DOCSLIB.ORG

Capital Accumulation and the Composition of Capital

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Capital Accumulation and the Composition of Capital Chapter 4 Capital Accumulation and the Composition of Capital This essay examines Marx’s concept of the composition of capital.1 Although this concept is essential for understanding the relationship between values and prices, technical change, accumulation, and other critically important structures and processes under capitalism – for example, the occ is the pivot of the transformation problem and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and it plays a critical role in Marx’s theory of rent – the composition of capital has tended to be explained cursorily and understood only superficially and – often – incorrectly in the literature. This essay shows that a clear understanding of the composition of capital can contribute to the development of Marx’s theory of value, exploitation and capital accumulation. The argument is developed in five sections. The first summarises Marx’s theory of capital, exploitation and accumulation, which underpins the concepts of composition of capital. The second briefly reviews some of the best-known interpretations of the composition of capital, in order to illustrate the diversity of the literature on this topic. The third follows Marx’s analysis of the composition of capital in the absence of technical change. Each concept used by Marx is defined and its introduction justified. The fourth discusses how the technical (tcc), organic (occ) and value composition of capital (vcc) are affected by technical progress. It will be shown that one of Marx’s aims in distinguishing the occ from the vcc is for a focused analysis of a particular case, where the accumulation of capital occurs with technologi- cal change. The fifth summarises the main findings. The contrast between the static and dynamic cases is essential, not only to the orderly introduction of the concepts, but also to the appreciation of their contradictions, limits and shifts. Moreover, this arrangement is useful in its direct connection with the levels of analysis of the composition of capital. 1 Based on The Value of Marx, London: Routledge, 2002, ch.6, ‘Capital Accumulation and the Composition of Capital’, Research in Political Economy 19, 2001, pp. 69–85, and on ‘A Note on Marx’s Analysis of the Composition of Capital’, Capital & Class 50, 1993, pp. 127–146. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004393�0�_006 <UN> Capital Accumulation and the Composition of Capital 85 1 Capital and Exploitation For Marx, capital is a social relation between two classes, capitalists and work- ers. This relation is established when the means of production are monopo- lised by the capitalists, that employ wage workers in production for profit. Once this class relation of production is posited, capital exists in and through things, namely, the means of production, commodities, money and financial assets employed in the process of valorisation: Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people ap- pear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society … Capital and wage-labour … only express two aspects of the self-same relationship. Money cannot be- come capital unless it is exchanged for labour-power … Conversely, work can only be wage-labour when its own material conditions confront it as autonomous powers, alien property, value existing for itself and main- taining itself, in short as capital … Wage-labour is then a necessary condi- tion for the formation of capital and remains the essential prerequisite of capitalist production.2 Capital 1, pp. 1005–1006 There is a relationship of mutual implication between capitalism (the mode of social production), wage labour (the form of social labour), and the commod- ity (the typical form of the output): [The] relation between generalised commodity production [gcp] … wage labor and capitalist production is one of reciprocal implication. First … when labor becomes wage labor … commodity production is gen- eralised. On the one hand wage labor implies gcp … On the other hand, gcp implies wage labor … Marx shows … that capitalist production is commodity production as the general form of production while, at the same time, emphasizing that it is only on the basis of the capitalist mode of production that all or even the majority of products of labor assume commodity form … Finally, the relation of wage labor and capital is also 2 Chattopadhyay (1994, p. 18) rightly argues that ‘Marx’s starting point in the treatment of capi- tal is conceiving capital as a social totality, capital representing a class opposed not so much to the individual laborers as to the wage laborers as a class’. <UN>.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations Of
    THE SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM Henri Lefebvre THE SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM Reproduction of the Relations of Production Translated by Frank Bryant St. Martin's Press, New York. Copyright © 1973 by Editions Anthropos Translation copyright © 1976 by Allison & Busby All rights reserved. For information, write: StMartin's Press. Inc.• 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. N.Y. 10010 Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-32932 First published in the United States of America in 1976 AFFILIATED PUBLISHERS: Macmillan Limited. London­ also at Bombay. Calcutta, Madras and Melbourne CONTENTS 1. The discovery 7 2. Reproduction of the relations of production 42 3. Is the working class revolutionary? 92 4. Ideologies of growth 102 5. Alternatives 120 Index 128 1 THE DISCOVERY I The reproduction of the relations of production, both as a con­ cept and as a reality, has not been "discovered": it has revealed itself. Neither the adventurer in knowledge nor the mere recorder of facts can sight this "continent" before actually exploring it. If it exists, it rose from the waves like a reef, together with the ocean itself and the spray. The metaphor "continent" stands for capitalism as a mode of production, a totality which has never been systematised or achieved, is never "over and done with", and is still being realised. It has taken a considerable period of work to say exactly what it is that is revealing itself. Before the question could be accurately formulated a whole constellation of concepts had to be elaborated through a series of approximations: "the everyday", "the urban", "the repetitive" and "the differential"; "strategies".
    [Show full text]
  • The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again
    The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again Chris O’Kane John Jay, CUNY [email protected] There has been a renewed engagement with the idea of real abstraction in recent years. Scholars associated with the New Reading of Marx, such as Moishe Postone, Chris Arthur, Michael Heinrich, Patrick Murray, Riccardo Bellofiore and others,1 have employed the idea in their important reconstructions of Marx’s critique of political economy. Alberto Toscano, Endnotes, Jason W. Moore and others have utilized and extended these theorizations to concieve of race, gender, and nature as real abstractions. Both the New Reading and these new theories of real abstraction have provided invaluable work; the former in systematizing Marx’s inconsistent and unfinished theory of value as a theory of the abstract social domination of capital accumulation and reproduction; the latter in supplementing such a theory. Yet their exclusive focus on real abstraction in relation to the critique of political economy means that the critical marxian theories of real abstraction -- developed by Alfred Sohn- Rethel, Theodor W. Adorno and Henri Lefebvre -- have been mostly bypassed by the latter and have largely served as the object of trenchant criticism for their insufficient grasp of Marx’s theory of value by the former. Consequently these new readings and new theories of real abstraction elide important aspects of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and Lefebvre’s critiques of real abstraction; which sought to develop Marx’s critique of political economy into objective-subjective critical theories of the reproduction of capitalist society.2 However, two recent works by 1 Moishe Postone’s interpretation of real abstraction will be discussed below.
    [Show full text]
  • Department of Economics
    DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS Working Paper Problematizing the Global Economy: Financialization and the “Feudalization” of Capital Rajesh Bhattacharya Ian Seda-Irizarry Paper No. 01, Spring 2014, revised 1 Problematizing the Global Economy: Financialization and the “Feudalization” of Capital Rajesh Bhattacharya1 and Ian J. Seda-Irizarry2 Abstract In this essay we note that contemporary debates on financialization revolve around a purported “separation” between finance and production, implying that financial profits expand at the cost of production of real value. Within the literature on financialization, we primarily focus on those contributions that connect financialization to global value-chains, production of knowledge- capital and the significance of rent (ground rent, in Marx’s language) in driving financial strategies of firms, processes that are part of what we call, following others, the feudalization of capital. Building on the contributions of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, we problematize the categories of capital and capitalism to uncover the capitalocentric premises of these contributions. In our understanding, any discussion of the global economy must recognize a) the simultaneous expansion of capitalist economic space and a non-capitalist “outside” of capital and b) the processes of exclusion (dispossession without proletarianization) in sustaining the capital/non-capital complex. In doing so, one must recognize the significance of both traditional forms of primitive accumulation as well as instances of “new enclosures” in securing rent for dominant financialized firms. Investment in knowledge-capital appears as an increasingly dominant instrument of extraction of rent from both capitalist and non-capitalist producers within a transformed economic geography. In our understanding, such a Marxian analysis renders the separation problem an untenable proposition.
    [Show full text]
  • The Dangerous Class: the Concept of the Lumpenproletariat
    Review The dangerous class: The concept of the lumpenproletariat Clyde W. Barrow, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2020, xii+196pp., ISBN: 978-0472132249 Contemporary Political Theory (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00487-9 An oft-cited description of the lumpenproletariat comes from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Parisian lumpenproletariat that Louis Bonaparte recruited during the French class struggles of 1848–1851 in order to defeat the proletariat and ultimately to seize state power consisted of the following: Alongside decayed roue´s with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, ma- quereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me (1963: 75). As self-interested hustlers whose services are for sale to the highest bidder, the lumpenproletariat – a term Marx and Engels created – is typically co-opted, as Bonaparte demonstrates, by reactionary movements. However, Marx’s taxonomy indicates the difficulty of locating a synthesized and explanatory definition for a term presented here as an ‘indefinite’ alterity with no clear framework of composition. The term has seemed, to some commentators, incoherent or reflective of scorn toward the disreputable or poor (Bussard, 1987; Draper, 1972; Hardt and Negri, 2004). Others – typically literary and cultural critics (Stallybrass, 1990; Mills, 2017) – have approached it as the discursive trace of a complex social scene that escapes full schematization by class relations.
    [Show full text]
  • Race, Rights and Reterritorialization
    RACE, RIGHTS AND RETERRITORIALIZATION Gil Gott * Critical race and neo-Marxist perspectives treat rights or “rights discourse” with a somewhat similar and complex ambivalence, but with distinctly different weightings and emphases in how they theorize rights functioning within systems of liberal democracy and racialized capitalism. On the one hand, both approaches identify a subject formation function1 of liberal rights discourse that may be informed by dominant ideology— racialized in the case of critical race theory (CRT) and disciplinary or abstract universalist2 in the case of neo-Marxism. On the other hand, this scholarship acknowledges a politically progressive or liberatory subject-formation and equalizing/ redistributive function by which rights discourse may potentially * Associate Professor of International Studies, DePaul University. I would like to thank Anthony Paul Farley for his encouragement in this project. My interest in Marxist legal theory was refreshed after reading Anthony’s inspiring article: Anthony P. Farley, Accumulation, 11 MICH J. RACE & L. 51 (2005). For my family, Sumi, Maia and Quin. 1 The notion of “subject formation” suggests the importance of power and social processes, including law, in effecting human subjects and subjectivity. See, e.g., ALAN HUNT AND GARY WICKHAM, FOUCAULT AND LAW: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF LAW AS GOVERNANCE 28-29 (1994) (explaining the claim that social processes “give rise to subjectivity,” which results from a combination of individual agency and “outside” power). 2 Abstract universalist conceptions of rights may be thought of as those that propound an imaginary equality under law as a universal condition of citizenship in liberal democratic states. Critics view such conceptions as abstracting from the material inequality and exclusions of civil society.
    [Show full text]
  • 6 Marx's Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism
    6 Marx’s Grundrisse and the ecological contradictions of capitalism John Bellamy Foster Introduction In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circum- stances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1979: 103). The material circumstances or conditions that he was referring to here were the product of both natural and social history. For Marx production was a realm of expanding needs and powers. But it was subject at all times to material limits imposed by nature. It was the tragedy of capital that its narrow logic propelled it in an unrelenting assault on both these natural limits and the new social needs that it brought into being. By constantly revolutionizing production capital transformed society, but only by continually alienating natural necessity (conditions of sustainability and reproduction) and human needs. Recent research has revealed that an ecological–materialist critique was embedded in all of Marx’s work from The Economic and Philosophical Manu- scripts of 1844 to his Ethnological Notebooks of the late 1870s to early 1880s (see Burkett 1999; Foster 2000; Dickens 2004). This can be seen in his material- ist conception of nature and history, his theory of alienation (which encom- passed the alienation of nature), his understanding of the labour and production process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature, and his co- evolutionary approach to society–nature relations. Nevertheless, because Marx’s overall critique of political economy remained unfinished, these and other aspects of his larger materialist conception of nature and history were incompletely developed – even in those works, such as Capital, volume 1, published in his lifetime.
    [Show full text]
  • Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: an Aggregate Study
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Economics Department Working Paper Series Economics 2009 Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: An Aggregate Study Amit Basole University of Massachusetts - Amherst Deepankar Basu University of Massachusetts - Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper Part of the Economics Commons Recommended Citation Basole, Amit and Basu, Deepankar, "Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: An Aggregate Study" (2009). Economics Department Working Paper Series. 4. https://doi.org/10.7275/1066720 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Economics at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Economics Department Working Paper Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS Working Paper RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND MODES OF SURPLUS EXTRACTION IN INDIA: AN AGGREGATE STUDY by Amit Basole and Deepankar Basu Working Paper 2009-12 UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND MODES OF SURPLUS EXTRACTION IN INDIA: AN AGGREGATE STUDY (September, 12, 2009) Amit Basole! and Deepankar Basu$ Abstract: This paper uses aggregate-level data, as well as case-stud- ies, to trace the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant re- lations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian work- ing people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes.
    [Show full text]
  • Keywords—Marxism 101 Session 1 Bourgeoisie
    Keywords—Marxism 101 Session 1 Bourgeoisie: the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. Capital: an asset (including money) owned by an individual as wealth used to realize a fnancial proft, and to create additional wealth. Capital exists within the process of economic exchange and grows out of the process of circulation. Capital is the basis of the economic system of capitalism. Capitalism: a mode of production in which capital in its various forms is the principal means of production. Capital can take the form of money or credit for the purchase of labour power and materials of production; of physical machinery; or of stocks of fnished goods or work in progress. Whatever the form, it is the private ownership of capital in the hands of the class of capitalists to the exclusion of the mass of the population. Class: social stratifcation defned by a person's relationship to the means of production. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png Class struggle: an antagonism that exists within a society, catalyzed by competing socioeconomic interests and central to revolutionary change. Communism: 1) a political movement of the working class in capitalist society, committed to the abolition of capitalism 2) a form of society which the working class, through its struggle, would bring into existence through abolition of classes and of the capitalist division of labor. Dictatorship of the Proletariat: the idea that the proletariat (the working class) has control over political power in the process of changing the ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership as part of a socialist transition to communism.
    [Show full text]
  • Mode of Production and Mode of Exploitation: the Mechanical and the Dialectical'
    DjalectiCalAflthropologY 1(1975) 7 — 2 3 © Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam — Printed in The Netherlands MODE OF PRODUCTION AND MODE OF EXPLOITATION: THE MECHANICAL AND THE DIALECTICAL' Eugene E. Ruyle In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material produc- tive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstruc- ture and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that deter- mines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.2 The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relation of rulers and ruled, as it grows immediately out of production itself and in turn reacts upon it as a determining agent. .. It is always the direct relation of the owners of the means of production to the direct producers which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social structure.3 In the first of these two passages, Marx in crypto-Marxist bourgeois social science, and appears to be arguing for the sort of techno- then by exploring the possibilities of supple- economic determinism which has become menting the "mode of production" approach increasingly fashionable in bourgeois social with a "mode of exploitation" analysis.
    [Show full text]
  • Production Modes, Marx's Method and the Feasible Revolution
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by European Scientific Journal (European Scientific Institute) European Scientific Journal November 2016 edition vol.12, No.31 ISSN: 1857 – 7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857- 7431 Production Modes, Marx’s Method and the Feasible Revolution Bruno Jossa retired full professor of political economy, University ”Federico II”, Naples doi: 10.19044/esj.2016.v12n31p20 URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.19044/esj.2016.v12n31p20 Abstract In Marx, the production mode is defined as a social organisation mode which is typified by one dominant production model which confers significance on the system at large. The prominence of production modes in his overall approach provides clues to the identification of the correct scientific method of Marxism and, probably, of Marx himself. The main aim of this paper is to define this method and to discuss a type of socialist revolution which appears feasible in this day and age. Keywords: Marx’s method, producer cooperatives, production modes, socialism Introduction It is not from scientific advancements – Gramsci argued – that we are to expect solutions to the issues on the traditional agenda of philosophical research. Fresh inputs for philosophical speculation have rather come from notions such as ‘social production relations’ and ‘modes of production’, which are therefore Marx's paramount contributions to science.1 In a well-known 1935 essay weighing the merits and 1 For quite a long time, Marxists used to look upon the value theory as Marx’s most important contribution to science. Only when the newly-published second and third books of Capital revealed that Marx had tried to reconcile his value theory with the doctrine of prices as determined by the interplay of demand and supply did they gain a correct appreciation of the importance of the materialist conception of history.
    [Show full text]
  • The Political and Social Thought of Lewis Corey
    70-13,988 BROWN, David Evan, 19 33- THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT OF LEWIS COREY. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1969 Political Science, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT OF LEWIS COREY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By David Evan Brown, B.A, ******* The Ohio State University 1969 Approved by Adviser Department of Political Science PREFACE On December 2 3 , 1952, Lewis Corey was served with a warrant for his arrest by officers of the U, S, Department of Justice. He was, so the warrant read, subject to deportation under the "Act of October 16 , 1 9 1 8 , as amended, for the reason that you have been prior to entry a member of the following class: an alien who is a member of an organi­ zation which was the direct predecessor of the Communist Party of the United States, to wit The Communist Party of America."^ A hearing, originally arranged for April 7» 1953» but delayed until July 27 because of Corey's poor health, was held; but a ruling was not handed down at that time. The Special Inquiry Officer in charge of the case adjourned the hearing pending the receipt of a full report of Corey's activities o during the previous ten years. [The testimony during the hearing had focused primarily on Corey's early writings and political activities.] The hearing was not reconvened, and the question of the defendant's guilt or innocence, as charged, was never formally settled.
    [Show full text]
  • Neoliberalism and the SSA Theory of Long-Run Capital Accumulation
    Neoliberalism and the SSA Theory of Long-Run Capital Accumulation by David M. Kotz Economics Department and Political Economy Research Institute Thompson Hall University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 U.S.A. Telephone 413-545-0739 Fax 413-545-2921 E-mail [email protected] January, 2003 Abstract: The social structure of accumulation theory faces a challenge arising from the persistence of neoliberalism, which does not appear to promote rapid capital accumulation. This paper suggests an alternative interpretation of institutional change, in which liberal and "regulationist" institutional structures alternate with one another, with the latter more favorable for capital accumulation. It examines the reasons why these two types of institutional structures arise, concluding that neoliberalism may persist for some time. JEL Codes: E11 (heterodox macro), N40 (history of government and regulation), P17 (capitalist systems–performance and prospects) Keywords: Neoliberalism; accumulation; regulation; institutions. This is the final manuscript version of a paper published in Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 35, Number 3, Summer 2003, pp. 263-270. 1. Introduction The social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory offers an explanation for alternating long periods of rapid and slow capital accumulation in a capitalist economy and the world capitalist system. The SSA theory argues that the creation of a coherent set of institutions favorable for capital accumulation – the SSA – sets off a long period of rapid growth, which ends when the SSA collapses, ushering in a long period of relative stagnation. According to Gordon et. al. (1982), the US has had three SSA's to date, in the 1840s–70s, the 1890s–1910s (or 1920s), and the 1940s–1970s.
    [Show full text]