Marx says that the workers alone produce surplus value.—This he has failed to prove, since Marx does not even consider other producers beside workers, for instance farmers, whose production of surplus value enables other people to move into the cities. Marx says that the workers, who alone produce surplus value, are being robbed of it by the capitalists.—Actually, it is in the nature of surplus value that someone in society produces it not to benefit by it directly, but to make his contribution to a rising scale of existence. Marx says that control of the surplus value is the decisive factor. But surplus value created in a society cannot be kept by any group. What is decisive is not who controls it at any given phase but what use is made of it and how human beings ultimately fare under the system by which it is distributed throughout society. Marx says that those who collect surplus value from the worker have power to rule all of society. Surplus value, regardless of who produces it, must of course be collected in order to be passed on, if it is to be socially useful. Those who collect it, undoubtedly have some power in the social system, but, unless they are the government, they have only a certain kind of power, and only over a certain aspect of society. They, in turn, are subject to the rigors of a system of distribution, and above all, to political power-which has no trouble in imposing extremely heavy taxes on the collectors of surplus value. 2. Marx's View of the Dynamics of Capitalist Society Having described capitalist society as a system of robbery by means of the law of exchange of commodities, a system in which the capitalist wields despotic and dehumanizing power over the workers and all the rest, Marx goes on to predict that in the course of the development of capitalism, things will not get better, but worse. Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself. . . . It is the process itself that incessantly hurls back the labourer on to the market as a vendor of his labour-power, and that incessantly converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. ... Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.11 "Ibid., pp. 632, 633. The "law of accumulation" The growth of capitalist production is called accumulation. Marx defined a "law of capitalist accumulation" and uses this law to predict future social developments: .. The law of capitalist accumulation . . . in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour. . . .12 At the same time, the whip that drives the capitalistic system forward on its path of development, is competition. Competition compels each capitalist to increase productivity. In the course of competition, "concentration" and "centralization" of capital occurs: Two points characterise this kind of concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with, accumulation. First: The increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is . . . limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who face one another as independent commodity-producers competing with each other. . . Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitals one from another. This splitting-up . . . is counteracted by their attraction. This last . . . is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. . . . Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.13 "Concentration" and "centralization" Accumulation means faster and faster growth of the whole of capitalist production. Concentration means more and more power over all of social wealth in the hands of capitalist. With this goes "centralization," the possibility of controlling more and more from a single center. And wealth, power, control are gathered in fewer and fewer hands. All the time, the masses of labor are becoming more and more helpless. On the one hand, they are growing in numbers. On the other, capitalism is predicted to produce an “industrial reserve army" of unemployed or half-employed people on whom it can draw for cheap labor. On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced "Ibid., p. 680. "Ibid., pp. 685, 686. with change of composition, repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it.14 14 . . . The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. 15 . . . this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.16 "Increasing misery" Whatever makes for the growth of this "industrial reserve army" also makes for lower real wages, harder work, and all-round misery: . . The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve-army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve-army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve-army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.17 The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.18 Crises and revolution Capitalism thus is supposed to breed vast and concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, and increasing misery for ever larger masses of exploited people. In addition, its repeated crises are supposed to mount in intensity, the rate of its profits is predicted to drop lower and lower, and the entire system presumably is heading for collapse resulting from 14 Ibid., p. 689. 15 Ibid., p. 692. 16 Ibid., p. 693. 17 Ibid., p. 707. 18 Ibid., p. 709. its own inner contradictions. The combination of these inner difficulties with the ever-sharpening social antagonism is ultimately supposed to lead to the catastrophe in which capitalism is bound to be supplanted by socialism, the system in which the workers collectively are expected to be masters of their own product: ... in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. . . . The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.19 3. Lenin's Views on Capitalism Marx had influence as a thinker whose mind penetrated into hitherto hidden recesses of society which he succeeded in illuminating through analytical thought. On the other hand, Marx's predictions about the development of capitalistic society have turned out to be monumentally wrong. False predictions Marx, wishing to analyze the inner laws of capitalism, concluded that real wages must go further down. In reality, wages in capitalist society have steadily risen not only in terms of money but also in terms of purchasing power. Marx predicted worse and worse misery of the masses under capitalism. Instead, increasing welfare and well-being has been the lot of the people in capitalist societies. Marx foresaw that the differences between rich and poor would steadily widen, and more and more formerly well-to-do groups would be drawn into a proletarian existence, while wealth would be concen "Marx and Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" (December 1847January 1848), Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 45. trated in the hands of fewer and fewer immensely rich people. Actually, capitalism has produced a steadily growing class of people in the middle income groups, people with comfortable salaries, financial reserves, higher education, and more leisure time. Marx was sure that capitalism would entangle itself in the contradictions of its own system so that eventually it could not longer function according to its own laws, would bog down in a fundamental crisis of production, and become “unable to feed its own slaves." What has happened instead is a continuous rise of productivity in capitalist countries, a steadily improving distribution of wealth throughout all layers of the population, and a developing ability to cope with maladjustments and crises. Marx anticipated that the workers would become more and more embittered and revolutionary, and that the class struggle between them and the capitalists would grow in sharpness and tempo. Neither prediction has come true. The bulk of the working classes in capitalist countries have shown less and less inclination to support a revolution, and their relation with capitalist management has evolved along the lines of orderly bargaining within the confines of a mutually accepted system. The consequences of the failure of Marx's predictions Why was Marx so wrong in his predictions? This question cannot be discussed here. The reader must instead be referred to the literature about Marx and the discovery of basic errors in Marx's thought by many critics. In looking back over the very summary statement of Marx's main ideas on the preceding pages, the reader may be struck by the fact that Marx based his entire analysis and ensuing prediction on the theoretical model of a commodity economy and the laws of exchange. He saw the entire structure of power in a capitalist society as a "golden chain," a system in which the workers are "enslaved" to the capitalists by nothing more than the simple logic of trading in an open market on the basis of personal freedom and private property. What Marx did in Capital was to "discover" the inherent logic of a theoretical model of a society. This model was an intellectual construction which, he asserted, actually represented the real system of modern capitalist society. He assumed a system in which the bourgeois class ruled by means of private property, free contract, and the laws of exchange, and he proceeded to prove that this kind of a system was necessarily headed for increasing misery, collapse, and proletarian revolution. In reality, as we have seen, modern capitalism developed quite differently. By the turn of the century, this was plain to everyone. From the failure of Marx's predictions one could, then, draw the conclusion that the logic he unfolded was not that of the real modern society, but merely that of his theoretical model which did not actually |