Truth To Power wrote:Classical political economy had determined that production of value proceeded by application of natural resources (which it called, "land"), labor, and producer goods ("capital") to relief of scarcity, and that those who contributed labor and producer goods contributed to production and earned commensurate shares thereof, while those who owned natural resources did not, but only exacted a share of production as the price of their permission to use the resources they legally owned. Marx erased that knowledge by conflating land and capital as, "the means of production." Socialism and capitalism are both based on the Big Lie that there is no essential difference between owning natural resources that would have been available anyway and owning producer goods that would not.
What do you make of the enclosures in England that precipitaed the creation of the working class there?
Is this only an evil of landlords kicking the peasant farmers off of the land that they had previously been guaranteed to subsist on, or do you also lambast the capitalist takes advantage of the structural restriction of private property to extract surplus value? Or is that a myth and somehow the capitalist who owns the land in which they have workers labor, is only wrong for owning the land itself? The restriction of land is itself tied to the existence of a capiatalist class based on the exploitation of workers and is less of an issue against mere landlordism.
No. He must at a minimum decide to devote his purchasing power to obtaining income.
There is also a difference between earning money and just legally obtaining it. Earning requires a commensurate contribution to production. The "capitalist" (another Marxist anti-concept) can do that by investing in producer goods, or he can obtain income without earning it, by owning privileges such as land titles, IP monopolies, bank licenses, etc.
Anti-concept seems nonsensical, a concept can be over extended and wrong in the context in which it is applied, but most concepts even when refracted in idealist forms have basis in reality and human practice. And Marx didn't create the concept of the working class nor of capital. That would be to frame him as some kind of alien independent of the history of political economy.
Yes, the capiatlist must invest and will do so only where they see the prospect of profit.
And how exactly does the capitalist earn their wealth? What is Jeff Bezos doing that he is directly responsible for the creation of billions of dollars in wealth? I imagine we have to make a discussion of productive and unproductive labor, where a lot of socially important work is done, but this doesn't mean it produces surplus value and thus expands wealth of a society. It's important that families do domestic work, but it's important even while foundational to society and the economy does not constitute it as productive in the economic sense. So I am curious how to explain the role of the capitalist contributing because in neoclassical it largely ignores the analysis of production in its particulars and treats it as a black box where capital and labor are inputs and then there are outputs, probably thought of in terms of use value.
You still have to make that decision. ALL labor, from flipping burgers to running a multinational corporation, consists of three steps: obtaining information, making a decision, and implementing the decision. The capitalist does all three; but as labor is defined as human effort devoted to production (relief of scarcity), the capitalist only labors when he decides to invest in producer goods, not privileges. While it may involve a lot of effort, a decision to invest in privilege is rent-seeking behavior, not labor in the economic sense.
Indeed, the productive side of the economy is where there is investment in labor which produces a surplus which isn't confined to physical objects but even services with use-value, a social good.
Capital is about investing for a profit naturally and is the primary motive force of a capitalist.
Dated but more recent in reflecting such a motivation:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/12641/33292_1.pdf?sequence=1This is how one of the top 30 Australian directors describes the role of capital
and the freedom of capitalists to invest where they like:
Most governments that I have spoken to have no understanding of private capitalism.
Now I have heard people say that you should feel privileged to be committed to invest
in Australia. Really! The whole world is our oyster so what is so special about here?
New Zealand is the same! Their attitude is we are permitting you to invest. So what!
The whole world is on offer to us so what is so good about you? They think that they
are the pearls in the oyster of the world. Australians in Canberra are remote from the
real world. They don’t understand why you invest. It isn’t something that they have ever
been involved in and they say, ‘We have improved the conditions — so now you do
your bit’. What do they mean — my turn? We don’t have turns; we put our money out
when we think that it’s good for us. That’s all we do. We don’t look for any other
reason — it’s not a turn. Not when …Keating or Howard or other politicians say we
have made all the conditions right, now it’s up to you to go and do it, unless we can see
the market we are not going to invest.14
And when it comes to considering the role of the worker or the capitalist in production, the sameness of their human qualities isn't what is essential to the concept of their class position.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1g.htmIn general, interaction proves to be strong if an object finds in another object a complement of itself, something, that it is lacking as such.
‘Sameness’ is always assumed, of course, as the premise or condition under which the link of interconnection is established. But the very essence of interconnection is not realised through sameness. Two gears are locked exactly because the tooth of the pinion is placed opposite a space between two teeth of the drive gear rather than opposite the same kind of tooth.
When two chemical particles, previously apparently identical, are ‘locked’ into a molecule, the structure of each of them undergoes a certain change. Each of the two particles actually bound in the molecule has its own complement in the other one: at each moment they exchange the electrons of their outermost shell, this mutual exchange binding them into a single whole. Each of them gravitates towards the other, because at each given moment its electron (or electrons) is within the other particle, the very same electron which it lacks for this precise reason. Where such a continually arising and continually disappearing difference does not exist, no cohesion or interaction exists either; what we have is more or less accidental external contact.
If one were to take a hypothetical case, quite impossible in reality-two phenomena absolutely identical in all their characteristics-one would be hard put to it to imagine or conceive a strong bond or cohesion or interaction between them.
...
To express the individual in thought, to understand the individual in its organic links with other instances of the individual and the concrete essence of their connection, one must not look for a naked abstraction, for an identical feature abstractly common to all of them taken separately.
Let us now take a more complex and at the same time more striking example. Wherein lies, for instance, the actual, living, concrete and objective bond between the capitalist and the wage workers, that ‘general element’ which each of these individual economic characters has in comparison with others? The fact that both of them are men, both of them need food, clothing, etc., both of them are capable of reasoning, talking, working? Undoubtedly they have all of these features. Moreover, all of this even constitutes the necessary premise of their bond as capitalist and wage worker, yet it in no wise constitutes the very essence of their relation as capitalist and wage worker. Their actual bond is founded on the fact that each of them has an economic trait that the other lacks, that their economic definitions are diametrically opposed. The point is that one of them possesses a feature that the other lacks, and he possesses it exactly because the other does not have it. Each mutually needs the other because of the diametrical opposition of their economic definitions. And that is exactly what makes them the necessary poles of an identical relation binding them stronger than anything they might have in common (‘their sameness’).
One individual thing is as it is, and not the other thing, exactly because the other is diametrically opposed to it in all characteristics. That is exactly why it cannot exist as such without the other, outside its connection with its own opposite. As long as a capitalist remains a capitalist and a wage worker, a wage worker, each of them necessarily reproduces in the other a diametrically opposed economic definiteness. One of them appears as a wage worker because the other is a capitalist vis-à-vis the former, the two economic figures having diametrically opposed traits.
That means that the essence of their bond within the given concrete relationship is based precisely on complete absence of a definition abstractly common to both.
A capitalist cannot, within this bond, have any traits that a wage worker possesses, and vice versa. And that means that none of them possesses an economic definition that would be simultaneously inherent in the other, that would be common to both. It is precisely this community that is lacking in their concrete economic bond.
So while the capitalist invests in pursuit of a profit, those decisions as such while necessary in the reproduction of capital do not themselves create surplus value which constitutes capital. The whole point is about how capital invested in production can produce a profit at all, and not simply shift value around. While the dispossession of workers of land and such for subsistence like with the serf/peasant is necessary, so that they have to work to survive, the exploitation within a factory or at some office arises only where one can produce a commodity worth more than what it is to pay the workers. I take it you already know this but I'm outlining this to see how you denounce such exploitation and reframe it to a landowner or something.
"Capitalist" is a Marxist anti-concept contrived to prevent use of two valid economic concepts: privilege (especially land) owner and factory owner.
I guess Marx just wrote fantasy books based in no relation, even if one thinks somehow imperfect, to reality? You come across as dogmatic more than anything. Which is fine in itself, but when it doesn't explain itself, it becomes dull.
Can you find a willingness to know the fact that although they may yield identical incomes, a "capitalist's" decision to buy land does not aid production, while a decision to buy appropriate producer goods does?
The purchase of land indeed does not immediately improve the production of use-values, but it is of course a precondition to doing so and the location and development of such land is pivotal to even pre-capitalist economies.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
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