Fundamental Questions of Marxist Economics, 1959

Fundamental Questions of Marxist Economics, 1959
International Communist Party
On Marxist Economics
Reports to the Milan Meeting 17-18 October 1959
Classic Solutions of Marxist Historical Doctrine for the Vicissitudes of Miserable Bourgeois Actuality
Fundamental Questions of Marxist Economics
(
Il Programma Comunista
No. 1 and 2, 1960)
The question of accumulation
–
Theory of crisis
–
Anarchy of production
–
The historical discussion
of accumulation –
Report on Luxemburg
–
The historical environment
of capitalist accumulation –
Report on Bukharin
–
Bukharin’s ‘points’
The question of accumulation
The historical dispute over the accumulation or expanded reproduction
of capital revolves around the ‘schemas’ that Marx quantitatively
expounds on in Section Three of this second book, and which we will
expose in the numerical forms and symbolic expressions to which they
lead in the near future.
But a few observations must be made on the classic dispute, and we
apologise if they seem not only prejudiced but also paradoxical to some.
Of Marx’s various commentators, some argue that the series of schemas is
conclusive, others that it is contradictory and cannot be developed
indefinitely. But for what purpose and in what field of general
treatment are the schemas instituted? Perhaps to prove that on their
tracks capitalism can run unimpeded indefinitely?
Absolutely not.
Insofar as the schemas of accumulation are intended to present the
process in the pure capitalist economy, Marx wanted to construct them in
such a way that they would be conclusive and not erroneous. But for the
purposes of his entire construction – which, as we always show, is not
descriptive of capitalism as an objective historical form, but is a
platform for the programme of its revolutionary destruction – Marx’s
objective is precisely the opposite: to show that capitalism, whether
pure or mixed with pre-capitalist forms: CANNOT LAST; it must succumb to
the inexorable impossibility of survival. Any group of schemas may be
ARITHMETICALLY conclusive, but HISTORICALLY we must precisely come to
prove that it cannot hold
.
To arrive at this complex dialectical view of the matter, many
important considerations must be taken into account.
Marx sets up his study of the circulation of capital – of which both
simple and expanded reproduction are two aspects, dealt with in the
present first Section – by warning that he considers a movement of
production and reproduction of capital not in the real historical
framework but with the
working hypothesis
that all exchanges
between money and commodities that encompass the central process of
production take place at prices equal to the general exchange value and
without movement of the
price
and monetary
standard
.
It is clear that no geographical capitalist country and no historical
period of even a very few years can be chosen in which these conditions
are fulfilled; whereas it is precisely the changing of all these
conditions that gives rise to the progress of capitalism towards its
crises and destruction.
There are then, at the basis of the much discussed and variously
accepted or interpreted ‘schemas’, many other no less explicit
theoretical suppositions: that the organic composition of capital does
not change in the short course considered, that the rate of
surplus-value does not change, and therefore that the ratios linking the
three quantities of the schemas, i.e.
C
, constant
capital,
V
, wage capital,
S
,
surplus-value, are always the same. With difficulty, Marx, in order to
remove certain obstacles, will concede that the rates may change when we
pass from Department I producing means of production to Department II
producing consumer goods.
If all those conditions were to occur, it is certain that capitalism
could last eternally: but it is precisely because they never occur in
social reality that it is heading towards its end.
What is more, another condition is assumed, that all remnants of
pre-capitalist forms have disappeared, and that the integral
mercantilism discussed earlier functions so that there are no
non-salaried workers. This condition was not reached in Marx’s time even
in England, and today there is still no country where it is reached. The
central point of Marxism is that it is not at all necessary to wait
until the whole economy is integral capitalism in order to overthrow
capitalism in the communist revolution!
Whether or not the schemas add up, and what needs to happen for those
accounts to add up, is not the vital aspect of the question, either of
the presentation of the mechanics of capitalism or of the course of its
downfall. Both are true: Marx’s abstract schemas walk well; and real
capitalism walks infamously.
The theory of progressive accumulation is not yet the historical
theory of the inescapable
crises
of the capitalist economy.
And one more important point: between the doctrine of the circulation
of capital, which we seem to have absorbed at this point, and the
doctrine of expanded reproduction, there is the doctrine of
fixed
capital and
circulating
capital, which is in the
second Section and needs to be examined.
In simple reproduction, constant and variable capital, which form the
total advanced capital, remain the same in all cycles, and surplus
value is consumed by the capitalists while the workers spend the
variable capital. It is easy to find the relation that ensures that so
many means of consumption are found on the market that both the
capitalists’ surplus and the workers’ wages are spent, and we will see
this later when we discuss the two departments and accept the hypothesis
that everyone is either a personal capitalist or a wage earner. But when
one goes to expanded reproduction, a part of the surplus-value is taken
away from the capitalist’s consumption and goes to buy new means of
capital, which must be found produced in society. The simplest, Marx
says (as we know) in these pages, is to assume that all surplus value
goes to new capital, i.e. Marx already eliminates the persons and mouths
of capitalists, and shows that capital functions (the usual Russia). But
once such a scheme is made to balance, nothing is explained, because all
balancing is done between circulating capitals, which is the real
capital in our economic science, the sum of all the value of social
products. But to make an extra machine worth a thousand pounds work, we
will have taken from the schemas only the ten pounds of annual wear and
tear: where does one get the rest? Marx would have replied immediately
that this far greater remainder is not real productive capital but fixed
capital, such as construction. It is the famous ‘objectified human
labour’ provided by all generations and held by the ruling class-state.
It was formed in the initial or primitive accumulation of the First
Book, historically, and Marx replies that all capital was formed this
way. Thus the clash between fully bourgeois and pre-bourgeois economic
forms is evident, which Luxemburg rightly introduces but without adding
anything to Marxism; for which it is classically clear that the contact
must be seen both historically and geographically; and here is another
immense field of work for our organisation on the tremendous problem of
‘backward’ peoples.
Theory of crisis
The other observation that should not seem so paradoxical as it is
obvious is that one does not need to go into the realm of progressive
accumulation to prove the inevitability of crises in capitalist
production.
The Marxist doctrine of crises appears in simple
reproduction
. It is fundamental that capitalism is condemned to
accumulate by extending general capital even at the cost of sacrificing
to this inexorable fate all privilege and the very life of
capitalist-people. This notwithstanding, even in the humble hypothesis
of the constancy of social capital and simple reproduction, Marx
presents the evidence of crisis theory. In other words, this means that
in its turbulent race, beset by the need to produce more surplus-value
in order to increase the volume of total capital, the capitalist world
or one of its sectors can also make us witness phases of ‘regressive
reproduction’, like the overwhelming phases of progressive accumulation.
We will prove as usual not to have discovered this.
Even with the unfortunate immediatist formula that would arrive at
what Marx derides as the ‘generalisation of misery’, with the sharing of
surplus value among wage earners, the economic machine would remain
mercantile and capitalist and would be subject to leapfrogging in the
crises of its operation, however dim it may be.
The paragraph on simple reproduction, which precedes the one on
‘Accumulation and Reproduction on an Extended Scale’ (where it is said
that
the simplest will be to admit that all surplus-value is
accumulated
) goes in the French edition on p. 110 to p. 133. The
actual theory of crises is taken off pages 129-130.
In this passage Marx makes the opposite assumption to the one
underlying the ‘verification’ of the schemas, namely that not everything
is sold and not everything is consumed. The final product
C’
must be sold so that, in simple reproduction, it is
divided between
c
consumed by the capitalist and
C
with which the cycle starts again. But: ‘[w]hether
C’
is bought by the ultimate consumer or by a merchant
for resale does not affect the case’. And shortly afterwards, following
the well-known observation that the stimulus is the need of capital to
reproduce itself and not the famous supply and demand of the gentlemen
‘circulators’, or even the need of human beings to be satisfied:
‘Within certain limits, the process of reproduction may take place
on the same
or on an increased
scale
even when the
commodities expelled from it did not really enter individual or
productive consumption. The consumption of commodities is not included
in the circuit of the capital from which they originated (…) So long as
the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the
standpoint of the capitalist producer. The circuit of capital-value he
is identified with is not interrupted. And if this process is expanded –
which includes increased productive consumption of the means of
production – this reproduction of capital
may
be accompanied by
increased individual consumption (hence demand) on the part of the
labourers. (It must not be forgotten that in the formula of expanded
reproduction when the new commodity expenditure becomes greater, Marx
admits that, as the advanced capital grows, the constant capital may
grow, but not the wage capital, neither relatively nor absolutely, when
the rate of organic composition changes; which will not be assumed until
Luxemburg in outlining the schema of Part III), since this process is
initiated and effected by productive consumption. Thus the production of
surplus-value, and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist,
may increase, the entire process of reproduction may be in a flourishing
condition, and yet a large part of the (produced) commodities may have
entered into consumption only apparently, while in reality they may
still remain unsold in the hands of dealers (the wholesale ones, who
have already paid the capitalist producer and reinvestor), may in fact
still be lying on the market. Now one stream of commodities follows
another, and finally it is discovered that the previous streams had been
absorbed only apparently by consumption. The commodity-capitals compete
with one another for a place in the market. Late-comers, to sell at all,
sell at lower prices (here we are dealing with what is in Marxist
economics the
price of production
, the price equal to the value
containing the exact part of the capital advance and surplus value at
the average social rate). The former streams have not yet been disposed
of when payment for them falls due. Their owners must declare their
insolvency or sell at any price to meet their obligations. This sale has
nothing whatever to do with the actual state of the
demand
. It
only concerns the demand for payment, the pressing necessity of
transforming commodities into money. THEN A CRISIS BREAKS OUT. It
becomes visible
not in the direct decrease of consumer demand, the
demand for individual consumption
(this would be the usual and also
very modern explanation of conformist economists: see a current example
in our article in the last issue on the crisis in US agriculture), but
in the decrease
of exchanges of capital for capital, of the
reproductive process of capital
’.
This is perhaps one of the most eloquent descriptions of crisis in
Marx’s work. When the capitalist system enters into crisis, not only
does the strident and lacerating contradiction with its historical need
to expand occur, but it is also the case that its circulation in
constant quantity is prevented, i.e. there is a negative reproduction as
opposed to simple reproduction, a part of the value that has already
taken the form of productive, industrial capital is pulverised, and the
social sum of the means of production circulating as capital falls
frighteningly from the historical level reached.
Anarchy of production
In this framework lies the well-known demonstration of the effects of
the anarchy of capitalist production. The mechanism, the secrets of
which are powerfully revealed in our original doctrine, succeeds in
fulfilling its task of incorporating into the belly of the monster that
is total capital the ancient patrimonies, that is, the dead labour of
past generations and the labour of the proletarian army into which the
living are regimented, and satisfies, among terrible alternatives, the
delivery of reproducing itself in more monstrous dimensions; but what it
will never resolve, indeed less than any ancient historical form of
economy, is the proportioning of productive efforts to the rational
needs of men.
One of the ancient aspects of the irreconcilable contradiction has
become clear in the glimpse we have just reproduced and commented on
soberly, and in our entire reconstruction of the circulation of capital,
which is quite different from the circulation of commodities and money.
When we are in a moment, a good one, for bourgeois society and the
capitalist form, when the ‘schemas’ flow and accumulation ascends with
positive rates, to greater constant capital (and greater fixed capital)
corresponds (see Abacus) a greater product, but generally a lesser
global variable capital (total part of the working class), or at least a
lesser individual part (wages) for each of its components; while with
the increased global value of the product and the increased productivity
of labour the share of the capitalist class grows, and it matters little
to us whether it goes into the jaws of its individual slavers or into
those, more greedy for human flesh, of the single monster that
personifies the social machine of capital.
If, on the other hand, the days of sorrow for the monsters and for
the Monster come, if the Crisis worthy of the name appears (and we
showed this with the figures of the American 1929), if Black Friday
occurs, the warehouses are overflowing with unsold goods, prices fall
below the production price, at first, as Marx’s passage echoed, there
will be a more favourable distribution of consumption to the
wage-earners and the entire proletariat will take more as a class, even
if unemployment will advance in the field opened up by the collapse of
the profits plundered by capital. This preludes the general ruin, but at
the same time it preludes the phase of maximally rotating schemas of
high production and market conquest. Behind this mirage too is the great
crisis; war, destruction with ever more ruthless weapons, carnage and
bloodshed, the rarefaction of vital consumption and the debasement of
money in the hands of the surviving petty-bourgeoisie raised in eternal
‘kolkhozian’ and ‘conciliatory’ illusions.
At either extreme, whether the schemas run or jam, revolutionary
Marxism will always have won – yesterday a battle of doctrine by
dispelling the circulationist and welfarist lie which in the free or
cunningly directed individual monetary games presents the deception of
absurd equilibria, and places them at the end of a long course of
overwhelming accumulation – tomorrow a revolutionary battle and a social
war, when the domination of the volcanology of social crises will allow
the theoretical consciousness and strategic leadership of the
resurrected Marxist party to bring down under the blows of the communist
dictatorship the immense and inhuman beast of accumulated capital, in
its all infamous metamorphoses of commodities, financial fictions, and
corporate production galleys for wage slaves.
The historic discussion on accumulation
In what follows a very extensive development of the presentation made
in Milan of Karl Marx’s ‘Economic Abacus’ about the beginning of the
second volume of Capital, which is being distributed as a formulary
among the organisation’s groups (the Abacus, or formulary, of the first
volume will be found by readers in the recently published No. 10 of
Programme Comuniste
of January-March 1960).
The purpose of this extensive development was also to present the
reports on classical Marxist polemics that had been entrusted, for Rosa
Luxemburg’s work to a French comrade, and for N. Bukharin’s work to a
comrade from the centre of Milan, and to which we now make room.
For the intelligence of the discussion among Marxists, it is good to
remember (since it was decided to postpone the quantitative formulae to
the next meeting and its reports) that the whole debate relates to the
‘realisation’ of surplus value, i.e. of the whole product, and to the
question of whether it was possible on the assumption that everyone in
society was either an industrial capitalist or a wage-earning
proletarian. Suffice it to recall that Marx divided all production in a
society into two departments: the first producing means of production
and the second producing means of consumption. For each, we know that
the final product brought to the market is composed of the respective
constant capital, variable capital and surplus value. The money-bearers
to realise these commodities are the proletarians for the variable
capital of the two departments, and the capitalists for everything else.
Customers
of the first department can only be the capitalists
who buy back (between them) all the product – customers of the second
for the commodities are the proletarians for the variable capital of
both departments, and the capitalists for the surplus-value of both
departments. Indicating the two departments with Roman numerals as
subscripts of the known letters
C
,
V
and
S
, we would say that all the money to be spent on
consumption is
V
I
+
V
II
+
S
I
+
S
II
. But it is clear that
all consumable goods are the product of Department II, i.e.
C
II
+
V
II
+
S
II
. Bukharin and Luxemburg
agree that everything flows in simple reproduction, and that the obvious
condition arising from the comparison of the two sums is that
C
II
equals
V
I
+
S
I
. Thus if everything is
realised (both monetarily and as commodities) the law of simple
reproduction is that the constant capital of the
second
department must equal the variable capital of the
first
plus the surplus value of the
first
.
With expanded reproduction the complication begins, and for now we
will give neither Marx’s and Luxemburg’s numerical schemas, nor
Bukharin’s formulas. Apparently, for the former, not all surplus-value
can be realised in expanded reproduction, whereas for the latter it can.
We have shown how neither Marx nor any Marxist wants to prove that the
capitalist economy can function
as a stable system
, not even in
simple reproduction. Never can capitalism
realise
all that it
produces or overproduces. Its condemnation is the series of crises that
demonstrate that the system neither knows nor can
consume all that
it produces nor produce what society actually needs to consume
. By
its very nature, capitalism does not
realise
, which leads to
the subversion of commodity-currency equivalences, and the outcome of
giving away
or
destroying
, worse than selling off, its
commodities, i.e. squandering human labour power, due to its inability
to impose an organised discipline on labour.
Report on Luxemburg
Comrade Rosa Luxemburg’s work on the
Accumulation of Capital
and her later writings in response to criticism of it were part of a
debate that lasted more than a century. Two questions were posed by all:
the first, why does expanded reproduction occur and what demand does it
respond to; the second, linked to the first: who realises the surplus
value?
Marx had also posed this problem by drawing a schema of expanded
reproduction, which Luxemburg examines by noting that its presupposition
is the same as that of simple reproduction – that is, a society composed
exclusively of capitalists and proletarians and, on the other hand,
capitalist production realising surplus value within itself. Now
Luxemburg says: this presupposition corresponded perfectly to simple
reproduction, since in this one can admit the case of the development of
the reproduction of individual capital as an internal element of
capitalist society, but it no longer fits the reproduction of social
capital which historically arises in a certain geographical environment
in which there exist social forms which are not yet capitalist. Thus,
according to Luxemburg, this theoretical assumption prevents the
fundamental questions of the historical polemic from being answered: for
whom does expanded reproduction take place? And who realises the surplus
value?
Let us now take the schema itself: of course it is ruled out – and
everyone has ruled it out – that the capitalist and the proletarian can,
in expanded reproduction, realise surplus value, for in this case we
would return to the case of simple reproduction. The proletarian can
exchange for money the commodity corresponding to the variable capital
of Departments I and II; the capitalist can realise surplus value by
consuming it. But the part of surplus-value that is capitalised, the
capitalist cannot realise it, unless we admit that the capitalist
realises his surplus-value by accumulating it, and only accumulates for
the sake of accumulation. This would lead one to describe capitalist
society in this way: coal production is increased so that iron
production can increase, in turn iron production increases so that
mechanical production increases, and so on ad infinitum.
Now, this, according to Luxemburg, would result in an ‘empty joust’,
nor can such be the deduction to be drawn from Marxist theory as a
whole. She would therefore like (and it must be stated immediately that
Luxemburg does not deny the necessity of schemas in general in order to
eliminate the secondary aspects of the question and pose the problem in
all its purity) to bring the problem of accumulation back into its real
historical framework, because, by not doing so, the two questions
already mentioned are not answered: for whom is the demand expanded? And
who realises the surplus-value? Nor the correlative question: how is the
surplus-value capitalised?
Capitalism, Luxemburg notes, was born at the end of the Middle Ages
in a European environment around which non-capitalist countries continue
to exist. Moreover, in the very bosom of capitalist society, there
remain social environments that can be considered ‘external’ in the
sense that they live in economic relations that are not yet capitalist
in character: for example, the small peasant farm. And it can also be
said that these environments, although becoming ever smaller, continue
to exist today, since not in every country does peasant production take
place within the framework of capitalist relations. In the historical
discussion around the problem of accumulation, Luxemburg further notes,
two answers played an enormous role: international trade and foreign
trade. But economists have failed to realise that to invoke these
factors merely shifts the problem, since for us, when we speak of total
social capital, we speak of capitalist society in general. The problem
of international trade must therefore be understood in the sense not of
the political geography of the various nations, but in that of the
social economy taken as a whole, and giving the term ‘international
trade’ the content it deserves, we can see that the demand which
provokes the expansion of total reproduction is a demand
external
to capitalist society, coming neither from
proletarians nor from capitalists: those
who
realise
surplus-value are therefore this external demand, whatever it may
be.
The historical environment of capitalist accumulation
Of course, the problem does not arise in the same form in all stages
of capitalist development. Three stages can be considered: 1) Around
capitalism there is a natural economy that completely ignores money;
which on the one hand produces for needs and on the other has no
unconsumed surplus: everything that is produced is consumed. 2) After
the natural economy, of which, without going back to primitive
communism, we have many historical examples, there is the other model of
the medieval feudal economy and, 3), after this, the simple mercantile
economy, whose formula is not M-C-M, but C-M-C. This form,
characteristic of the crafts of the Middle Ages, survives to this day,
albeit on a restricted scale.
If capital accumulation takes place through the struggle against the
natural economy, this must be replaced with a mercantile economy for
capitalism. Why? Well, because the natural economy – as well as the
semi-natural economy of the Middle Ages in the countryside – demands
nothing from capitalism and offers it nothing: it is locked completely
within itself. It can give it neither the means of subsistence that
would be necessary for the capitalisation of realised surplus value, nor
labour-power, held captive as it is by pre-capitalist relations of
production. An example of this is serfdom during the Middle Ages, which
establishes a relationship of personal domination between the
peasant-serf and the lord, and which prevents peasants from going to the
city to work for capital, as it permanently binds them to serfdom. This
relationship must be broken, and this has been the case throughout the
history of capital during the Middle Ages and, even more so, in that of
imperialism’s struggle in the colonies, where it is necessary to destroy
social institutions still resting on pre-capitalist relations of
production in order to utilise not only the raw materials produced by
that society, but also ‘coloured’ labour power without which capitalism
could not exploit the resources of climatic zones where whites cannot
work. But, once social relations based on the natural economy have been
destroyed, capital has not yet achieved its goal – the establishment of
a relationship in which it can draw new riches from the historical
social and economic environment to continue its accumulation also from
the physical point of view: new raw materials, new labour forces. In
other words, capitalism must replace the
natural economy
with a
mercantile economy
.
How does it achieve this goal? Apparently (and, of course, the
apologists for capitalism say it is a peaceful process) it seems that
the superiority of the capitalist model in terms of living standards and
productive techniques imposes this transformation
on its own
:
in reality, it is only possible by destroying and ruining entire
centuries-old societies. Luxemburg, who gives an extensive illustration
of these countries in the phase preceding capitalist accumulation,
recalls the ruin of primitive communism in India or among the Berber
tribes of North Africa, or, more simply, that of the American farmer
who, until the middle of the century, was at the same time farmer and
producer of everything (tools, clothing etc.) he needed. The replacement
of this quasi-natural economy came about through the introduction of
English manufactured goods (railway equipment, industrial equipment);
and, later, through the formation of a manufacturing industry in North
America itself. This whole process leads to the separation of
agriculture and rural trades; little by little, the peasant class is
forced to limit itself to the only form of activity that capitalism
cannot immediately take away from it, the cultivation of the soil
(especially given the property relations prevailing in the New World),
and to buy the goods produced by the great capitalist manufacturing
industry – all this through violence that can be open or merely economic
(increased taxes, etc.). Once the simple mercantile economy has been
introduced, when the peasant is forced to limit himself to agricultural
activity because the rural trades have disappeared, a third phase of the
struggle begins, the competitive one, which has as its goal the ruin of
the simple economy through price competition, since the goods produced
by capitalist manufacturing cost less and easily replace those of
artisan origin, which are no longer bought because they are too
expensive. Here, too, the example is given by the United States, and
Luxemburg shows how, after the Civil War, the speculative development of
railway construction and increasing emigration led to the constitution
of an agriculture that developed in purely capitalist forms: very large
estates, entirely industrial management methods, enormous production
with which the small
farm
of the direct farmer, of the
individual peasant, is no longer able to compete. Result: complete ruin
of the
farmer
.
But the example could be repeated for many other countries and social
classes, because in addition to the ruin of the peasant, there was that
of the artisan: the generalisation of capitalist production relations is
sown with rubble.
In conclusion, Luxemburg shows how, for a century, the problem of
accumulation had divided economists into two camps: on the one hand, the
sceptics who denied the possibility of expanded accumulation (e.g.
Sismondi), perhaps because they felt what revolutionary results it would
lead to; on the other, the so-called gross optimists for whom capitalism
was capable of indefinite self-perpetuation and, therefore, was the
eternal social form.
Such are the conceptions that Luxemburg, as a militant Marxist,
intends to combat. It is foolishness, she says, to take literally a
scheme that is merely a method of examining a problem to want to
conclude from it the eternity of the social form we are fighting. The
Marxist solution to the problem of accumulation lies between the two
extremes of scepticism and optimism, and resides – according to the
spirit (if one can call it that) of all Marxist doctrine – in a
dialectical contradiction
: on the one hand, capitalist
accumulation needs a non-capitalist social environment in order to be
realised; on the other hand, it cannot go forward without exchanges with
this environment (exchanges, of course, anything but peaceful) and
without its erosion and, ultimately, its ruin.
Not only is all surplus value not realisable within the bosom of
capitalist society, but its very capitalisation requires the
exploitation of all the material and human resources of the globe. With
the extension of capitalism on a world scale, the capitalisation of
surplus-value becomes more and more difficult, because new sources of
raw materials and labour-power can no longer be found; on the other
hand, the part of the social product that corresponds to
C
and
S
grows in relation to
V
due to the increase in the organic composition of
capital. Hence the contradiction (according to Luxemburg, writing in
1911-12), hence the universalisation of capitalism and, at the same
time, the catastrophe towards which it proceeds. Hence the fact that the
capitalist countries depend more and more on each other for the
capitalisation of surplus-value
, because if
C
increases in relation to
V
this is, of course, in the
form of raw materials that may come from outside but also of machinery
that can
only
be produced in
highly capitalist
relations of production, whereas for the
realisation
of
surplus-value they always depend on an extra-capitalist environment, and
thus enter into increased competition with each other for its division,
for the imperialist domination of the world. The conditions of
surplus-value realisation and the conditions of capital renewal thus
fall into an increasing mutual contradiction which is only a reflection
of the tendential law of the falling rate of profit, itself
contradictory.
Luxemburg’s entire critique could be summarised by noting that she
only takes Marx’s schema as a starting point in order to fight against
the apologetic theories of capitalism, which foresee the eternity of
this social form, and to fight the revisionists of revolutionary
Marxism. Her outline is, in short: capitalism feeds on an
extra-capitalist environment; by feeding on it it destroys it; when it
has destroyed it all, the historical hour will come in which it must, in
turn, necessarily succumb (which is not to say: let us wait for
capitalism, by extending its relations of production to the whole world,
to destroy itself: Luxemburg identifies a
historical tendency
,
the stronger the more prolonged in time; the revolutionary struggle of
the proletariat can shorten it and, if victorious, cut it off abruptly
on a world scale).
Report on Bukharin
Bukharin’s study –
Imperialism and the Accumulation of
Capital
– in order to refute Luxemburg’s deduction concerning the
contradictions to which the schemas given by Marx in the 2nd volume of
Capital
would lead, does not consist in giving new numerical
tables of the two departments relating to successive cycles (years) of
capitalist production that resolve the doubts raised through numerical
balancing. Instead, as in a lecture Bukharin gave in Moscow at the time
of the 4th Congress of the Communist International, he develops a set of
formulae that we will not quote for now. He divides the surplus-value of
Department I and II into two parts, one of which is to be consumed by
the capitalists and thus realised by purchasing Department II
(consumption) goods on the market, and the other to be added to the
capital brought forward in the new cycle; and evidently to be realised
on the market in the purchase of more constant capital and a greater sum
of labour-power. Bukharin shows that, as in simple reproduction, the
continuity of the cycle does not always occur, but is linked to the
condition we have stated, namely that ‘the constant capital of the
second department is equal to the sum of the variable capital and
surplus-value of the first’.
In the case of expanded reproduction Bukharin develops an analogous
relation which we merely quote without algebraic demonstration, and it
is this: ‘The constant capital of the second department, increased by
the part of the surplus-value of this one taken to constant capital,
must be equal to the variable capital of the first department, plus the
surplus-value consumed of this one, plus still the part of the
surplus-value of this one taken to
variable
capital’. In fact,
the surplus-value of each department is divided into two parts as stated,
and then that reserved for investment is divided between investment in
constant capital and investment in wages.
The meaning of Bukharin’s research is meant to be this; if these
relations are respected, it will always be possible to construct a
series of schemas in which all surplus-value, consumed and not, remains
entirely ‘realised’, i.e. put into mercantile circulation, without the
obligation introduced by Luxemburg to bring a third type of buyer onto
the scene, one that is neither capitalists nor the workers employed by
them.
Bukharin’s ‘points’
This algebraic-arithmetic research may be carried out, but it remains
limited to the formal character of the question. The reminder that even
simple reproduction is only assured if a certain condition occurs, which
in the generality of cases is lacking, seems important to us. So even in
simple reproduction it is not certain that ‘all surplus-value is
realised’ and the hiccup can arise, along with the rupture of the cycle
and the ‘crisis’ as Marx foresaw, indeed as he wanted to show inevitable
in all scenarios.
For now, it is interesting to briefly note what Bukharin, premised on
the above, responds to what he calls, perhaps a little too formally,
Luxemburg’s criticism of Marx.
First point. For whom does expanded accumulation take place?
According to Bukharin, this finalistic question introduces a subjective
and voluntarist element into the objective analysis that is outside the
Marxist dialectic.
Second point. Luxemburg having admitted that the consumption of
society, both of capitalists and proletarians, grows (although the
number of the former decreases, of the latter it grows), Bukharin
observes that in this way she has already answered the question: for
whom does production expand. In every social form the very fact of the
growing population determines the possibility of greater consumption,
without one can impute to Marx the degenerations of those
(Tugan-Baranovsky) who fell into vulgar economics by treating production
and consumption separately.
Third point. It is incorrect to say that accumulation is explained if
capitalists consume surplus value but is no longer explained if they
partially invest it by ‘refraining’ from consuming it. Bukharin accuses
this critique of contradiction and reduces it to the fallacy of saying:
since capitalists are the ruling class, the phenomena of the capitalist
economy occur according to the desires of capitalists. Bukharin is
right, but Luxemburg knew this no less!
Fourth point. Luxemburg says that it cannot be the aim of the
capitalists to maintain an ever-increasing army of workers. Bukharin
tries to show that this is a necessity, and therefore an aim, in the
sense that the capitalist class would lose its domination if the number
of proletarians did not continually increase. Perhaps it would not even
conquer it against the old historical powers. Bukharin’s thesis does not
translate into a philanthropy of the capitalists towards the working
class population, yet, in the early days of capitalism, they truly
believed it.
Fifth point. Luxemburg finds it strange that the capitalists are
fanatical about the enlargement of production as an end in itself and
without benefit to either the proletarians or the bourgeois themselves,
and calls this reasoning an ‘empty joust’ that cannot provide a
scientific explanation. Bukharin’s answer is given by quoting a passage
from Marx’s ‘Theories of Surplus Value’, which corresponds to the many
we have given in our research.
‘The industrial capitalist... as
personified capital
produces for the sake of production, he wants to accumulate wealth for
the sake of the accumulation of wealth. In so far as he is
a mere
functionary of capital
, that is, an agent of capitalist production,
what matters to him is exchange value and the increase of exchange
value, not use value and its increase. What he is concerned with is the
increase of
abstract
wealth, the rising appropriation of the
labour of others. He is dominated by the same absolute drive to enrich
himself as the miser, except that he does not satisfy it in the illusory
form of building up a treasure of gold and silver, but in the creation
of capital, which is real production… the industrial capitalist becomes
more or less unable to fulfil his function as soon as he personifies the
enjoyment of wealth, as soon as he wants the accumulation of pleasures
instead of the pleasure of accumulation. He is therefore also a producer
of overproduction, production for others’.
This applies, Bukharin adds, subjectively, that is, from the point of
view of the ‘animating motive’ of the capitalists, although one cannot
deny the
objective consequences
of these subjective tendencies,
consequences that consist in the satisfaction of the growing needs of
society as a whole.
At this point, one might ask Bukharin whether he did not see an
active side to industrial social production only up to a certain
historical point after which the expansion of production becomes
completely anti-social in all its effects; and thus imposes precisely
the necessity to overthrow the capitalist form. But these were things
that Bukharin, although sometimes a fierce formalist in his polemics,
knew inside out.
He finally comes to refute the thesis that the buyers that capitalism
does not find within itself must be sought in socially pre-capitalist
countries and examines Luxemburg’s thesis point by point. He certainly
does not dispute its historical aspects in the contemporary world
context, but merely wishes to deny that without non-bourgeois markets
capitalism cannot exist in the countries where it first appeared, and
above all that the need for its overthrow has not already arisen.
Further study of this debate can only show how the great
revolutionaries Luxemburg and Bukharin are on the same side of the
barricade against the nefariousness of revisionist opportunism, which in
a parallel manner killed them both.
However, it is the duty of the Marxist movement that follows them and
us to bring order to these issues by bringing the vital transitions
between economic analysis and historical and political analysis, and, to
put it in the usual abbreviated way, philosophical analysis into the
right light.
This work was given at the meeting by the various comrades who worked
on it and the contributions we have reported, serve as the basis for the
further development in the various sectors and fields.