Societies have always produced things. As long as class-society exists, there have always been two poles - exploited and exploiting class.
In previous class societies like feudalism or the slave-economy, these social relations were static: It was clear that the peasant produces some food for himself and some food surplus goes as tribute to the king. Goods were primarily produced for consumption, not for exchange.
Under capitalism, production for exchange becomes the dominant form. The social relations are less apparent.
Everything appears to be dominated by money and the buying and selling of things. Making money is the driving force behind almost everything. Money relations have become burned deep into everyday life and consciousness.
This outlook mystifies, for example, our view of economic activities, of which we are a part. Our daily lives are dominated by mysterious forces. Such things operate behind our backs and we do not fully understand them. Our world is dominated by money and commodities, which acquire seemingly extraordinary powers. No one has control over the market. And yet it dominates everyone.
Marxism does not view capitalism from a moralistic viewpoint (it came to being dripping with blood from all pores, but we look at it from a scientific standpoint).
Capitalism had greater achievements than the great pyramids & co (centralization of production → incredible efficiency).
Society is not just an amalgamation of individuals (greater than the sum of its parts)
→ it is a system that produces forces and tendencies that impose themselves onto society, which operate blindly and anarchically, upon individual economic agents, despite anyones wills or intentions
→ these features are an inherent part of the system. they cannot be reformed away → revolutionary conclusions.Classical Economists: Adam Smith & David Ricardo:
- they see capitalism as something eternal, unnatural
- base themselves on abstract thought experiments e.g.: two people trading directly with eachother on a desert island … and want to scale what’s rational to these traders to a whole society. “Robinson Crusoe Method”
- “vulgar economists”, because they tried to analyse the economy scientifically, but failed and defaulted to just defending capitalism
Building Blocks of capitalism
- commodity production (explore this note recursively from here on out to discover the rest of marxist economics, lol)
- private property
- nation state
commodity fetishism, reserve army of labour, malthusianism (overpopulation)
We encounter commodities in finished form. We don’t see the labour that has gone into it, so we don’t understand why a thing costs what it does. “The price is guided by the law of the value”, and you can’t understand values as things themselves, but you must look at the labour time that goes into production.
→ Because this is hidden, relations between things cover relations between people. Marx calls this commodity fetishism.
It mystifies the underlying relations.
Example: technology has the capacity to shorten labour time. But work has to be done by a worker in order to put it to use (and create new value), just like it took work to produce the tech.
They are not eliminating human labour, they are degrading it (?) and making it cheaper (e.g. sweatshop workers filtering images for AI training; programming jobs becoming way cheaper). That’s what capitalism does best, called progressive accumulation of capital.
Capitalists are not satisfied to feed themselves on their profits, they must turn those profits into new capital, increase the scale of production, increase the productivity of machines.
→ The worker becomes an appendage to the machine!
→ Capitalists can reduce the number of workers and pay them less.
Capital is increasingly dedicated to the machines / means of production (see TRPF), and a section of the working class is increasingly pushed to the side, condemned to idleness - temporarily or permanently (the reserve army of labour), while those in the factories are condemned to overwork.
→ Downwards pressure on the actively working people’s wages.
Today, ome of these extra workers are utilized through things like “gig work” / freelance work, lying around for the capitalists to use for whatever purpose, only useful so long, as they can produce surplus.
This is also where the idea of overpopulation looks at it backwards. It’s not that there are too many people / that the working class has grown too much, but capital has grown too much, and increasingly cannot absorb the working class! It reproduces and even depends on the division between the active and idle army!
use-value
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exchange-value
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Labour Power
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Value
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Progressive Accumulation
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References
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