Max wrote: > I'd say monopoly rents are far more common than not. They may be susceptible > to entry, but they are much more the normal case than the exception. How > much that impedes the analysis in Capital, if at all, is a different > question.
Right. The former is an empirical question, and I have nothing helpful to say about it. Conceptually, IMO, Marx did regard technological rents as a *common* phenomenon. You adopt the right method of production or hire the people with the right "human capital," who would place you ahead of your competitors. For the time being, your costs would be lower or your profit margin larger than your competitors'. But you had to hold that rock. It was a common phenomenon for capitalism as a whole, but only by chance this kind of technological leadership would stick to a particular individual capital. Marx seemed to have thought that these rents popped up most everywhere all the time, last for a shorter or longer length of time, and then disappear. At some point, your competitors would reverse engineer your success, copy your methods, snatch away your talented workers, and undercut your rents. What Marx's "model" predicts is that, at any given point in time, you'd observe some sort of a "monopoly" in most industries. In a race, somebody has to be ahead of the pack. But over a sufficiently long period of time, you'd see this technological leadership in a given industry switching from one individual capital to another in a rather chancy way. In slightly different terms, at any given point in time, you'd deal with a whole "probability distribution" of profit rates (and market prices) in a given industry, with the lucky capitals on the right tail of the distribution. However, over a certain length of time, the central tendency or expected value of this distribution would be -- well, duh -- the average profit rate! Now, in principle, the rents fetched by the capitals on the right tail of the distribution could become more or less permanent. If they were systematic enough, they'd perhaps try to perpetuate themselves by influencing legislation and erecting legal barriers to entry: "rent seeking." They could then use political power and crystalized political power (i.e. laws, like copyrights, patent laws, etc.) to keep competitors at bay. For historical reasons (the feudal recent past in Europe and other places), the latter case was typified by private land ownership (or, more generally, over natural resources). This was the theme of part 6 of volume 3. At the time (unlike now?), the commons had been and were being pushed back forcefully. Marx became a Marxist because of a struggle of this kind (peasants in Moselle continuing to fetch wood from forests that had been privatized or something like that). (By the way, you have to give it to David Harvey for emphasizing the importance that this process of extra-economic appropriation of space and nature's stuff continues to be in our times.) There you had a means of production indispensable in every process (space and the stuff of nature) monopolized by the landlords. Considering location and "fertility," each piece of nature had unique characteristics that were, in a certain way, non-reproducible. Certain climates would be good to produce a certain wine, etc. The owners of this land would use their control over that resource to appropriate a portion of the surplus value that workers ultimately produced under the immediate supervision of the capitalists directly involved in production. This was, and then it wasn't, so different from the way in which other functional categories of capitalists, merchants and money-lenders, got to appropriate their respective portions of the total surplus value. In the latter case, they used the ownership of liquid capital to fetch a rent in the form of "interest." Etc. Marx's central point here is that all those forms of "property income" (rents, interests, commercial profits, technological rents) were simply transformed figures of surplus value. What determined who got which share of the surplus value was competition, the struggle among these various types of capitalists, an intra-family fight for the spoils. It was, in Marx's terms, a circulatory phenomenon. The class struggle, which determined who got what portion of the total value produced (which is to say, who truly controlled the existing wealth of society), struggle waged under conditions that resulted from prior history, was a different matter. This was about production, i.e. the overall appropriation of nature and existing wealth. Here, the idea is more subtle that (I believe) many Marxists think. Ownership is about controlling wealth *now*, at the edge of the present. But you truly control something now, when you can dictate how that something is to be used *over time*. What truly allows for a society to exist over time is production, an activity over time (purposefully guided), where production is ultimately the production of self. It's an activity, not a power. It is a flow, not a stock. You are powerful only if your power manifests itself in systematic actions, i.e. in activity. On the other hand, if you don't control the power now, if you don't direct its use over time, its activity, then you don't produce for you. What is the point of "having" something if that something is used for purposes other than yours? The fight over who owns the productive wealth of society *now* is the fight over how to organize and conduct the production (and reproduction) process of society in its totality, the fight over the *by* and the *for* whom to produce. The *by* and *for* whom production is organized and carried out (over time) determine the *of* whom wealth truly is. This conflict is the process of *production* of surplus value, the process of *production* of capital as a social structure, the process of *production* of the poverty and alienation of the producers, and all that. This fight decides whose society this is, *of* whom this society is. > Your 's' sounds like a residual. Devine says it's the 'normal' return to > capital. Sounds neo-classical to me. The two things, the total and the partition, are determined at once, as a result of the same process, the totality of the historical process, but their determining factors are different and have to be analyzed separately. If you think about this historical process in its totality, you'd probably conclude with me that there's an element of indeterminacy in it. I'm talking about the use of society's wealth in and through the struggles between workers and capitalists, in and out of the workplace (the class struggle), and among the capitalists (competition), and also among the workers (competition among workers, which perpetuates their division, precondition for capital to rule). The totality of these struggles is what determines the outcome. But, as Marx noted, these struggles are waged under the conditions that exist: the outcome of prior struggles. So, they are not completely arbitrary. And to be able to gain the upper hand in these struggles, you needed to "deconstruct" and understand the existing social structures. In Capital, Marx is studying this historical process in a stylized fashion, in general or abstractly. So, the behavior of the capitalists and workers is scripted. The capitalists rule, own capital legally and effectively, organize production, direct the workers, and exploit them. The workers are split, they only cooperate under the aegis of capital and for the benefit of capital, they obey or limit their squabbles to more wages and better working conditions (which imply that capital rules). The capitalists compete, but if push comes to shove (something that doesn't happen in Capital, except as an insinuation in a few passages), the capitalists close ranks against the workers. However, as Michael Lebowitz has is famous for emphasizing, this is an assumption that holds insofar as capitalism sticks. Socialism is the process of undoing all this, which starts by questioning its necessity or "naturalness." So, is the surplus value a residual value? IMO, there's no harm of thinking that Marx saw the production of total (new or added) value as analytical primary, i.e. as determined at a more essential level than its distribution between the capitalists and the workers as income shares. "All value has to be produced before it can be distributed." Again, this is not true in a factual sense. Both, production and distribution of value, or their duals, i.e. the proportions at which wealth gets allocated among its uses, are elements of the same "fixed point." But this is clearly the correct way of "deconstructing" capital. This "distribution" was more essential than the distribution of the surplus value among the various categories of non-workers. Marx said it. It's in Grundrisse and in volume 2, at least. My paraphrasing: The distribution of income between labor and capital shares (wages and surplus value) is but the superficial aspect of the distribution of ownership over the objective and subjective conditions of production (MP + LP), it is not "distribution" in Mill's or Ricardo's sense, but "production" -- i.e. production of wealth and, at once, production of the social relations embedded in this wealth. This "distribution" (again, in fact, an aspect of the process of production) *is* much more essential than the distribution of surplus value among the capitalists. Clearly so. If a majority of the capitalists put as much effort to exploit one another as they put to exploit the workers, then their system would be in constant jeopardy. This is convoluted, but it's hard for me to get the point across without some verbal twisting. > In Heinrich/Marx, v is what it takes to reproduce the working class, though > sometimes v gets too low and maybe the state responds in the interests of > capitalists as a whole, and sometimes it's high because the workers are > fired up, and sometimes it's higher than subsistence because 'subsistence' > is historically specific to time, place, and culture. So it sounds like v > and therefore s can be pretty much any damn thing. Yes and no. There are social conventions that have a greater or lesser degree of objectivity. Here's Marx: "On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. [7] In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm This is spot on, IMO. I'm not saying there are not disputes about the precise content of these categories, but right now in the United States, there exists a certain, notion shared widely by people of what constitutes "poverty." I mean, again, the World Bank has its line, as does the Census Bureau, and these lines differ and then they shift. But you get the idea. "Poverty" is not a completely arbitrary notion, unless a society is already in total flux. And yes, after a significant class struggle, these notions (and the conditions that give raise to them) get more or less fossilized, and it takes another significant class struggle for one or the other class to dislodge them from the social consciousness. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
