1. Nobody just writes an introduction to Marx's
Capital, which is okay because I almost never read books introducing Marx's
Capital. It's like asking somebody else to get yet somebody else's phone number for you. If it's your intent to call, then just
introduce yourself, and get the number.
In general, I never review books about other books. That's like watching drag queens lip-syncing to Tina Turner songs. "Derivative" barely qualifies as an euphemism. But.....but Marx's
Capital isn't just any book. To begin with, and the beginning carries itself right through to the end,
Capital is a lot more than its subtitle,
A Critique of Political Economy, implies. That's because political economy is not a
theory, a scholarly inquiry of and into capital accumulation. It is the
capitalists' theory of capital accumulation that fails to explain capital accumulation, and by design.
Political economy presents itself as an account of the historical genesis of capital, but Marx recognizes that this is history as rendered by an amnesiac.
Against divine right, political economy fastens first upon "nature" as the origin of capital, as in "it is the human nature to truck, barter, exchange." And from nature comes "destiny" as the ultimate arbiter, the co-signer on the perpetual lease on value, as in "it is nature's design that destines all to labor once and forever for capital." Teleology is an alibi.
Political economy in its near perfect failure to account
socially for the conditions of capital's origin and reproduction validates itself as the non-explanation of the economy it cannot, dare not, apprehend. As "economics," political economy is the perfect agent, broker,
politician for exchange value.
Marx's critique of capital is determined to explode both notions of nature and destiny as economic properties by exploring the conflicts, antagonisms, oppositions that in fact make up the historical and immediate basis for capital accumulation.
Accounting for that opposition is not the account of the development or the successive manifestations of some supra-historical law, immutable in its very mutability, of economics. Marx is not about to reproduce "nature" or "destiny" as the characteristics of
value in his critique of value.
2. The condition of origin of capital is its condition of reproduction. Engels to the contrary notwithstanding, Marx is not, with
Capital, providing an historical account of "value's progress," of the expression of the "law of value" throughout different epochs.
Marx, beginning his critique of capital with the analysis of the commodity as it is produced by industrial capitalism,
by the modern capitalism, initiates an exhaustive exploration of the facets of value. This unveiling of value is overture and coda to theme of the conflict embodied at the heart capitalist production. That conflict is between labor and the conditions of labor. That conflict is the conflict between the labor process and the value process. That conflict is expressed immanently in and by capitalism as the conflict between labor organized as value producing, and.............the production of value.
3. Marx, in his
Grundrisse......
hey wait a minute, this isn't supposed to be what I think of what Marx wrote in the Grundrisse. This is supposed to be about what Heinrich wrote as an
Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, translated by Alexander Locascio, Monthly Review Press, 2012. See what I mean, nobody can just write an
introduction to
Capital. Everybody has a pony to ride. Everybody has a horse in this race. Everybody wants to argue what Marx meant when he wrote what he wrote; what Marx didn't mean when he wrote, or didn't, what he wrote. Me too.
Everybody wants to introduce others to just how correctly, clearly, properly
I understand Marx's critique, and those others who
think they understand...? All those others? Pay no attention to those others behind the curtain, the great and powerful Oz has spoken. Me too.
Heinrich too. He starts by taking on the notion that presents the law of value as "supra-historical," with all commodity production throughout history governed by the same principle as capitalist commodity production.
For that meta-law to hold, we have to jettison the vital determination of value, of capital itself, that Marx unpacks, unfolds and spreads before us like Picasso unfolds guitars and wine bottles in his Cubist paintings. We have to disallow that the laws organizing an economy are nothing other than the projection of the specific social conditions of labor. We have to discount, reject that the "objects"of the capitalist economy are
immaterial to the real material of this economy; that the
object of production is the social reproduction of the
subjects, the owners and the producers, as classes
owning and classes
producing.
We have to discard the transformation of non-capitalist commodity exchange where surplus
product was expropriated, aggrandized, seized, or sold, leaving subsistence production intact, into capitalist commodity exchange where all of production must the production of values in order to provide for subsistence, all products have to submit to exchange in order for the producers to survive.
We have to deny that the law of value is nothing other than the
reflection of labor made into abstract labor, labor devoid of particularity, labor as time.
Capital's need for the expansion of value is determined by the fundamental condition of living labor within capitalism-- as value producing and
useless to the laborers: as value producing
because it is useless to the laborers save as a means of exchange. Consequently, the commodities produced by this labor are likewise
useless unless they can be realized in exchange as values; that is engage, command labor power again, always again, to expand the universe of commodity exchange, to
expand the means of producing commodities as values themselves.
So, because Heinrich, from jump street, pretty much demolishes the "super law of value" interpretation of
Capital, I really, really, really, wanted to like his
An Introduction... really, really, really, more than I did. But I didn't.
Besides my horse is always in the gate; my horse is always ready to run
.
4. "Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself," wrote Marx in the
Grundrisse. All economy is the economy of time, but not all economy of time is the economy of value. Not all economy is the reduction of labor power to the time lost to value.
When Heinrich gets down to the nits and grits of the extraction of surplus value things don't go all that well. First, he states on page 94:
Capital, self-valorizing value, has no intrinsic limits to valorization, and for that reason no rate of valorization, once reached, is sufficient.
Uhhh.........no, the point of Marx's critique of capital is to illuminate what the intrinsic limits, the inherent restrictions to valorization are. Marx calls this the "immanent critique." These limits and restrictions are
not just at the very origin to the valorization process itself. They
are the very origin of valorization. No rate of valorization is sufficient, no rate of expansion is sufficient as all valorization, all expansion
itself becomes a limit to further valorization.
In fact, if there is no intrinsic limit to valorization, then capital truly is a perfect organization of social labor. It is nature. It is destiny. While Heinrich simply may have chosen his words poorly, I think the notion that capital has no intrinsic limits to valorization informs Heinrich's presentation of Marx's work, and undermines that presentation. He has a horse in this race all right, but halfway into it, he wants to call a halt, get off, and walk his mount off the track.
Heinrich discusses the distinction between
absolute surplus value, and
relative surplus value, and he misses the point. In Marx's analysis
absolute surplus value is the result of lengthening the total laboring time of the laborers to aggrandize the more surplus labor time, after the equivalent value to necessary labor time has been satisfied.
Relative surplus value is the product of the
relative reduction of the value of the labor power, the value necessary for reproduction of the laborers
.
Marx's point is that one conditions the other, each determines the other, both exist only in the organization of the other. Absolute and relative surplus value are "co-conspirators" in the capitalist mode of production, in the accumulation, expansion, reproduction of capital.
Marx is emphatic in this matter. Says Karl, introducing himself:
The prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which
the labourer would have produced just an equivalent for the value of his
labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital,
this is production of absolute surplus-value. It forms the general groundwork
of the capitalist system, and the starting-point for the production of
relative surplus-value. The latter presupposes that the working-day is
already divided into two parts, necessary labour, and surplus-labour. In
order to prolong the surplus-labour, the necessary labour is shortened
by methods whereby the equivalent for the wages is produced in less time.
The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length
of the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises
out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society.
It therefore presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production,
a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and
develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal
subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development, the
formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour to capital.
It will suffice merely to refer to certain intermediate forms,
in which surplus-labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer,
nor the producer himself yet formally subjected to capital. In such forms
capital has not yet acquired the direct control of the labour-process.
By the side of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and
agriculture in the traditional old-fashioned way, there stands the usurer
or the merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s capital, feeding
on them like a parasite. The predominance, in a society, of this form of
exploitation excludes the capitalist mode of production; to which mode,
however, this form may serve as a transition, as it did towards the close
of the Middle Ages. Finally, as is shown by modern “domestic industry,”
some intermediate forms are here and there reproduced in the background
of Modern Industry, though their physiognomy is totally changed.
If, on the one hand, the mere formal subjection of labour to capital
suffices for the production of absolute surplus-value, if, e.g.,
it is sufficient that handicraftsman who previously worked on their own
account, or as apprentices of a master, should become wage labourers under
the direct control of a capitalist; so, on the other hand, we have seen,
how the methods of producing relative surplus-value, are, at the same time,
methods of producing absolute surplus-value. Nay, more, the excessive prolongation
of the working-day turned out to be the peculiar product of Modern Industry.
Generally speaking, the specifically capitalist mode of production ceases
to be a mere means of producing relative surplus-value, so soon as that
mode has conquered an entire branch of production; and still more so, so
soon as it has conquered all the important branches. It then becomes the
general, socially predominant form of production. As a special method of
producing relative surplus-value, it remains effective only, first, in
so far as it seizes upon industries that previously were only formally
subject to capital, that is, so far as it is propagandist; secondly, in
so far as the industries that have been taken over by it, continue to be
revolutionised by changes in the methods of production.
From one standpoint, any distinction between absolute and relative
surplus-value appears illusory. Relative surplus-value is absolute, since
it compels the absolute prolongation of the working-day beyond the labour-time
necessary to the existence of the labourer himself. Absolute surplus-value
is relative, since it makes necessary such a development of the productiveness
of labour, as will allow of the necessary labour-time being confined to
a portion of the working-day. But if we keep in mind the behaviour of surplus-value,
this appearance of identity vanishes. Once the capitalist mode of production
is established and become general, the difference between absolute and
relative surplus-value makes itself felt, whenever there is a question
of raising the rate of surplus-value. Assuming that labour-power is paid
for at its value, we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness
of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised
only by the actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand,
given the length of the working-day, that rise can be effected only by
a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working-day,
viz., necessary labour and surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages
are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change either
in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour. [Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 16].
Absolute and relative are not identical but each conditions, each
is a condition for, the other.
In his
Economic Manuscripts 1861-1863 [
MECW, Vol 34], Marx writes:
We have considered absolute and relative surplus value separately. But
in capitalist production they are bound together. And it is precisely
the development of modern industry which shows how they develop
simultaneously, how the working day is prolonged in the same degree as
necessary labour time is reduced by the development of the social
productive powers of labour. It is capital’s tendency to develop surplus
value simultaneously in both forms.
Heinrich's "mishandling" of the various subsets of surplus value takes an odd turn when he includes this in the subset of absolute surplus value:
A lengthening of the workday does not just occur when the number of daily working hours is increased, but also when those hours are used more efficiently...Furthermore, an increase in the level of intensity of labor (that is, a speed-up of the labor process) has the same effect as lengthening of labor-time. An intensified workday yields a larger value product than a normal workday, just as if the workday had been lengthened. [p.104]
Odd? Yeah, more than a bit for this to appear in an "introduction" to Marx's
Capital, since in the passage from
Capital, Volume 1 quoted above
Marx specifically includes changes in the intensity of the labor produce as affecting the magnitude of the
relative surplus value.
Of course, it-- the more efficient use of labor-time, speeding up the production process-- has "the same effect" as lengthening of the labor-time, just as absolute and surplus value are both surplus value. However, more efficient use of labor time, and increasing the pace of production within the same working period are not identical to lengthening the working day because 1) there is no lengthening of the working day. There is a reduction in the necessary time that the laborers expend in the reproduction of value equivalent to their wage 2) the speed-up in the labor process is the result of the introduction of machinery, the relative reduction in the labor power consumed in production, the amplification of the productivity of labor. The more efficient use of labor-time, and the speeding up, are aspects of increased
relative surplus value.
My memory is not what it used to be, if I am remembering what it used to be correctly, which is itself in question, but nowhere do I recall Marx ever describing
absolute surplus value as having any source other than the extension of the working day.
And because I too have a pony to ride, a horse in this race, let me continue. Heinrich writes:
The necessary labor-time must suffice to produce the value of the means of subsistence required by the labor-power for its own reproduction. If the value of the labor-power is to be fully compensated (and this must be assumed if "normal" capitalist relations are being considered), then a reduction in necessary labor-time is only possible when either the quality and quantity of the means of subsistence considered necessary is reduced (meaning the "normal" standard of living of the working class is lowered, which is difficult to implement and which cannot happen permanently) or--and this is the typical case dealt with here--if the value of these means of subsistence decreases.[p.105, emphasis added]
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the "then" that I highlighted in bold is in direct conflict with the "if" that is underlined. If the value of the labor power is fully compensated, then the compensation, the wage, represents the value of all elements necessary for the reproduction of the laborer. Reducing the quality and quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of the laborer in order to reduce the wage means the value of the labor power is not being fully compensated as it cannot be reproduced to its previous level, which was the level of full compensation.
Let's ride a bit further. The "typical case" is described by Heinrich as one where the value of the means of subsistence decreases, allowing for the wage to drop. This is taken to mean that the productivity of labor "increases in those branches that produces means of subsistence" or "when the productivity increases in those branches that deliver raw material or machines" for the production of the means of subsistence (which is simply another way of saying the same thing).
Marx himself insists on the specificity of the increased productivity to this "department" of production. And indeed, such a "typical case" in the decrease of the value of labor power because of the lower value of the means of subsistence due to increased productivity of labor occurs in the United States during 1873-1898 period of the "long deflation." Over the course of those years, nominal wages declined for workers. However, the decline in the value of the means of subsistence, in the prices of food, clothing, shelter were even greater, so that real wages register an increase.
Before anyone gets too upset, this process was hardly an even, steady one. This era might be called the "Gilded Age" but it wasn't a golden one for labor. Peace, love, harmony, and bread did not flow undiluted from the taps of capital's golden kegs. All the miseries of capitalism, miseries which accompany, even identify, its very robustness, continued to be reproduced. All the obstacles that capitalism creates through its own valorization to its own
further valorization were created and recreated.
But let's continue. The reduction in
relative value of labor power through the reduction in the value of the means of subsistence through increased productivity of labor is a vital process for capitalism. Marx writes that a certain level of productivity in agriculture is essential for capitalist development. Let's add, that continuous improvement in the productivity of agriculture is necessary both for the capitalist development of agriculture, and capitalism as a whole, and not simply because of its impact on the
inner relations, ratios, of necessary labor time to surplus labor time for the individual worker and/or the class of workers engaged in industrial production. Amplification of the productivity of labor in agriculture is essential in that it provides for the
expulsion of labor-power from the process of rural production and the "freeing" of labor for the production of value in industrial and urban settings. Political economy likes to call this "creation of the domestic market." The critique of political economy knows this expulsion as the real domination of capital.
What we have here is the fractal, at the level of agriculture, of the totality of capitalist production: Labor engaged as labor-power through and only through its expulsion from the production process. The division of labor that is so important to the aggrandizement of the productivity of labor by capital begins with the division, the
separation, of labor from its own means of subsistence. The division of labor that is so important to to the accumulation of capital is represented
socially as the separation of the "necessary labor"-- that labor necessary for the production of the means of subsistence as
commodities, from the "surplus labor" that can be commanded for the production
of all other objects as commodities.
Now since all capitalist production is the production of commodities, and all commodities can, must, establish relations to each other as exchangeable values, as
proportionate to each other, it is no longer the case that the enhancement of relative surplus value depends on reducing the value of the means of subsistence. The enhancement of relative surplus value requires that the value of the labor power, the equivalent to the value of the means of subsistence be reproduced in less time; hence Marx's inclusion of more efficient use of labor time and intensification of the labor process as components of relative surplus value.
At the same time,
capital's limits to the valorization of agricultural production; capital's limits to the profitability of agricultural production become the image, the genetic lens providing insight into the limitations to the valorization of all capital.
First and foremost, that limitation to the valorization of agricultural production is not simply consumption, the limited power of consumption of the population. It is exchange. That is to say that consumption can only occur when and if the consumers can exchange their labor power for the commodities of subsistence. Such capitalist consumption, consumption designed to reproduce value, to reproduce labor-power as value producing cannot occur when the
property forms inhibit the detachment of labor from subsistence, and it just so happens that the property forms that provide such obstacle are manifestations of
private property. As capital must expel labor power from the process of production in order to create surplus value, and must continuously expel such labor power to revalorize surplus value, it runs up against its own inability to create a "domestic market," to create the conditions of exchange for the valorization of capital. Instead, capital, to preserve its own existence as private property must adapt, and adapt to the
conditions of labor that mark, measure, index its own intrinsic limitations to valorization. We call that intrinsic inhibition
uneven and combined development, and whatever else anybody else wants to say about Trotsky, he provided this concrete application and extension of Marx's critique to the specific manifestation of "underdevelopment;" identifying it as the product of the general "overdevelopment" of global capitalism. Credit due. and recognized.
5. It should be evident to the careful observer where Heinrich is going to go once he makes his "vital analysis" that there is no limit to valorization intrinsic to capital, poor choice of words or not. We are going to find ourselves in the midst of the old arguments that say "The notion of imminent capitalist collapse is not immanent in Marx's critique of capital," "Marx does not provide a comprehensive theory of crisis," "Marx's critique does not include a prophecy for the inevitability of proletarian revolution,"and the most important "no intrinsic limit to the valorization of capital" ever--- "Marx does not establish, nor is there, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline."
We are also going to get, rather hilariously, a single and short chapter "introducing" the reader to all, or none, of the issues Marx engages in
Volume 2; a critique of Lenin's
Imperialism [proving once again that nobody writes just an "introduction" to Marx, everybody has pony to ride; and a theory of the state.
Let's start with the easy stuff, Lenin's
Imperialism. Heinrich thinks that Lenin's analysis stands on "shaky ground" "not only theoretically but empirically." Heinrich is not alone. Actually Lenin's analysis has no theoretical grounds, if Marx's critique of capital is supposed to provide the categories for the analysis of the historical expressions of the demands and needs of capitalist accumulation. But Heinrich slips away from these categories and actually slips into categories that Lenin and other "theoreticians" of imperialism [like Kautsky] would like to substitute for Marx's critique. For example, Heinrich says:
At the international level, a multiplicity of states of widely varying economic, political, and military strength and with completely different interest face one another. Between them, there exist disparate constellations of dependency and alliance, as well as antagonisms.
At this point, let me interject, "So what?" Or, "who gives a rat's ass?" Or, and even better, "this relates to the categories Marx develops, and wields like scalpels, to expose capitalism exactly how?"
...In this competition between states, every state attempts to win and maintain opportunities for itself. An independent terrain of conflicts for power and influence between states is constituted.
Yeah? And?
This terrain is not limited to the direct implementation of the economic interests of individual fractions of capital (although this also occurs). Upon this terrain, the primary concern is the organization of an international "order" in the trade, currency, and military-political sectors. [p. 216].
Short version? Of the first two sections? The capitalists act like.... "hostile brothers."
Quelle surprise. New York short version?
No shit, Sherlock. You should have been a detective.
Of the third section? No, Sherlock, you're wrong. the primary concern is not of the international order in trade, currency and military-political sectors. The primary concern is of the accumulation of capital, the expansion of value. More precisely, the primary concern is suppressing the proletariat. The primary concern is conducting, now more openly, now more in disguise, class war against the working class on both the national and international stages. The primary concern is driving up profitability by driving down the
cost of labor power even, if necessary, below its value. The primary concern is "clawing back" value from "v," so that, indeed, when you decide to beggar your neighbor, you really have something to beggar with. Evidence, references, data? The history of the actions of the US bourgeoisie vis-a-vis "its" workers and "its" partners since 1974.
Heinrich continues:
Finally, for the developed capitalist countries, the majority of which are poor in natural resources, a decisive point is the secure provision of raw materials and fuels. However, the point is not the conquest of corresponding territories so much as the "organization" of trade and its conditions: calculable extraction and secure transportation, the mode of price formation, and the currency in which the trade is conducted.
Really? Developed countries are "poor" in natural resources? Exactly how does "poor" become an attribute of quantities of natural resources, of
use values? "Poor," "wealthy" are measures of social reproduction, and for Marx, they are
determined by the aggrandizement of labor power.
The United States, Great Britain, Norway, Denmark are not "poor" in raw materials; they are not poor in fuel supplies. There is, indeed, a problem with the profitability, with the valorization of fuel
productiion, but "abundance" or "shortage" are social measures, not natural ones. Iraq, for example, was not invaded by the US in order to secure transportation, ensure a steady supply of the commodity, to prevent Iraq "adopting the euro" in its oil trade, or protect the mode of price formation. As a matter of fact, and history, Iraq was invaded as a result of overproduction, the overproduction of oil as a commodity, the overproduction of the means of oil production as commodities, and the resulting decline in profitability impacting capitalist oil production. Iraq was invaded to drive its production
off the market, to preserve, extend, and enhance instability, volatility, disproportion in the oil markets, in order to drive the price of oil high enough that it could serve as a conduit to bring the depressed profitability of oil production, which is perhaps the most technically intensive sector of capitalist production, back to, and then
above, the average profitability of capital, and
in proportion to the size of the capital dedicated to this sector.
Amazing, isn't it, how the easy stuff gets us to the uneasy stuff?
It's one thing to reduce
Volume 2, the most tentative,
unsorted, of Marx's manuscripts, including those of
Theories of Surplus Value, the
Grundrisse, and the other drafts that form the
Economic Manuscripts [which I consider to be Marx's greatest works], to nine pages, and nine pages that do not engage with the problems Marx encounters, engages, in the volume. It's one thing to miss completely the critical points of the volume 1) that the capitalist, after the first "turnover" of capital,
is in effect only advancing to the workers as a wage due for the next cycle of production, their earnings from the previous cycle of production 2) that
no matter whether a commodity is the product of slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of communes (Dutch East Indies), or of stated enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom, or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc., commodities and money of such modes of production, when coming in contact with commodities and money representing industrial capital, enter as much into its rotation as into that of surplus values embodied in commodity-capital. The character of the process of production form which they emanate is immaterial. They perform the function of commodities on the market, and enter into the cycles of industrial capital as well as into those of the surplus-value carried in it. It is the universal character of the commodities, the world character of the market, which distinguishes the process of the rotation of the industrial capital. [Volume 2, Chapter IV, "The Three Diagrams of the Process of Circulation"]
that 3)
It is true that capitalist production has for its general form the production of commodities. But it is so and becomes more so in its development, only because labor itself here appears as a commodity, because the laborer sells labor, that is to say the function of his labor-power, and our assumption is that he sells it at a value determined by its costs of reproduction. To the extent that labor becomes wage-labor, the producer becomes an industrial capitalist. For this reason capitalist production (and the production of commodities does not reach its full scope, until the agricultural laborer becomes the wage-laborer. [Ibid.]
that 4)
In so far as the capitalist personifies but his industrial capital, his own demand is only for means of production and labor-power. His demand for Pm expressed in value, is smaller than his advanced capital; he buys means of production of a value smaller than his capital, and therefore much smaller than the value of the commodity capital which he takes back to the market.
As regards his demand for labor-power, its value is determined by the proportion of variable capital to his total capital, as expressed by V/C. Its proportion in capitalist production decreases continually more than his demand for means of production. His purchases of Pm steadily increase over his purchase of L. [Pm is, obviously, means of production; L is labor-power].
that 5)
All other circumstances being equal, the degree of fixity increases with the durability of the means of production. This durability determines the magnitude of the difference between the capital-value fixed in the instruments of labor and between that part of its value which is yielded to the product in successive labor-processes. The slower this value is yielded--and some of it is given up in every repetition of the labor-process--the larger will be the fixed capital, and the greater will be the difference between the capital employed and the capital consumed in the process of production...[Chapter 8, "Fixed Capital and Circulating Capital"]
and that all of
that is leading to this:
So much at least is evident that this cycle comprising a number of years, through which capital is compelled to pass by its fixed part, furnishes a material basis for the periodic commercial crises in which business goes through successive period of lassitude, average activity, overspeeding, and crisis. It is true that the periods in which capital is invested are different in time and place. But a crisis is always the starting point of a large amount of new investments. Therefore it also constitutes, from the point of view of society, more or less of a new material basis for the next cycle of turnover. [Chapter 9, "The Total Turn-Over of Advanced Capital. Cycles of Turn-Over"]
... it's one thing to ignore all of that, that Marx has here set out the basis for an analysis of uneven and combined development, for the analysis of overproduction, for lengthening turnover of capital as capital, that is to say
value accumulated as the means of production, develops and expands, for the declining ratio of profitability to the total capital deployed in production, for the inevitable, and necessary, conflict between means and relations of production, and for, since all those are but aspects of the relation between labor and the conditions of labor, the eruption of
class struggle; but it's another thing completely to use that ignorance to argue that Marx never provides a "comprehensive" theory of crisis; Marx never predicts the inevitability, the necessity of proletarian revolution; that Marx never
proves the tendency of the rate of profit to decline is a "law," when in fact the proof of that law is not in the abstraction, the distillation, the explication of the internal metabolism of capitalism, but in the living relations of class, in the actual class struggle that is precipitated by exactly that decline; when indeed the intrinsic limits to the valorization of capital are in the overproduction of the means of production as capital; where the limit to profitability is the overproduction of the means of production as capital, in quantity and degree, to a point where labor-power cannot be exploited intensely enough. "Enough to what?" you ask?
Enough to offset the continuing expulsion of labor power from production.
Now that's my horse, my lean horse for a long race, coming in at the finish. Like I said, nobody just writes an introduction to Marx's
Capital. And nobody just writes a review of any such introduction.
S. Artesian
August 25, 2012
