist history, it co-exists with capitalist accumulation proper.
 (Let me skip volume II altogether.)  In profit formation, it enters in the
sharing of the surplus value among the different sorts of capitalists
playing socially necessary roles (as the different phases of M-C-M' spins
off types of capital specialized in commerce and interest-bearing.

It may or may not enter essentially in the decomposition of profit into
interest and enterprise profit.  Why may or may not?  Well, it depends on
your views here.  Interest is clearly the "shadow price" of capital as
property: a rent.  Rents are the most chemically pure forms of appropriation
-- they are based on sheer wealth ownership (and, ultimately, the deeper
foundations of such social structure).  Capitalists as such capitalists
(owners of capital) are rentiers.  You are entitled to a appropriating a
piece of the social surplus value *only* because you own capital.
Enterprise profit, on the other hand, may or may not be viewed (at least
partially) as the "shadow price" of the production functions of the
productive capitalist.  To the extent the productive capitalists (or their
deputies in charge of productive management) conduct the top coordination
moments (in the technical sense) of production (that is, if we abstract from
the role of policing labor and protecting property in the workplace), the
productive capitalists operate as elements of the collective worker.  Theirs
is not only a socially necessary function as all cooperative production (and
modern capitalist production is cooperative through and through) requires
technical coordination, but it is also *productive*.  (Marx says that
there's no law regulating this division of profit into interest and
enterprise profit, but I disagree.)

Finally, the derivation of rents (or super-profits) based on monopoly power
of some kind is transparently the description of some process of direct
appropriation.  (By the way, the "hundreds of millions of dollars" that,
according to Surowiecki, constitute the "value" of the extra chunks of the
electromagnetic spectrum that the networks are trying to steal from the
public is the capitalization of rents, i.e., chunks of surplus value that
will be appropriated by whoever winds up owning these damn pieces of the
ether in the future.)  And I'll stop here.

Good luck,

Julio



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