Saturday, February 20, 2021

 

Notes from our discussion of session 8, pages 275-333

The core of what we discussed on 18/2/21 (session 8, pages 275-333) can, I think, be summed up in two extracts from the Grundrisse.

On labour vs labour-power

"The worker cannot become rich in this exchange [with the capitalist], since, in exchange for his labour capacity as a fixed, available magnitude, he surrenders its creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself, as we shall see further on, because the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him. He divests himself [entäussert sich] of labour as the force productive of wealth; capital appropriates it, as such…"

On capital as "productive"

The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of... mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased...

Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. [Emphasis in original].


Thinking back to Marx's comment in The Poverty of Philosophy that "it is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle", will, I think, help us understand here.

Capital is "productive" for Marx because it creates a "bad side" which generates richer struggles, with more potential.

Some of that, I guess, is also to do with "good sides" (in the sense that Marx cited knightly virtues, balance of rights and duties, etc. as "good sides" of feudalism). Capitalist production, for example, makes its workers literate as feudal and slave modes did not.

But the gist is the production of a richer "bad side" with more potential.


Lev asked how much "disposable income" workers had at the time Marx was writing?

Little compared to today, to be sure. The conditions of the majority of the working class were wretched, as Engels describes in The Condition of the Working-Class in England.

Nevertheless we find that Marx takes it as a rule of thumb that workers' wages in England are about twice the level (at his time) of wages in France in Germany, and workers' wages in the USA are twice the level in England. Workers in France and Germany had a hard time, but they didn't generally starve to death, so compared to their level (or, as Marx puts it, to the level of the lowest-paid in England then, generally Irish immigrant workers) the majority, and even more so better-off workers in good times, had some "disposable" income.

Advertising was beginning to flourish (the billboard was invented in the 1830s and spread from the 1860s). Workers bought and read newspapers and books. More of them had "Sunday best" clothes in addition to their work clothes. Some rented or even owned cottages which were a great improvement on the tenement rooms where worse-off workers lived. And some, of course, spent a lot of money on gin.

All that was meagre, but important in its time, and a break from the more stereotyped consumption of previous exploited classes.


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