[Marxism] A second quote from Marx and Engels on crises

[Charles Brown <cdb1003@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Waistline2@xxxxxxx 

>> CB: How can production be "over" without it being "under" bought ? 

Hmmm "by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented" 

So, "more thorough exploitation of the old markets" "diminishes the means 
whereby crises are prevented". So more exploitation diminshes the means whereby 

crises might be prevented. Ergo, less exploitation is the means whereby 
crises might be prevented. 

The working class says "Give us some more money and we will buy what's over 
in production. 

Sartesian says: 

Oh,no,no,no you see the problem is the falling rate of profit. We've got to 
raise the rate of profit back up. <<


Comment 

To attribute to an author a notion without providing the supporting material 
makes it virtually impossible to verify an accusation.

^^^
CB: As I consider your last post
and  this one, I think you will
find that you and your sidekick
Sartesian are
not ultimately on the same side in this
debate.

^^^^
 The "problem" of 
capitalism, the source of its crisis, this current crisis, is it's property 
form. 

^^^^
CB: Yeah, its property form is wage-labor/capital
and once you head down that line of thought
you are headed to exploitation, and I'm
the one who connects exploitation to
crises in this discussion, not Sartesian or Steve Palmer.

^^^^^



One of Marx contribution to "the science of society," is to show how private 
property has a history, a genesis and a projected ending as a mode - shape, 
of society production and reproduction. 

^^^^
CB: More specifically _bourgeois_ private property.

^^^^^

Capital is not a thing but a historically evolved social relations of 
production. This social relations, as history, is a material relations of 
re/production, where the commodity form is universalized in widening 
dimensions; and 
labor itself appears on the market as a commodity, brought and sold as labor 
ability. And paid a value below the value this deployed labor creates. 

^^^^
CB: Correct. I spell this out in my last post.

^^^^

Here is why Capital 1 begins with unraveling what a commodity is and how 
products are transformed into commodities. What confuses the early student of 
Marx approach is his emphasis on private property and the commodity form under 
the capitalist mode.

^^^^^
CB: Confused ? Capital was clear to me
the first time I read it.

^^^^^^
 Here is why he places emphasis on understanding the 
distinction between use value and exchange value as tension - a dynamic, 
embodied 
in a commodity. Production for exchange value is the hall mark of the 
bourgeois mode of production, no matter how dire the need of the masses is for 
consumption of that, which is produced. 

The "secret" to Capital is that labor becomes a commodity and its purchase. 
As a commodity labor is purchased for an amount close to or below its own cost 
of reproduction and then put to work to create value over and above what 
this labor power cost the capitalist. Things become even more confusing and 
dire 
with the existence of a mass of workers who cannot sell their labor power 
and yet need to consume to live. Raising wages for those workers cannot solve 
the problem inherent to capitalist production. 

^^^^^
CB: No it won't solve the inherent problem,
but workers who cannot sell their
labor power need welfare. They have no
wages to raise.

^^^^^^

Capital is a social relations of production. 

Production as the capitalist mode of production, buttress and reproduce the 
capitalist commodity form (capitalism own peculiar social relations, or 
capital reproduces itself as itself). This appears as production with a 
possibility 
to realize its exchange value, or the value not paid in wages - surplus 
value or profits. Capitalist production is driven by "possibility" rather than 
what society needs and crave at a given moment, because capital is private 
property (individualism without individuality); and each private capital, 
expressed as the morality and market ethics of individualism, and disregard 
for the 
individuality of the worker) seeks an expanded value without regard to the 
other capitals or the limit of the wages - consuming capacity of the PAID 
masses. 

^^^^^
CB: Yes, you look like you
are headed to the "poverty and
restricted consumption of the
masses" quote. Lets see where you
go.

^^^^^

My children generation for a moment in the 1980's had the slogan "get paid." 
They instinctually and intuitively understood that their ability to consume 
under capitalism, (unless you are a holder of capital and thus acquire some 
characteristic of capital's individualism) , meant "getting paid" or the sell 
of their labor power as the means to consume. Plus mother would say, "I'm 
tired of having to go to work for y'all." :-). 

The reason that production is "over" the consuming capacity of PAID labor is 
bound up with the commodity form of labor under the capitalist system; as 
this labor is sold and purchased as labor power; as it is put to work and paid 
in wages an amount below the value it creates. This value created over and 
above what the mass of workers are PAID is called surplus value and is 
appropriated by the capitalist. The total mass of workers EMPLOYED by capital 
on 
earth and the wages they are paid, is never equal to or above the total value 
they create -

^^^^^
CB: Exactly ! Workers are not paid enough
to buy all that they produce, as I've
been saying

^^^^

 (contained in the commodities) as the shape and curve of 
capitalist history. This is only one aspect of the crisis immanent to 
bourgeois 
production, because the mass of laborer on earth are not employed, yet needed 
commodities sit in warehouses for lack of purchasers.

^^^^
CB: _a_ mass of laborers are part of the relative
surplus population, and the reserved army
of unemployed. Their immiseration is
the Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.

^^^ 

The simple everyday reason for modern overproduction is material over 
capacity of the productive forces in relationship to the consuming capacity of 
the 
paid workers. 

^^^
CB: So , we agree. Where's
Steve Palmer and Sartesian

^^^^^

The machinery of society is never run full throttle, with both 
feet on the peddle. The sum total of our modern productive forces can fill up 
the world market in 6 months if production capacity was unfettered and run 
24/7, rather than its standing 75-80% utilization rate - currently 65%,. The 
bourgeoisie will not do this because he lives and breaths profits; his 
individualism informs him that the world masses and the world itself can die, 
before 
he voluntarily surrenders "his right" to blindly produce and withhold needed 
items from th starving masses. 

Why is this? Why cannot the "un-hired" workers acquire these needed 
commodities? 

To confuse momentary demands of a LAYER of the working class with the 
operations and shape of commodity production on the basis of the capitalist 
mode of 
producing, 

^^^^
CB: Whose confusing that ? Not I.

^^^^^


is to miss Marx and Engels MEANING. The mass of un-hired workers 
is important and serve as a drag on the wages of the hired workers because 
wages drift to the cost of reproduction of the working class as a class 
possessing labor ability. Some believe the workers are paid an amount in wages 
determined by the class struggle, without looking at what drives the "class 
struggle" and reproduction cost of the workers as they are enslaved by the 
commodity 
form. Class struggles are not the bottom line index - pivot, for wage rates. 

Anarchy of capitalist production is very important because this form as the 
shape of bourgeois production is bound up with bourgeois property RATHER THAN 
the division of labor upon which sits any commodity production. For 
commodity production and commodity exchange to take place different people must 

produce different things, which can be exchanged and are exchanged on the basis 
of 
the socially necessary labor time in them. No one would exchange a pack of 
cigarettes for an automobile because of the different magnitudes of labor in 
them. This law of value is the intuitive and historically built up awareness 
of the human species knowledge of labor and production, the almighty law of 
value.

^^^^
CB: This is all good.

^^^^

As important as this law of value is, it must be left to the side for a 
moment because bourgeois production shapes - contains and make operational, 
the 
law of value in a specific way. One of those ways, and perhaps its most 
important is the law called "anarchy of production." 

What drives this anarchy of production is capital itself; its morality as 
individualism; as a property relations and its institutional form operating as 
private property and the resultant competition for commodity purchasers. 
Anarchy of production consumes, houses and shapes consumption. However, one 
can 
see its operations in everyday American life. For instance, the purchase of 
an automobile or house, automatically means that other commodities cannot be 
purchased because of the fixed character of wages. Automotive producers would 
rather the consumer purchased an automobile versus a new house. 

What cause overproduction, which for Marxists defines itself as "production 
over the capacity of the market to consume as buying - consumption," is the 
property form, which directly results in anarchy of production. What determines 
the consumption capacity is wages. Wage rates or consuming capacity does not 
cause crisis of overproduction, although wage rates are part of the problem 
of capital in the workers eyes and life experience. Consumption capacity does 
not cause the crisis of overproduction because consumption does not 
determine "how much" of what is produced in the first place.

^^^^
CB: This is a nice point. However, _underconsumption_
is an "ultimate" cause. But I agree, and
have said in these debates that anarchy of production
is a part of the causal process too.

So, yes underconsumption inherent in exploitation
and anarchy of production. Unplanned production.

But think about it further, why is the
production anarchic in the sense that
all the capitalists producing at levels
individually without any sense of how much is
produced in the economy as a whole is not
matched 
to _demand_ of society as a whole ?

Gotta go now. Tune in next time
for the answer.

 

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