Second question: Is formal subsumption necessary for the exploitation of labor (understood in the strict sense of expropriating surplus labor) via relationships of exchange? I have in mind here not only usury, the circuit of capital Jim focuses on in his post, but also those circuits corresponding to merchant's capital and ground-rent prior to the era of capitalist production. Did these circuits support the exploitation of labor in Jim's sense, and if so did they require at least formal subsumption of labor, understood in either Jim's or Marx's sense? Jim says yes. He writes: > My perspective, which fits with Marx's general views but goes > beyond them, is that the production of a surplus-product which is > then redistributed to some non-producer is fundamentally based on > subjection of some sort... And what are Marx's views on this score? According to Jim, who writes (after making several cogent points which are however not at issue, at least between us): > Except for the hint in the quote from the RESULTS and some other > partial references, *Marx does not consider seriously* the > possibility that an independent producer might, like the slave- > owner or "feudal" lord, produce a surplus-product [to pay > interest]...That is, we have to consider the possibility that the > usurers could exploit the peasant without formal or real subjection > of their labor (the possibility that Gil stresses as part of his > view). As noted, *Marx doesn't given us an answer here*. [Emphases > added] Really? I count at least six distinct passages in which Marx explicitly and emphatically affirms the existence of exploitation, understood in Jim's sense, via circuits which do not presume even the formal subsumption of labor, understood in Marx's sense. (In fact, two of these passages, which contradict Jim's conclusions, are cited by Jim himself). Furthermore, since Marx is in all cases referring to historical cases which preceded the era of capitalist production, these circuits also did not presume even the formal subsumption of labor understood in Jim's alternative sense--that is, workers were not in general "free in the double sense", though some may eventually have *become* that way as the result of the operation of these circuits. All of the following references are to the Penguin paperback edition. First, one of the passages quoted by Jim, from the RESULTATE, p. 1023: "The exorbitant interest which [usurer's capital] attracts, the interest which...it extorts from the primary producer, is just another name for surplus-value. It transforms its money into capital by extorting unpaid labour, surplus labour, from the immediate producer. But it does not intervene in the process of production itself...here we have *not yet* reached the stage of the formal subsumption of labour under capital." Marx goes on in this passage to talk about merchant's capital: "A further example is merchant's capital, which commissions a number of immediate producers, then collects their produce and sells it, perhaps making them advances in the form of raw materials, etc., or even money....Here too we find no formal subsumption of labour under capital." What is the nature of exploitation via merchant's capital? Marx writes in CAPITAL, Vol III, Ch. 20, Historical Material on Merchant's Capital, p. 453: "Without revolutionizing the mode of production, [merchant's capital] simply worsens the conditions of the direct producers, transforms them into mere wage-labourers and proletarians under worse conditions than those directly subsumed by capital, appropriating their surplus labour on the basis of the old mode of production." Further down the page, he adds: "Under these conditions [the handicraft masters] are really only middlemen between the merchant and their workers. The merchant is the real capitalist and pockets the greater part of the surplus- value." Returning to the case of usurer's capital, we find Marx writing in Ch. 36, p. 730: "In the form of interest, the usurer can in this case swallow up everything in excess of the producers' most essential means of subsistence...(the usurer's interest being the part that later appears as profit and ground-rent)...If the usurer, not content with extracting his victim's *surplus labour*...Usurer's capital, in this form where it actually appropriates all the *surplus labour* of the direct producer, without alterning the mode of production..."[Emphases added] On the basis of such considerations Marx concludes on p. 732: "Usurer's capital has capital's mode of exploitation without its mode of production." Further comments on usury and the putting-out system are found in the GRUNDRISSE, pp 851-2: "[In India] profit as well as part of wages itself is appropriated in the form of interest by the usurer...[Mr. Carey] ought to have compared the interest which English handloom-weavers...pay, whose material and interest is advanced (lent) by the capitalist. He would have found that the interest is here so high that...the worker ends up being the debtor,...also having *added his own labour to [the capitalist's advance] free of charge*." [Emphasis added] And in a separate passage, on p. 853 of the GRUNDRISSE: "On the other side, the [worker] is not yet subsumed into the process of capital. The mode of production therefore does not yet undergo essential change....What takes place is exploitation by capital without the mode of production of capital. The rate of interest appears very high, because it includes profit and even a part of wages." Marx also sees exploitation emerging from pre-capitalist forms of ground rent which clearly do not presume formal subsumption even in Jim's sense. After discussing various pre-capitalist and capitalist forms of ground rent, Marx states in Vol. III, pp 772-73: "*All* ground-rent is surplus-value, the product of surplus labour. In its more undeveloped form, rent in kind, it is still a direct surplus product." I could keep going, adducing corroborative passages from Volume I of CAPITAL and from THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE, but you get the drift. Next up: if exploitation in these cases didn't require even the subsumption of labor under capital, did it require instead the existence of individual market (i.e. price-setting) power?
