Readings: Capital II, ch. 20 (sections 6-13), 21
Returning to a point I have made multiple times, the implication of Marx’s theory in Capital is that the anarchic capitalist system needs to be replaced with an egalitarian, planned economy. His project is to render visible all of the hidden and ignored inefficiencies in capitalism so that the working class can gain insight into production, circulation and distribution in order to run the economy more efficiently. His intention is to posit a fully planned system as the solution to the inherent exploitation and instability of capitalism.
He makes clear that if humans are to build a rational, equitable and efficient economy, they need to be fully aware of all the steps necessary to produce, accumulate, circulate and distribute the products. These are all hidden by capitalism due to the power of the capitalist class. When that power is destroyed, all of these little steps in the process will be visible to the working class. This process has revealed itself in revolutionary situations throughout history, such as in Russia in 1917, France in 1968, Chile in 1973 and several others. What can be seen in these situations is the workers struggling concretely over how to efficiently and rationally plan an economy. That struggle has to be combined with a fight against the power of the capitalist class and its parallel attempt to obscure production, circulation and distribution. But the challenge of running an economy does not disappear after a revolution—it is just that the challenge is no longer obscured from view.
In his description of capitalist accumulation, Marx writes that commodity circulation mediated by money gives rise to “conditions for normal exchange that are peculiar to this mode of production, i.e. conditions for the normal course of reproduction, whether simple or on an expanded scale, which turn into an equal number of conditions for an abnormal course, possibilities of crisis, since, on the basis of the spontaneous pattern of this production, this balance is itself an accident.” (570-1)
This quotation contains most of the elements of his analysis of capitalist accumulation. Starting with money, we can return to the infamous commodity fetish, an ideological cloaking device that hides the true essence of capitalist exploitation behind anonymous, and often coveted commodities. He also applies the commodity fetish concept to money, the ultimate value fetish that reduces all products of human labor, as well as that very labor itself, to exchange value. In the context of accumulation, money again serves as the cloaking device for production, circulation and distribution. The working class does not have access to the basic knowledge of what and how much of a product they are producing, where it will go, how much profit is to be made, where that profit will be distributed and how it will or will not be reinvested in useful production for society.
Any conjunctural balance of capitalist reproduction is merely an accident and an accident waiting to happen. No sooner is this balance achieved than it is overthrown by the underlying anarchy of capitalist production. What creates this anarchy? It is the intrinsic drive by the capitalists to constantly increase their surplus-value. This entails, for each capitalist, reinvesting a portion of his surplus-value in expanded production to gain more of it and out-compete the other capitalists. While Marx admits that expanded production is generally good for society, under capitalism, it introduces imbalances because the economy may not be able to absorb the surpluses that it produces.
The result is that the hypothetical equilibrium conditions that Marx laid out in his discussion of simple reproduction are a fantasy. As greater surplus accumulates in one portion of the economy, e.g. overproduction, it creates disproportion with other portions of the economy, e.g. leading to underconsumption. Crises of realization, then are built-in features of the system.
When describing hoard formation, a necessary element of capitalist accumulation, Marx argues, “It is a ‘dead weight’ on capitalist production. The attempt to make use of this surplus-value that is being hoarded up as virtual money capital, either for profit or for revenue, culminates in the credit system and ‘papers’… This absolute increase in the virtual money capital annually reproduced, however, also makes its segmentation more easy to achieve, so that it can be invested more quickly in a particular business…” (574)
While the credit system ultimately allows for accumulated surpluses to be deployed faster and in larger quantities, the underlying accumulation system persists, which results in even greater, more catastrophic crises (a point covered in-depth in Volume III). Money and credit hide the accumulation process and the guiding imperative remains accumulation of surplus-value, i.e. the accumulation of riches at one poll and misery at the other instead of accumulation of broad-based abundance for society.
World of Lenidzky 