Chapter XIV: Marx’s Sociological Economics

Marx’s economic doctrines are the result of the application of historical materialism to the ‘mysteries’ of value, price and profit. The solution of all mysteries, Marx taught, was to be found in social practice. And it is his analysis of the social character of all economic traits and categories which represents Marx’s distinctive contribution to political economy.

Traditional economics had approached the objects of political economy in the same way that a physicist approached a steel bar or a chemist a dye. Economic relations were not derived from the way in which things entered into the social process, but were regarded, on the analogy of the physical sciences, as intrinsic properties of things. They were as much in evidence in the solitary domestic economy of a Robinson Crusoe, and in the primitive economy of the savage horde, as in the complex economy of a modern society. It was therefore not necessary, orthodox economists assumed, to take into account the distinctively historical contexts in which the economic properties of things were discovered. Further, all attempts on the part of the state to regulate prices, wages or capital investment could be denounced as absurd and pernicious attempts to interfere with the natural functioning of economic laws. No room was left for normative judgements. From this abstract unhistorical point of view gold was regarded as naturally money, instruments of production naturally capital, human labour-power naturally wage-labour, the soil, and not society, the natural locus of rent. What for Marx was the outcome of a socio-historical process was taken as the natural precondition of that process. The historical expressions of a set of relations of production were turned into fixed things; and human behaviour in all its economic ramifications was explained as controlled by things.

The upshot of this unhistorical approach corresponds to the actual consciousness of those who live in a commodity-producing society and have not yet penetrated to the secret of commodity production. The rise and fall of the market, periodic glut and scarcity, small-scale and large-scale panics, are taken as natural events bestowing blessings and calamities, like the fortunes of the weather, upon the just and unjust, the wise and the unwise. The social relations between human beings are ‘thingified’ into impersonal, automatic laws, while the material instruments of life are ‘personified’ into the directing forces of human destiny. Man finds himself ruled by the products (commodities) of his own hands. The relationships between these products:

... vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. [1]

The whole of bourgeois economy consists of a process in which things carry on, so to speak, behind man’s back. It is a process which makes a mockery of man’s strivings for security, comfort and peace by producing unemployment, want and war. It diverts human relations from their human form, and by casting a shadow of mystery on human affairs generates mysticism, superstition and religious obscurantism. Instead of the instruments of production being utilised by human beings for human purposes, in bourgeois society human beings are utilised as instruments to serve machines. It is not only in Samuel Butler’s satiric Utopia that human beings are the instruments of production used by machines for the manufacture of bigger and better machines. That is what they are in the practice and theory of commodity-producing societies. This is what Marx means when he calls bourgeois society a ‘fetishism of commodities’ and the orthodox ‘science’ of political economy, its theology.

Although the marginal utility school came into its own after Marx, its unhistorical character is just as marked as that of the classical school. In its most developed form it regards its task to be the study of ‘human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’. [2] Pure economics would result in the statement of formal laws – invariant relations – derived from the general empirical fact that many things are wanted which are mutually incompatible. The character of the psychological incentives and aims involved in human behaviour, the social institutions which provide its framework, are ruled out of the scope of economic inquiry, while the propositions of pure economic science – which are really empirical – are paraded as analytic deductions from first principles. Changes in evaluation, which flow from altered psychological and social conditions of economic behaviour, are regarded as brute irrational data. No attempt is made to show how economic laws change with a developing society, for by definition, economic laws are eternal. Only their historical expression can change, not their meaning and validity. From this point of view, the laws of economics are the same for all societies – feudal, capitalist and communist. An analysis which refuses to investigate the way in which formal relationships are affected by material context, cannot escape, for all its disavowal of value judgements, the air and manner of subtle apologia for the status quo. To maintain that propositions such as ‘the share of income which is received by land, labour and capital is exactly proportionate to their specific, marginal productivities’, are expressions of eternal, economic laws without further distinguishing between the formal, skeletal economic elements which are presumably invariant, and the concrete historical situation which provides the flesh and blood of significance, is to encourage the uncritical belief that the economic system is rightly ordered because, from a strict economic point of view, it can be no other than what it is.

Not all non-Marxian theories of economics are guilty of overlooking the specific historical and social context of the economic relations they submit to analysis. But the question which arises concerning those schools which adopt a genetic and functional approach – like the historical school of the nineteenth century and the institutional school of the twentieth – is: to what extent are they really theories? The task of a theory is to organise the empirical propositions of its subject-matter into some systematic connection, so that the consequences deduced are either compatible with observed phenomena or capable of serving as a guide to the discovery of new phenomena. Descriptions of mechanisms and processes can only supply the raw material for theoretical elaboration. The historical school cannot do justice to the present tendencies of economic development unless it is guided by a theory. Although its starting point is diametrically opposed to the abstract, analytical school, its practical upshot is the same: the acceptance of what is as the norm of what should be.

It would be a mistake, however, to contrast Marx’s sociological economics with the economic systems of those who begin with price, or demand, or cost, or welfare as fundamental, and then to inquire which of the two systems is truer. For they are not concerned with the same problems. The empirical findings of the various contemporary schools can be taken over by Marxists as the indication of certain correlations in the fetishistic expression of the movement of commodities. But what distinguishes Marx’s economic analysis from all others is its fusion of the historical and analytic moments of capitalist production in the interests of a practical programme of revolutionary activity. His refusal to consider political economy as an independent science, his evaluation of the significance of the historic tendencies of capitalist accumulation in the light of the totality of the social relations of production, which includes the specific historical context, the politics, psychology and legal relations of the day, enables him to incorporate in a concrete synthesis what is sound in both the historical and analytic approach. What Marx is really offering is a philosophy of political economy based upon all of the important observable facts and suggestive of a method of fundamentally transforming the existing order. His theory of political economy cannot be used as a guide to play the market or make safe investments any more than a treatise on the fundamental causes of war can be used as a manual for military operations on the field of battle.

The ‘immediate’ aim of Marx’s economic analysis is to discover the laws governing the production and distribution of wealth in capitalist societies. Wealth in capitalist societies presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities whose elementary form is the single commodity’. [3] Not every product is a commodity and not all wealth is capital. These are historical categories. Societies exist in which things produced are not commodities and in which wealth is not capital. A commodity is a product which can be exchanged for other products – it is something which normally can be bought or sold; capital is wealth used for the production of more commodities. Capital may exist in the form of money or means of production; but no matter what the form of its embodiment, ‘it is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things’. [4] The social relations between persons, under which the wealth used for the production of more wealth is known as capital, are expressed in that mode of economic production called capitalism.

What is capitalism? Capitalism is private ownership of the social means of production carried on for private profit, and employing workers who are formally or legally free to sell their labour-power. The italicised phrase distinguishes capitalism from all other forms of production (including what is sometimes mistakenly called ancient capitalism) and stamps it with a definitely historical character. Since the decline of genteel society, there has always been private ownership of the means of production; and the profit motive is as old as the traders of antiquity. But it is only when the quest for profit is carried on with ‘free’ wage-labour that the capitalist system emerges. Wage-labour under capitalism is free:

... in the double sense that neither they [the free-labourers] themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc, nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant proprietors; they are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. [5]

This point is important because Marx maintained that the wages of labour constituted the chief ‘mystery’ of capitalist production, and that the solution of the mystery would reveal that the labourer, for all his freedom, was still being exploited as his forbears had been under feudalism and slavery. Why is the exploitation of labour, if it exists, any more of a mystery under capitalism than it was under previous forms of society? [6] To answer this we must glance for a moment at the relations of production as they existed in feudal and slave times. Here everything is as clear as daylight. The serf who works three days on his own field and three days on his lord’s field can distinguish between the work he does for himself and the unpaid work which he does for another. He does not have to infer the existence of this difference; the difference is visible in space and time. The parcels of land are generally separate from each other and the days which he must allot to the lord’s land are already assigned. Or, where he must pay his tithe in products, he can divide into two piles that which he may keep and that which he must turn over. Under slavery all labour is unpaid and the very food which the slave receives as fuel for his body seems to come as bounty from his master. In none of these cases is there any mystery about the fact of exploitation, and where and when it takes place.

Under wage-labour the case is quite different. For all of the labour, both what is strictly necessary to keep the labourer in condition and the surplus produced over and beyond this necessary minimum, seems to be paid for. The labourer, say, is hired to work by the day. He does not stop at that point where the value of what he has produced equals the value of the money or commodities he receives as wages. There is no clear physical or temporal division between the work for which he is paid and the work for which he is not paid. At the end of the day, his wage payment is ostensibly for the whole day’s work. Now it may be asked how is it known that there is any portion of the day’s work for which the labourer is unpaid? Isn’t the assumption that the worker creates more value in the form of goods and services, than what he receives in wages, an arbitrary one? Marx’s answer is that if there were no difference between the value of what the worker produces and the value of what he received, there would be no profit, or interest or rent.

There is no mystery about the existence of profit, interest and rent. It is their origin which is in question. In contradistinction to all other economists before or since, Marx contended that these forms of income were all derived from the unpaid labour of those actually engaged in production. That the origin of profit and interest constituted a problem was sure to strike anyone who inquired by whose largesse those unproductive classes in society which neither toiled nor spun were fed and clothed and housed. And as for the huge profits often made by entrepreneurs who participated in production, it was implausible, on the face of it, to attribute it all to wages of superintendence. How, then, did profit arise? Before we examine Marx’s own theoretical construction, it would be well to see on what grounds he rejects the current theories of the origin of profit.

1) Does profit arise in the course of the ordinary exchange and circulation of commodities? The normal situation in the circulation of commodities is the exchange of equivalent values. This does not mean that the use-values of the commodities exchanged are equivalent, for then there would be no motive for the exchange. So far as use is concerned both sides gain in the transaction. But in respect to the exchange-values of the commodities, their combined price – which is the rough index of their exchange-value – is the same immediately before and immediately after the exchange. Consequently, no new value has been produced. In circulation, a buyer may take advantage of a seller or vice versa, in which case we say there was no honest bargain. This only means that existing values were redistributed, not that new value was created. The circulation of commodities, however, in a competitive market, cannot take place through a series of dishonest bargains. The seller may take on a capricious surcharge to the value of his commodity. But in order to keep on selling, he must be a buyer, too. The seller, from whom he buys, reasons that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and places the same overcharge upon his goods. The result is that only nominal prices increase. In a society where buyers are sellers and sellers are buyers, it is absurd to explain profit as something created by the sale of commodities above their values. And if they are exchanged at their values, the world is not the richer by any new value. It is true, however, that even if profit is not created in exchange, it may be realised through exchange. But the real question is: What is the original source of profit?

2) Does profit arise from the use of machines or instruments of production? This is a view originally proclaimed by JB Say, the French economist. It has been revived by those who have noticed that other things being equal, a plant working with a great deal of machinery (say $9000) and with little wage-labour (say $1000) shows a rate of profit at the end of the year which is the same as that produced by a plant with relatively little machinery (say $2000) and much wage-labour (say $8000). If it is true, as Marx claimed, that the source of profit is the unpaid labour or surplus-value produced by the worker, then the second plant should have shown a much greater profit than the first, since a larger portion of its total capital consisted of wage-labour. In addition, if profit is exclusively derived from labour-power, how account for the eagerness of capitalists to replace labour-power by machines? We shall consider these problems in further detail in the following chapter. Here the question must be asked: What specific character do machines possess which enable them to confer more value upon their products (we are not speaking of use-values) than they themselves possess? Assuming there is no monopoly, the value produced by the machine upon the total annual product of goods, according to Marx, is no more than its annual depreciation. The business man in fixing the price at which he is to sell his commodity, just as his accountant does in drawing up his profit and loss statement, adds an amount derived by dividing the original cost of the machine by its average life. The machine transfers value, which it itself has, to its products; but it cannot produce new value. Where monopoly conditions permit prices to be charged which are higher than the real value of the commodity, it is not the machine which is the source of the additional profit so made but the social conditions of monopoly production. [7]

3) Is profit and interest on capital the reward of abstinence? Senior regarded profit as the natural reward for not immediately consuming capital, as a return for the sacrifice involved in accumulating capital in order to get a higher return later. The ‘waiting’ or ‘deprivation’ of the capitalist in the present was regarded as part of the cost of production and had to be paid for. What is called abstinence, however, by itself never produces any new value; at most, it only permits a situation to develop under which the new value is produced. Whether the capitalist class as a whole accumulates or consumes its wealth, does not depend upon its own free will but upon the necessities of capitalist production. This is true with certain qualifications even of the individual capitalist. So long as he desires to make a profit, the amount he consumes and the amount he reinvests in his plant are settled for him by the market. If he does not desire to make a profit, there is no less and no more abstinence involved on his part than if he does. The choice of either one of two possible acts open to him involves on his part an ‘abstinence’ from the other. Why, then, should some kinds of abstinence result in a profitable reward?

4) Does profit arise from the fluctuations of supply and demand? If this were so, the prices at which commodities are exchanged would have to be the resultant of the interacting forces of supply and demand. That prices varied with supply and demand, Marx did not deny. The clue to the price of a particular commodity at a particular time in a particular place must always be sought in the local schedules of supply prices and demand prices. But Marx was interested in the direction in which prices moved, in the conditions by which supply and demand were themselves limited. Although the final price of a commodity in the absence of monopoly is dependent upon the higgling of the open market, the seller already knows what its market value approximately is before he offers it for sale, indeed, before he even produces it. Otherwise why should he risk everything in production? Business may sometimes be a gamble; but it is not yet a game of pure chance. If the answer is made that the seller is guided by knowledge of the past schedules of supply and demand for the commodity in question, it can be pointed out that where a brand-new commodity is put on the market its price is determined long before the demand has begun to make itself felt. In fact, the demand for it can be treated in part as a function of the price, that is, as a dependent variable.

The accidents of the market will determine whether a commodity is sold above or under its ‘real value’, and in this way profit may partly depend upon the fluctuation of supply and demand. But in order to make his profit the seller need only dispose of the commodity at its real value. What determines the real value of a commodity? According to Marx it is the amount of socially necessary labour-power involved in its production. Are commodities ever sold at their real values? Rarely, if ever. When would they be? If the organic composition of capital were equal. Are they equal? No. Is there any sense, then, in saying that the prices of commodities tend to equal their ‘real values'? Yes, as much sense, as we shall later see, as there is in saying that bodies in motion tend to remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force, even when we know that there is no body which is not acted upon by the external force of gravitation.

We return now to a more straightforward exposition, reserving the analysis of Marx’s methodology until the next chapter.

Under capitalism labour-power appears on the market like any other commodity. Its value is determined in the same way and it is subject to the same variations of supply and demand. Under the ideal or typical conditions of capitalist production, the worker receives in exchange for his labour-power a sum of money equivalent in value to the means of subsistence necessary to sustain him – food, clothing and shelter for himself and family. Like all commodities the use-value of labour-power is different from its exchange-value. But in one respect it is absolutely unlike other commodities. Its specific use-value lies in the fact that it creates more exchange-value than it is itself worth. If labour-power produced no more exchange-value than what it receives in money wages, then the value of the commodities produced would be equal merely to the value of the raw material, machinery and labour-power which entered into its manufacture. Where would profit come in? The capitalist might just as well close up his shop, for the only income he could receive under such circumstances would be the exchange-value of his own labour-power, provided he did work in his own plant. But why should he stay in business to give himself a job, when, without risking his capital, he might take a job elsewhere? He can remain in business only so long as there is a difference between the value of the labour-power he has purchased and the values which that labour-power creates. Profit is possible only when the value of the second is greater than the value of the first.

Marx calls that portion of the working day in which the worker produces commodities whose exchange-value (as distinct from the exchange-value of the raw materials, etc) is equivalent to the exchange-value of his own labour-power, necessary labour time; anything over and above this is surplus labour time. What is produced during this latter time is surplus-value for which the worker receives no return whatsoever. The ratio between surplus-value and wages (the value of labour-power) Marx calls the rate of surplus-value or the rate of exploitation. The profit of capitalist production is derived solely from surplus-value; and the progress of capitalist production consists in devising ways and means by which surplus-value may be increased. There are two generic methods of doing this. One is by prolonging the length of the working day. In this way absolute surplus-value is derived. Another generic method of increasing surplus-value, more in evidence under modern capitalism than in early capitalism, is by increasing the productivity of labour and curtailing the necessary labour time. In this way, even when the length of the working day remains constant, the difference between necessary labour time and surplus labour time increases, and therewith the rate of surplus-value and exploitation. By this means relative surplus-value is derived. Surplus-value is not appropriated in its entirety at the point where it is produced, but in the course of the whole process of capitalist production, circulation and exchange. The distribution of the total surplus-value at any time is determined not only by the operation of immanent economic laws but by the political struggles between entrepreneur, landowner and bankers; between entrepreneurs themselves even when production has become monopolistic; and, above all, between the entrepreneur and the wage-earners.

Marx divides the capital of a manufacturing concern into constant capital and variable. Constant capital consists of what orthodox political economy calls fixed capital, such as buildings and machinery, and part of what it calls circulating capital, that is, power and raw materials. Variable capital consists of wages, which non-Marxian economists regard as only part of circulating capital. The division of capital into constant and variable is made in the interests of Marx’s analysis according to which the value of constant capital is only reproduced in the manufactured products, whereas wages, or variable capital, always creates some new value over its own cost of reproduction. The ordinary distinction between fixed and circulating capital reflects the entrepreneur’s assumption that the source of profit is not only wage-labour but inanimate instruments of production as well. He, therefore, computes his rate of profit upon the whole of the capital he has sunk into his project and not upon the amount he has advanced as wages. This accounts for the disparity between what is called the rate of profit and the rate of exploitation. For example, in a $1,000,000 concern, $900,000 will represent investment in machinery and raw material (which Marx calls constant capital c) and $100,000 wage payments (variable capital v). If profit (which is called surplus-value s, since all profit, according to Marx, is produced during surplus labour time) is $100,000, then the rate of profit is s divided by c plus v, which is 10 per cent. The rate of surplus-value, however, is s divided by v, which is 100 per cent. The larger the rate of surplus-value (which is always being increased by either one or both of the two ways indicated above), the greater the absolute amount of profit produced. The total profit is not consumed for personal purposes but a large part of it is reinvested in constant capital; modernisation and rationalisation is made necessary by the pressure of competition and the quest for ever larger profits. The total amount of capital in use grows. In order, however, to keep the rate of profit constant, since the total amount of capital has been enlarged, the amount of profit and therewith the rate of surplus-value (the rate of exploitation) must be increased. The yearly increment of profit which is added to the capital investment grows together with that to which it is added. The constant capital of today is nothing but the unpaid labour of yesterday. Relatively to the increase in the magnitudes of constant capital, the amount of variable capital employed in production diminishes. The diminution of the amount of variable capital is attended by a demand for relatively fewer labourers and by a substitution of unskilled for skilled. Wages fall and an industrial reserve army comes into existence.

The rate of profit, as we have seen, is determined by the ratio between surplus-value and the total capital invested. With the increase in the organic composition of capital (that is, the ratio of constant to variable capital) the rate of profit falls even when the rate of exploitation, or surplus-value, remains the same. The desire to sustain the rate of profit leads to improvement of the plant and to increase in the intensity and productivity of labour. As a result ever larger and larger stocks of commodities are thrown on the market. The workers cannot consume these goods since the purchasing power of their wages is necessarily less than the values of the commodities they have produced. The capitalists cannot consume these goods because (i) they and their immediate retainers have use for only a part of the immediate wealth produced, and (ii) the value of the remainder must first be turned into money before it can again be invested. Unless production is to suffer permanent breakdown, an outlet must be found for the surplus of supplied commodities – a surplus which exists not in respect to what people need but to what they can buy. Since the limits to which the home market may be stretched are given by the purchasing power of wages – which constantly diminishes by virtue of the tendency of unemployment to increase with the increase of the organic composition of capital – resort must be had to export.

The first things to be exported are consumption goods: say, Boston shoes to South America, if we are an American manufacturer, and Lancashire textiles to India, if we are English. There was a time when natives had to be taught to use these commodities. But having learned how to use them, they soon desired to learn how to make them. In this they are helped by the manufacturers of shoe machinery in New England and textile machinery in Manchester who naturally desire to dispose of their own commodities. The raw materials are right at hand – Argentine hides in the one case, Egyptian and Indian cotton in the other. They are relatively cheaper than in the mother country because (a) transportation costs are lower; (b) where land is cheap its products – hides and cotton – are cheap; and (c) the working day is longer. Before long, Argentine shoe plants are underselling the Boston factories and India is ‘spinning its own’. The Manchester looms lie idle and the New England manufacturers clamour for a tariff even while their stocks remain unmoved. But this is an ever-continuing process. Having learned how to use shoe and textile machinery, what is more natural than that the colonies should wish to learn how to manufacture it? In this they are helped by the manufacturers of machine tools in America and England who desire to dispose of their own commodities. Before long there is a shoe machinery factory in the Argentine, and India is manufacturing her own looms. Later on, representatives of the US Steel Corporation will be convincing the South Americans and Indians that it would be more profitable to import iron and steel and other materials which enter into the manufacture of machine tools than to buy them ready made. Or natural resources may be discovered which will invite exploitation. A New York or London banking house will advance the money necessary for this capital outlay as it did for the other plants. Interest and profit will be considerable but none of it will turn a wheel in the many idle factories in New or Old England. If there is a glut on the colonial market, and interest payments cannot be met, the governments of the United States and Great Britain will step in to save their national honour and protect life and property.

This process is accompanied by periodic crises of overproduction. They become progressively worse both in local industries and in industry as a whole. The social relations under which production is carried on, and which make it impossible for wage-workers to buy back at any given moment what they have produced, leads to a heavier investment of capital in industries which turn out production goods than in industries which produce consumption goods. This disproportion between investment in production goods and investment in consumption goods is permanent under capitalism. But since finished production goods must ultimately make their way into plants which manufacture consumption goods, the quantities of commodities thrown on the market, and for which no purchaser can be found, mounts still higher. At the time the crisis breaks, and in the period immediately preceding it, the wage-worker may be earning more and consuming more than usual. It is not, therefore, underconsumption of what the worker needs which causes the crisis, because in boom times his standard of living is generally higher than in slow times, but his underconsumption in relation to what he produces. Consequently, an increase in the absolute standard of living under capitalism, since at most it could only affect the rate and not the tendency to overproduction, would not eliminate the possibility of crisis. That can only be done by the elimination of capitalism as such. Although the standard of living may be higher as production goes from the crest of one boom to another, once the crisis begins, the standard of living declines at an accelerated rate.

The anti-social consequences of the contradiction between the tendency towards ever-expanding forces of production under capitalism and the relatively progressive limitations upon consumption finds its crassest expression not merely in the existence of crises but in the way they are overcome. Despite the crying want of millions of human beings commodities are deliberately destroyed and basic production systematically curtailed. Even war is sometimes welcomed as the best means of disposing of surplus stocks of commodities – and of the surplus population which the normal progress of capitalism produces. The historical tendency of capitalist production is to go from small-scale organisation to large; from the exploitation of wage-labour to the expropriation of the capitalist, from isolated action against individuals to the organised overthrow of the system. No one can improve upon Marx’s own graphic recapitulation:

As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into the instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and therewith the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. [8]

* * *<&h4>

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 86. [available here. &ndash MIA

2. Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London 1932), p 15. – MIA

3. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, available here. – MIA

4. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, available here. – MIA

5. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, available here. – MIA

6. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 591. [available here. – MIA]

7. ‘However useful a given kind of raw material or a machine or other means of production may be, though it may cost £150, or say 500 days labour, yet it cannot, under any circumstances, add to the value of the product more than £150. Its value is determined not by the labour process into which it enters as means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product.’ (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume, p. 229. [available here. – MIA])

8. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, pp. 836–37. [available here. – MIA]

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Last updated: 20 February 2020