Readings: Capital III, ch. 16, 21, 23, 27, 48, 49, 51; Capital II, ch. 6
This is a bit of divergence from Volume I, but just for one post.
In this series of sections, Marx lays out several aspects of the circulation and distribution process of capitalist production. The two that are most salient here are: (1) the list of groups that receive distributions of the surplus value and (2) the labor that is involved in the circulation process, some of which is productive and some of which is not.
The groups that receive a cut of the surplus value described here are money capitalists, landowners, merchants and those involved in what Marx calls “pure circulation.” I believe there are more, but these are some of the most important groups.
Money capitalists, or bankers, receive a cut of the surplus in the form of interest payments. But this group of surplus receivers contributes a unique commodity: capital. In some ways, capital as commodity is like labor because the consumption of its use value creates value, or to be more accurate, “maintains” and “increases” it (Volume III, 473).
The question becomes, how is the value of capital determined? I am unsure what Marx’s conclusion is on this front. First, he states, “The value of money or commodities as capital is not determined by their value as money or commodities but rather by the quantity of surplus-value that they produce for their possessor.” (477) Let’s take the example of a bank loaning a car company $1 million for production. The car company then employs workers and constant capital to produce cars valued at $10 million, of which $8 million is surplus value. The car company then pays the bank a portion of the surplus value: $1 million to replace the money capital plus interest. If the interest rate is ten percent (choosing a high but round number), the bank receives $1.1 million in surplus value. But exactly how is that number arrived at? If it is determined by the quantity of surplus value produced, then the underlying determinant is the production process.
However, later he states, “Here competition does not determine divergences from the law, for there is no law of distribution other than that dictated by competition; as we shall go on to see, there is no ‘natural’ rate of interest. What is called the natural rate of interest simply means the rate established by free competition.” (478) So, is the value of money determined by the quantity of surplus it produces or by competition? Perhaps both. I may need to read on in Volume III to find the answer.
Another group that receives a cut of the surplus is the landowners in the form of rent. Marx describes landowners as the capitalists of the industrial capitalists, the latter having the hypocritical attitude that the former should be abolished because they serve no productive role and just collect rent: “Just as the products become an independent power vis-à-vis the producers in capital and in the capitalist—who in actual fact is nothing but personified capital—so land is personified in the landowner, he is the land similarly standing up on its hind legs and demanding its share, as an independent power, of the products produced with its aid.” (Volume III 963)
The merchants enter the picture largely in the realm of circulation. Commercial capital seems to arise for the same reason as money: it becomes easier to scale up capitalism by making the exchange process more efficient. Essentially, the process of circulating commodities that have been produced is contracted out to the merchants. Instead of one capitalist having to both produce and then bring products to market, those functions are separated into different firms. Commercial capital allows for three efficiencies:
- A decrease in the relative size of capital devoted to buying and selling due to the division of labor;
- A greater speed of metamorphosis of value through the circulation process; and
- The ability to turn over several different capitals at once.
Amazon is the obvious example here, having excelled at all three of these efficiencies.
But the interesting aspect of the labor process involved in circulation is that some of this labor creates value and some does not. He provides the following useful analogy: “When the commodity owners are not capitalists, but rather independent direct producers, the time they spend on buying and selling is a deduction from their labour time…” (Volume II 208) Indeed, if nothing is materially changed in the buying and selling process, it cannot be said that value is added, so the labor is not productive. This is the realm of “pure circulation.” This section is somewhat abstract, so I am not sure exactly what kind of labor is entailed here.
On the other hand, the warehousing and transportation of commodities does add value. Marx describes the process in this way: “…their actual object is not the formal transformation of value, but the conservation of the value which exists in the commodity as a product… The use-value is not increased or raised; on the contrary, it declines. But its decline is restricted, and it itself is conserved… But new labor, both objectified and living, is added to it.” (217) The implication here is that transportation and warehousing both entail mitigating the natural decay of a product over time. Labor has to be applied in order to preserve the value of products as they are stored and transported. In this sense, such labor adds surplus value.
My guess is that the labor of pure circulation is often mingled with that of storage and transport. Perhaps in a store such as Target, the cashiers and salespeople are unproductive workers who work in the same building as those who work in the stockroom and receive shipments from the truck drivers who deliver the products.
World of Lenidzky 