Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value. Samir Amin

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СКАЧАТЬ to the strategies of capital, which endeavor to capture control over this swelling of “tertiary” activities through privatization of their management in order to open new fields into which to expand—rather by expropriation than by any new creation—are possible people’s strategies of democratic control of the activities in question.

      The dizzying expansion of “Department III” (complementing the Departments I and II of the analysis of accumulation put forth in Das Kapital), which has become de facto “dominant” in the sense that it comprises two-thirds or more of what conventional economics terms GDP (Gross Domestic Product), certainly calls into question the formulations of the law of value that Marx offers us. It is even here that are placed the main arguments in favor of claims that “the law of value is outdated.”

      THESIS 4: Capitalism only adapts to the exigencies of the unfolding of struggles and conflicts that form its history at the price of accentuating its character as destroyer of the bases of its wealth—human beings (reduced to the status of labor force/commodity) and nature (reduced in the same way to commodity status). Its first long crisis (begun in 1873) paid off with thirty years of wars and revolutions (1914–1945). Its second (begun in 1971) entered the second, necessarily chaotic, stage of its unfolding with the financial collapse of 2008, bringer of horrors and destructions that henceforth are a menace to the whole human race. Capitalism has become an obsolete social system.⁸

      9. IS THE LAW OF VALUE OUTDATED?

      Identification of value as the central axis for critical analysis of the economy of capitalism and thus of its presence, concealed by the workings of its transformation into observed prices, is not without its problems. Marx’s own discussions of these questions invite Marxists not to limit themselves to exegeses of those texts but to dare to go further: in particular concerning (i) concrete labors of diverse character and their reduction to the concept of abstract labor; (ii) the time required for the production, circulation, and realization of surplus-value and, consequently, the relationship between living labor and transferred dead labor; (iii) the identification of use-values; (iv) the treatment of natural resources,whether privately owned or not; (v) the appropriate definition, specific to capitalism, of social labor, and the analysis of its relationship to other forms of labor; and (vi) making clear the forms of absorption of surplus-value by Department III.

      The evolution of capitalism since Marx’s day and the gigantic transformations that it has produced challenge Marxist analysis. A perspective that tries to stay critical and even to deepen this radical critique of capitalism requires going far beyond Marx’s answers to the challenges concerning these questions. Certain Marxists, myself included, are trying to face these challenges.⁹

      The current climate of opinion does not favor pursuit of these attempts to enrich Marxism, itself conceived as unbounded in its fundamental critique of the reality of the capitalist world. Instead and in place of enriching Marxist thought, one would rather prefer to bury it and claim to start over from zero. One is then usually the prisoner—whether aware of it or not—of vulgar thought, uncritical by nature. The radical critique of the reduction of the concept of progress to increasing GDP that I have put forward and—in counterpoint—the thesis that I have adopted, likening progress to emancipation, are registered here against the current climate of opinion.¹⁰

      Current fashion is to say that the law of value is “outmoded.” It would have applied to the industrial manufacturing phase of capitalism, itself made out of date by the formation of contemporary “cognitive capitalism.” Forgotten is that by its essential nature capitalism, today as yesterday, is based on social relationships securing the domination of capital and the exploitation of the labor force associated with it.

      The invention of the “cognitive capitalism” concept rests on a capitulation to the method of vulgar economics based on “measurement” of the specific productivities of “factors of production” (labor, capital, and nature). One “discovers” then that the rates of growth recorded by these partial productivities explain only 50 or 60 or 70 percent of the “general progress” (of “growth”). This difference is ascribed to the intervention of science and technology, considered as constituting a fourth, independent, “factor.” Some think to have rediscovered in this “factor” the general intellect, whose central position in the definition of the productivity of social labor had already been pointed out by Marx. But in fact there is nothing very new there, in the sense that labor and scientific/technical knowledge have been inseparable through all the stages of human history.¹¹

      There is but a single productivity, that of social labor working with adequate tools, in a given natural framework, and on the basis of scientific and technical knowledge whose elements are indissociable one from the other. What vulgar economics artificially pulls apart Marx unites, thus giving the concept of value that emerges from this unity its fundamental status: the condition in its turn for a radical critique of capitalist reality.

      Cognitive capitalism is an oxymoron. We will be able to talk of a “cognitive economy” only then, when social relations different from those on which capitalism is based have been established. Instead and in place of this deviant notion inspired by the climate of opinion, I have tried to formulate the metamorphoses that the transformations of capitalism engender in forms of expression of the law of value.

      In my work I have imagined a capitalism that has reached the furthest limits of its tendency to reduce the amount of labor used for material production (hard goods: manufactured objects and food products) through an imaginary generalization of automation.¹² The departments of production no longer set in motion more than a tiny fraction of the labor force: what is used partly for the production of science and technology (soft goods) needed for that of hard goods and partly for services linked to consumption. In those conditions, the domination of capital is expressed in the unequal distribution of the total income, and value has no longer any meaning except on this integrated and global scale. The concept of value would persist only because society would still be alienated, mired in scarcity thinking.

      Would a system that had reached such a stage of its evolution still merit the appellation “capitalism”? It would probably not. It would be a neo-tributary system based on systematic application of the political violence (linked to ideological procedures capable of giving it the appearance of legitimacy) indispensable for the perpetuation of inequality. Such a system is, alas, thinkable on a globalized scale: it is already in the course of being built. I have called it “apartheid on the world scale.” The logic of the forces governing capitalist reproduction works in that direction, which is to say, in the direction of making “another possible world,” one even more barbaric than any of the class societies that have succeeded each other throughout history.

      ANNEX TO CHAPTER ONE

      An Algebraic Model of Extended Reproduction

      1. PARAMETERS OF THE SYSTEM

      I shall begin with a broad analysis of the system, linking real wages (and surplus-value rates) with the development rates of the productive forces. Each Department (I for production of means of production E and II for production of consumer goods C) is defined, for each phase, by an equation in value terms, as follows:

Phase 1	Department 1	1e + ah = pe1
	Department 2	1e + bh = qc2
Phase 2	Department 1	1e + aδh = pe1
	Department 2	1e + bρh = qc2
Phase 3 СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 > В конец