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

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      The value standard is superior because this standard alone considers production as the resultant of all the technical coefficients that describe it.

      The conclusion of this analysis is fundamental: that social system that maximizes the rate of profit (for a given level of wages) does not necessarily maximize the development of the productive forces (the reduction of social labor time).

      There is no way of doing without the theory of value. This theory alone enables us to link all the economic magnitudes (prices and incomes) to a common denominator—value, that is, the quantity of socially necessary labor, which is independent of the rules of distribution (exploitation, competition, and so on), and to do this both for characterizing a given phase (static synchronic analysis) and for measuring change from one phase to another (dynamic diachronic analysis) of the progress of the productive forces.

      If a single standard is chosen to describe two systems, successive or simultaneous, there is a relation between w and r that is illustrated (see page 41) either by two curves of type C or by one curve C plus one straight line D.

      In the system of Sraffa there can exist no common standard for two systems. In that system, wages being replaced by their equivalent (the consumption goods destined for workers), labor disappears from the production equations: commodities are then only produced by means of commodities without intervening labor (which remains underlying); the surplus being entirely attributable to capital, which becomes the only factor of production! We have here reached the highest stage of alienation: commodities (including subsistence goods for workers) have children (a larger quantity of commodities) without the intervention of labor as such. This supreme alienation is comparable to that of the financier who, making money by means of money, regards money as in itself productive (see chapter two). Or, even further, material inputs are made to disappear, replaced by their equivalent in past labor. Then in the system will appear only one factor, dated labor falling back on the factor “productive time” à la Böhm-Bawerk.

      All post-Marxian economics has tried—in order to get rid of Marx—to put the origin of “progress” somewhere other than in social labor. To that end, it has invented specific productivities of “the factors of production,” or reduced these to that of the “commodity” (Sraffa: “commodities produced by means of commodities”), or to that of money (money produces money), or to that of time (“time is money,” Böhm-Bawerk’s discounting of the future), or—today—that of “science” (“cognitive capitalism,” descended from the marginal efficiency of capital as it was understood by Keynes). All these are nothing but forms of the basic alienation proper to conventional bourgeois social thought.

      Marx had filled out his critique of capitalist reality with a critique of the writings that aimed to legitimize capitalist practice, whether those produced by the great classics, who founded modern thought in the domain of the new political economy (Smith, Ricardo), or of those from the vulgar economics already present in his day (Bastiat and others). Critique of the post-Marxian economists is no less necessary. It has been carried out by several good Marxists who have thrown off the yoke of exegesis. In this regard, the contributions of Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff have been crucial. Let me point here to my own contribution to critique of the best attempts of conventional economics to extend the classics (Keynes, Sraffa) and also my critique of the new forms of vulgar economics (which I called “the witchcraft of modern times”).⁵

      8. ECONOMIC LAWS AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

      The schema of expanded reproduction thus seems to reveal that precise economic laws do exist, which, like any other laws, have an objective existence, that is, impose themselves willy-nilly on everyone.

      To conclude, the importance of Volume II of Capital, as it stands, is essential: it shows that, in the capitalist mode, social reproduction appears first and foremost as economic reproduction. Whereas in the precapitalist modes, in which exploitation was transparent, reproduction implied direct intervention from the level of the superstructure, that is not so here. This qualitative difference needs to be emphasized.

      There has been no question, so far, of the class struggle. This is, indeed, absent from the direct discourse of Volume II of Capital.

      “Economic determinism” was foreign to Marx, but not so to historical Marxism. A linear economic determinism, linked to a scientistic philosophical vision of “progress,” was predominant in the Second International and became even more dominant when social democracy, after the Second World War, abandoned its claim to derivation from Marx.

      One attitude that can be taken in this connection is that the class struggle setting bourgeoisie and proletariat against each other over the division of the product (the rate of surplus-value) is subordinate to economic laws. The class struggle can, at most, only reveal the equilibrium rate that is objectively necessary. It occupies, in this context, a position comparable to that of the “invisible hand” of bourgeois economics. The language of the “universal harmony” of social interests is replaced by that of the “objective necessities of progress.”

      What we have here is a reduction of Marxism to the so-called Marxist (or, rather, Marxian) political economy that is fashionable in the English-speaking world under the name of “Marxian economics.” According to this view, there are economic laws, which constitute objective necessities, irrespective of the class struggle.

      On such a basis, however, it is no longer possible to conceive of a classless society in the true sense, since it appears as a society identical with class society. The progress of the productive forces continues to dominate it, just as this progress has been dominant throughout history. This progress has its own laws: an ever more intensified division of labor, in the form we know well. Capitalism is seen as guilty only of not being able to carry forward the march of progress effectively enough. As for those СКАЧАТЬ