Developing a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism
The dream of the imminent end of the world inspired the struggle of the early Christians against the Roman Empire and gave them confidence in victory. Scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration, now taking place before our eyes, of the prevailing social order . . . is sufficient guarantee that the moment a truly proletarian revolution breaks out, the conditions for its immediate initial (if certainly not idyllic) modus operandi will also be there. –Karl Marx
Human power is rts own eno " ' —
ed from production relations. We now consider it as a manifestation of that very production relationship between capital and labor. Marx's theory of value is his theory of surplus value. Moreover, his abstract definition of value is rooted deep in the concrete history of developing capitalism. Marx traces in detail the concept of the working day and the history of its limitation; in the beginning the Protest of Immokalee workers, 2006 capitalist could extract surplus value from the worker only through lengthening of the working day, with the state intervening on behalf of the budding capitalist. This is the period of the production of absolute surplus value. The establishment of a normal working day, says Marx, is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and laborer. It connects with the highest stage of development of capitalist production, machinofacture, which makes possible, within the same working day, the extraction of ever greater masses of surplus value. Though the worker now labored eight hours instead of 11, only two of these eight hours are necessary to produce the means of subsistence of the laborer, so that the capitalist gets fully six hours of unpaid labor. The extraction of relative surplus value Marx calls the specifically capitalist method of extracting surplus value because it is here that the inversion of dead to living labor "acquires technical and palpable reality." Only in capitalist society does accumulated labor dominate living labor. There wa!s dead labor, -or machines, or at least tools in pre-capitalist societies, but they did not dominate living labor. The savage was complete master of his bow and arrow. The serf was without a tractor and had to use a wooden hoe, but that crude instrument did not have a value that asserted its independence in the process of production as a "live monster that is fruitful and multiplies" so that the energy of the living laborer was a mere means for its expansion. The machine age has brought about the complete inversion of dead to living labor. Moreover, more and more machines need less and less labor and more and more perfect machines need less and less skill in the general mass of human lahor. That is why the capitalist, the agent of value, cares naught about the specificity of the labor of the individual laborer. SOCIALLY NECESSARY LABOR TIME Whether he is a shoemaker, shipyard worker or assembly laborer, the capitalist sees that he uses up only as much time as is socially necessary in the production of commodities., The incessantly changing quantitative determination of exchange values—eight hours were socially necessary for the production of a commodity; only six hours are necessary today, and only four will be necessary tomorrow—is the law which compels the capitalist to use one factor of production, accumulated labor, against another factor of production, living labor. By means of his factory clock, he bludgeons the worker to produce as many units as is socially necessary—no matter whether the worker be a miner or a tailor." There is no such thing as an abstract laborer, yet all produce abstract values. The socially-necessary labor time is the solvent which reduces the aggregates of concrete labor into a general mass of abstract labor. Marx calls this the real subordination of labor to capital. Capital has not invented surplus labor; in all class societies surplus labor was extracted from the worker for the master class. What distinguishes one economy from another is, however, the manner in which this extraction is accomplished. In capitalist society this is accomplished by accumulated labor, machines, for which living labor is the mere ferment necessary to its self-expansion. The capitalist's domination over the living laborer is only "the mastery of dead over living labor." Constant and variable capital are not merely the outer covering of an old relationship; they are the innermost essence of the capitalist mode of production revealing that society in what Marx called its "particular distinctiveness." The basic antagonism between use-value and value reside in the commodity labor power, whose utilization produces all surplus value. That commodity, in the process of production, and not in the market, creates a greater value than it itself is. "It is every bit as important," writes Marx, "for a correct understanding of surplus value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus labor-time" as nothing but materialized surplus-labor, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labor, as nothing but materialized labor" (p. 241). The law of surplus value seems to contradict all phenomena based on experience for everyone knows that the baker who uses more living laborers relative to means of production does not get more profit than the steel manufacturer who uses relatively less variable as compared to his constant capital. Nevertheless, the law not only is true, but competition, which seems to be a matter of will, is, in reality, only a reaction to the inherent law of capitalist production. But, warns Marx, let us not worry about competition and profit, and stick to essentials: "The rate of profit is no mystery, so soon as we knlow the laws of surplus value. If we reverse the process, we cannot comprehend either the one or the other" (p. 239, footnote). Surplus value is a given magnitude, the sum total of unpaid hours of labor. "The breaking-up of surplus value into fragments," writes Marx, "neither alters its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an elemeftt of accumulation." Neither does the rate of accumulation depend upon either his consumption, or a middle man's commission, or his will. Accumulation, depending as it does on the magnitude of surplus value, the degree of exploitation and the productivity of labor, is fundamentally a simple process of exploitation. But this simple process of production and reproduction is obscured by the process of circulation. This is why, from the very beginning, in his prefaces, Marx states that he is not interested in subjective motivations, but only in objective conditions: "Individuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and classes. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains" (p. 15). Marx has therefore analyzed the capitalist mode of production from the point of view of the laws of production "working with iron necessity towards inevitable results" (p. 13). The inevitable results are dealt with in the theoretical climax to Marx's work, the Accumulation of Capital. This Part VII and the historical illustrations of its genesis in Part VIII we can deal with under the heading of "The Law of Motion of Capitalist Society." It is the discerrime of this law, we must remember, which Marx set as the task of his work. From the beginning of Capital we learned of the interdependence of use-value and value. Value, wrote Marx, may be indifferent to the use-value by which it is borne, but it must be borne by some usevalue. This bodily form assumes added significance in the question of accumulation or expanded reproduction: "Surplus value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus product whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital" (p. 636). Capital, which is "value big with value," deepens the contradiction between use-value and value. This is so because not only are the material and value forms of capital in constant conflict, but so are the class relations which "interfere with" the production process. Capital, Marx held, is not a thing but a relation of production established by the instrumentality of things. Expanded production further aggravates this class relationship which is produced and reproduced by capitalist production. Capitalist private property "turns out to be the right on the part of the capitalist to appropriate unpaid labor of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own product" (p. 640). LAW OF MOTION OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY Out of the innermost needs of capitalist production, whose motive force is the production of surplus value, comes the drive to pay the laborer the minimum and to extract from him the maximum. The class struggle produced thereby leads, under certain circumstances, to a rise in wages. But that rise is never so high as to threaten the foundations of capitalist production. The law of value, dominating over this mode of production, leads, on the one hand, to the centralization of the means of production and, on the other hand, to the socialization of labor. The centralization of the means of production ends first in trustification and, ultimately, in statification. But big capital which kills little capital cannot kill the workers who produce it. The socialization of labor brings masses of workers into large factories where production disciplines them and prepares them for revolt at the very time that they are degraded to "an appendage to a machine." This dialectical development is accompanied by centralization reaching a point where the entire social capital is "united, either in the hands of one single capitalist, ojf in those of one single corporation" (p. 688). This ultimate development in no way saves capitalist production from its "absolute general law"—the reserve army of labor. "But in fact it is the capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces and reproduces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent a relatively redundant population of laborers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population" (p. 691). contin
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.