William Coker

Humanities 112

Marx on Commodities

In Capital, Volume 1 Karl Marx sets out to establish the specific features of capitalism by
contrast to other social systems. In this contrast the place of the commodity is central.
Commodity exchange is central to capitalism in ways that it is not to previous frameworks of
economic and social interaction.

A commodity is a product that human labor creates for the purpose of trade on a market. Both
of these activities—production and exchange—must be present for something to be a
commodity. Land and other natural assets that people buy and sell are not commodities, and
neither is a product produced directly to satisfy human needs, without being bought and sold
for money. If my sister makes me a scarf it is not a commodity, but when a company produces
a scarf (even if materially identical to my sister’s scarf) for sale on a market it is one.

The exchange of commodities has existed for as long as there have been markets and money.
What makes capitalist society different from previous social forms is that in capitalism
commodity exchange is the dominant (though not the only) form of economic activity.

As long as people have lived together in settled communities, whether on simple peasant
farms, in towns where craftsmen and traders are at home, or in skyscraper-studded cities
where multinational corporations have their headquarters, their work has been a cooperative,
social activity regulated by a division of labor in accordance with the different positions that
individuals occupy within society. In every society some sort of power structure has kept the
system in place and regulated relationships between individuals.

From pg. 324-326 Marx lays out four models for economic life which are not capitalist. The
simplest of these is the peasant family in a country in which cities and markets do not yet play
a dominant role in economic and social life. Here people do different kinds of work to satisfy
their own and each other’s needs. Relationships within the family may determine who does
which jobs; all see each accomplished task as the contribution of the individual in question to
the good of the family. People see the power relations at work as natural because they extend
from family ties.

In the feudal economy, the relationships of mutual dependence among members of the
community are more formalized. Serfs, knights, lords and priests have clearly defined rights
and duties toward each other, culminating in a complex web of personal relationships in
which different goods and services, both material and symbolic, are made and exchanged.
Each person sees his own work as an expression of who he is (as knight, serf, lord or priest).
The different exchanges that obtain between any two people are largely determined in
advance by the position of each person in the hierarchy, and everyone knows this. They see
the whole system as an order established by God for the good of human beings, in which
everyone knows his place.

What these two models do not manifest is any attempt to establish a uniform standard of value
by which any two of the goods or services produced is exchangeable for any other. This
happens only in commodity exchange, by means of a universal equivalent: some one
commodity chosen to stand in for all of the others. Gold and paper money are examples of
such a universal equivalent. Only when such a system is in place does it make any sense to
talk about commodities as the receptacles of one uniform “value” in different quantities. Only
then, likewise, does it make sense to think of this value as the product of one uniform activity
called “labor” that exists equally in all of the many human activities that go into the
production of commodities. The qualitative differences among both things and activities
suddenly appear as mere quantitative differences.

“Free conscious activity” (see pg. 76) gives way to “human labor in the abstract,” and the life-
world of human beings is progressively commodified. This commodification is part and
parcel of the domination of both society and nature by capital. The reason for this is that
“value” is not as politically neutral a concept as it might seem. The act of pledging one’s
ability to labor for a given period of time for a wage (the standard work contract) is also an
exchange of two commodities: labor-power for a wage. Paradoxically, this is an act of free
and equal exchange (one commodity exchanged for another of equal value) through which
one party comes to dominate the other.

To see why this is so we must remember that each instance of commodity exchange is a
leveling process by which the assertion of homogeneous “value,” though present in different
quantities, erases from view the qualitative differences between different things: those
features of the things in question that are not only different but incommensurate: that is, not
subject to a common measure. When we compare a book to an apple, for instance, lots of
material and sensory differences get lost in the activity of measuring the two items merely as
receptacles of value in different quantities.

Like books and apples, the commodity called “labor-power” has one feature that makes it
qualitatively different from whatever commodity it may be exchanged for (such as a wage).
This feature is labor-power’s ability to produce more value than it trades for (which typically
equates to no more than is needed to keep the worker working). This “extra value” Marx calls
“surplus value,” and he sees it as the key to the production of profit, and of the economic
surplus of the society in general, where this is defined as production in excess of what
society’s members need to sustain themselves.

Consider the case of Adam Smith’s workhouse, where workers make pins. To create the unit
of value called a “pin,” the capitalist brings together the other units of value necessary for its
production: labor-power + raw materials + instruments of labor (machines and tools) = pins.
But once the process is complete and the pins sell on the market for more than it cost to
produce them, we find that the final value (pins) amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

Labor-power is one commodity among others, insofar as it is an exchangeable value that must
be produced: one must provide varying quantities of food, training and other goods in order to
make the labor forthcoming. Just like the wage for which workers exchange it, it is a product
that realizes “exchange value” by being traded on the market. Yet in addition to this, it is also
a “use value” for the capitalist who buys it—that is, it is useful to him—insofar as it produces
value beyond what it trades for. It is “value-producing value.”

Workers thus necessarily expend more labor than is necessary to sustain themselves: this
additional labor Marx calls “surplus labor,” embodied in “surplus value,” which belongs to
the capitalist. Moreover, it is in the capitalist’s interest to make this “surplus value” as great as
possible. Competition with other capitalists mandates a maximum of surplus that can be
reinvested in improving or expanding production. Publically traded companies must
reimburse and compete for shareholders, and capitalists of all kinds must pay back with
interest loans they have taken out from banks. In this sense, even capitalists do not have a
completely free hand; Marx writes in Volume III that they are merely “the agents of capital.”

If the laborers needed only to produce goods to satisfy human needs, and did not also need to
produce a profit for the capital-owner who has invested in their labor-power, then all of this
“surplus labor” could be put to use according to the negotiated collective interests of the
producers, but as it is, it belongs to capital.

In the form of “surplus value,” then, the bourgeoisie controls the economic surplus just as
King Gilgamesh had controlled the economic surplus of the City of Uruk by holding the key
to the “sacred storehouse” in which surplus grain was kept (see Tablets I and VI of
Gilgamesh). He commanded the surplus labor of the society. The reason the bourgeoisie is
able to control the surplus value and labor in capitalism is that it owns the means of
production: workspaces, tools and machinery, raw materials and so forth. Yet at the same
time the bourgeoisie is beholden to capital, the collective product of the labor process, which
it is the job of the bourgeoisie to safeguard and increase.

Preparing the way for capitalism are / were a series of historical events (urbanization, war,
eviction of peasants from land, improved farming technologies making much farm labor
superfluous), that separated people from the ability to sustain themselves and their families on
their own. The result is what Marxists call “proletarianization”: the growth of a class of
people who must sell their labor power for a wage in order to survive. These people are
dependent on capital.

The realization that capital is also dependent on labor is the motor of the workers’ movement
and the key to class struggle in capitalism. Unionization, strikes, lock-outs and political
pressure for redistribution and other social-democratic measures are weapons for the workers
to resist or at least reduce their domination by capital. The fact that the capital-owning class
nonetheless controls the means of survival for the laborers still gives it considerable power to
fight these initiatives. Other elements of state policy including military and police activities
can also contribute to the efforts of the capital-owning class (the bourgeoisie) to maintain its
domination over labor. All of these class battles are effectively battles over the redistribution
of surplus value amassed in the production process and realized in exchange (when the goods
come to market and become proper commodities by being exchanged at a profitable rate).

What we have to remember, though, is that all of these struggles are still within capitalism. To
move beyond capitalism, the working class must not only definitively win the class war and
abolish the institution of capital by taking full control of the means of production; it must then
somehow design a new social order that is not based on the production and exchange of
commodities, but on the production of goods and services to respond directly to human needs.
To understand this problem we should return to Marx’s analysis of the commodity.

Human production has always been a social and cooperative activity, however structured by
different power relations and configurations of the division of labor. Yet in all the pre-
capitalist systems, these relations and configurations were directly visible in the work being
done. In Marx’s terms, the social character of work—or indeed of all “free conscious activity”
by which people transform their natural and social environment—was apparent to all. In
capitalism, on the other hand, we definitively establish our social positions—the position our
labor occupies within the whole of our society’s labor—only in the act of exchanging the
products of our labor. As a result, our relations to our fellows become visible to us only in the
form of exchange relationships among commodities.

In the form of “labor-power,” of “human labor in the abstract,” our “free conscious activity”
becomes, not an expression of who we are individually and socially, but rather an alien thing
that we have to sell in order to buy from capital the right to life. Yet the things that our labor
produces entertain relationships among each other in the form of relative values by which
they are exchanged. In a world upside down, human activity becomes a thing while the things
it produces become like people, maintaining relationships with one another.

Commodities are our fetishes just as the door is a fetish for Enkidu on Tablet VII of
Gilgamesh. Though we worked to produce these things within the context of relationships to
other people, we treat them as if they possessed a power independent of that work and those
relationships. Like the fetish-gods of ancient civilizations, they dominate us, who should
dominate them. This fetishism, which becomes visible in the exchange of commodities,
reflects the alienation that characterizes their production (see pg. 76 ff).

In capitalism, production and exchange form a unity in which each can only be understood in
relation to the other. In other words, the alienation of labor and commodity fetishism are
mutually dependent realities which can only be overcome if society as whole leaves
capitalism behind. Alienation and fetishism are not mere psychological conditions, but inhere
in a social reality in which one class dominates another.

Where labor is one commodity among others, its value can be driven down via technological
changes and capital-friendly state policies (including in the realms of international trade and
war with other states). Even when labor power trades at its value, as a value-producing power
it is in a sense “undervalued” and ever more so as the complexity of industry and the division
of labor increases (as happened in the industrial revolution). The existence of such a thing as
“value” ensures the domination of capital over labor and thereby over the whole of society.

Lots of socialists before Marx had written about the exploitation of labor by capital, but
Marx’s analysis differs from theirs in one subtle but important respect. While the other
socialists generally described exploitation in terms of the bourgeoisie cheating or stealing
from the worker, or not paying him the full value of his labor, Marx instead derived class
domination from the very existence of such concepts as “value” and “labor” in the historical
context of capitalist commodity exchange.

Like all concepts, “value” and “labor” are unifying terms of thought that suppress differences.
A society truly emancipated from capitalism would hence not be one of crushing uniformity,
but one where diverse activities could flourish, satisfying human needs without being held to
the unifying goal of a limitless increase in “value” (whether measured as GDP or otherwise).
How such a society can be achieved is of course a much more difficult question, involving not
just theory but theoretically informed action. After all, Marx wrote that “until now
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Marx’s Theory of Labor Value

There is frequently confusion concerning Marx’s theory of labor value. It is indeed a
confusing topic, partly because of the terms involved, and partly because of subtle differences
between Marx and other thinkers who preceded him, some of whom were even socialists.

Often in everyday speech we use the word “value” in a wholly subjective sense. Individuals
value different things, and any one of us may “give value” to something, like education, art,
culture, other people’s feelings, good-tasting food, our appearance, or anything else, while
others do not. Seeing that one student does all of the reading for this class while another does
not might make us say that the first student “values” the class while the other does not.

Like many other economic thinkers, Marx uses the word “value” somewhat differently. To
him value is something that exists objectively, though it can exist only in a certain type of
society. Capitalist society, in which the social relations of people are managed through the
production and exchange of commodities, is the society in which “value” in this sense comes
into being. It is this type of society that organizes itself through the reciprocal exchange of
commodities as units of “value.”

We know that we exchange commodities as units of value because as soon as different

commodities are measured against each other through the medium of a universal equivalent
(money), they appear to us as different quantities of the same homogeneous substance. This
substance can only be value, because the commodities have nothing else in common. Their
only common feature is that they are the products of “human labor in the abstract,” a concept
which only enters our heads once we engage in commodity exchange.

If we added up all the commodities produced and sold by all sectors of an economy in a given
year, we could calculate both the total value produced by that society in that year, and the
total labor-time that it took to produce it. We can also calculate the total surplus value created
if we subtract from the total value produced that which was spent in the production process.

Economists carry out calculations of this sort all the time, even if they don’t all use Marx’s
terminology while doing so. Complexity enters the picture only when we have to divide up
the aggregate surplus value and apportion it to different sectors and different commodities.

Each commodity represents a portion of the total value produced by a society in a given
period of time (or we might say, a portion of the total value on the market at a given moment).
The labor-time required to produce that value under given conditions is equally a portion of
the total labor-time expended by society in production, or represented in the commodities
currently on the market.

The tricky thing is that this value may or not be the commodity’s price. In fact, most of the
time it is not. To put it differently, much of the time commodities do not trade at their value.
Capitalists compete with each other over how to maximize the portion of the society’s total
surplus value that accrues to them, rather than to other capitalists. In particular, capital-
intensive industries are better at capturing surplus value than labor-intensive industries.
It is not the case that a commodity that took more work-hours to make is necessarily more
expensive than one that took fewer, even if one calculates into the equation the work-hours
contained in parts of the commodity produced in a previous production process (as when one
makes an IPhone App. or an auto-part that includes another, smaller auto-part).
A commodity that took a lot of people a lot of time to make but was made badly may fail to
sell at all, and thus fall out of the equation of value entirely. Or it may sell at such a low price
that the market disciplines the individual capitalist (and through him, his workers) into
making it differently. A capitalist may purposefully contract the supply of a commodity in
order to drive up its price (as OPEC did with oil in the 1970’s, in an extreme case of a capital-
intensive industry). None of these cases contradicts Marx’s theory of value, which is not
intended as a method for predicting the price of any given commodity.

Marx does not develop his theory of labor value by looking at the prices of milk and IPhones
and then proposing that these prices must faithfully measure the amount of work-hours that
went into the production of each. He starts rather by equating the total monetary value of all
the commodities produced by a society as the aggregate value of its social product, and then
reasoning that the value of each individual commodity is a portion of this aggregate value.
The average labor-time necessary for the production of each commodity under given
conditions must be this value, since if all of these average labor-times were added up
(calculated according to average productivity for that sector at that time), the total would by
definition = the total labor-time expended by that society.

As I argue in the previous section, the capital-owning class (including industrialists, bankers
and landowners) controls the economic surplus of the society by commanding its surplus
labor and capturing the surplus value that labor produces. Industrial capitalists, moneylenders
and landowners contend over the apportionment of the total surplus value in the form of
profits, interest and rent. At the same time, owners of productive capital (business-owners, as
opposed to moneylenders and landowners) contend among each other for the relative portion
of the total social profits that each can walk home with. They do this not only in the
competition over who can more effectively exploit labor, but also in everything else they do
to increase the “exchange value” their commodities realize on the market.

Marx’s value theory is only a “labor theory of value”—arguing that the price of commodities
reflects the amount of labor-time that went into them—on the level of the social product as a
whole. “Labor theories of value” were very popular in Marx’s time, and many of them ran
into insoluble problems because they tried to derive price from value on the level of the
individual commodity. So why does Marx postulate the existence of something called “value”
which appears only fleetingly or approximately in the exchange values actually observed on
the market? What is the point of this notion of “value”?

Marx’s primary objective was to expose the power relations operating underneath the
apparent liberty and equality of the capitalist market. In his analysis of the commodity he
purports to expose how we fetishize commodities as receptacles of “value,” whether we are
aware of it or not. This fetishism, while analogous to a pagan-religious delusion, also reflects
the way our society is actually structured, with commodities standing in for the relationships
in which we stand toward each other.

Because we necessarily relate to commodities as things having “value” in their own right,
rather than as expressions of our mutual relations in society, we effectively naturalize a state
of affairs in which capital dominates labor, society and nature. Marx thinks that an analysis in
terms of “value” reveals the relation of labor to the whole of society, and informs efforts to
transform this relation. His value theory purports to expose profits, interest and rent as so
many forms of a surplus value embodying the surplus labor of the working class. This surplus
value becomes the battle-ground between capital and labor unless or until wage-workers (both
“blue-” and “white color”) overturn the whole system and institute a new one geared toward
production that satisfies human needs directly, rather than through the detour of “value.”

Nevertheless, some Marxian economists argue that if we do try to use his theory of labor
value to predict prices, over a long term that theory turns out to be approximately accurate
(and more so than rival value theories). For a version of this argument, see the blog post by
Michael Roberts in the link below:

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/william-baumol-and-the-transformation-
problem/

Why read Marx today?

As I have mentioned in class (at least in one section), when the second edition of the first
volume of Capital came out in 1872, Marx wrote that what made him happiest was seeing
that workers’ organizations were reading his book. This, and not “bourgeois-dom and its
doctrinaire professors” was the audience whose attention he most cherished. The importance
of Marx’s writings today similarly depends on whether or not they can teach us about the
practical realities and class dynamics of our own time. The worst thing of all for Marx would
be to see his work read as abstract social theory proper only to the time when it was written.

As you must know, Marx faces serious challenges today. Most serious, from the point of view
of a thinker convinced that the truth-value of any idea can only be tested in practice, is the
record of self-declared Marxists after his death. Didn’t Marx’s writings inspire two
generations of totalitarian dictators, responsible for some of the worst acts of inhumanity of
the twentieth century?

What Marx calls “a community of free individuals, working according to a common plan”
bears little resemblance to the gigantic, predatory state that reigned over the USSR as well as
all of the countries that imitated or were colonized by it—or the similar red leviathan that still
holds sway in China. At their worst, these states have overseen slave labor and even mass
starvation while waving the banner of socialism, something that would have horrified Marx.

The tragic histories of these countries in the century since the Russian Revolution in 1917
must be understood in their historical contexts. After the October Revolution and the resulting
Civil War, Russian industry lay in ruins, its industrial working class decimated. Much of the
best agricultural land as well as many of the most productive factories were lost to the
German Empire as a result of the humiliating treaty Lenin and Trotsky had to sign to end
Russia’s involvement in World War I.

Under these conditions, the Bolshevik leadership put off the project of communism to a later
date, building instead a state-directed capitalism that could develop and industrialize the
country as fast as possible, arguing that such rapid development would provide the basis for a
communist society sometime in the future. What the Bolshevik leaders thus called
“socialism” was an authoritarian regime in which the state—which gradually became
indistinguishable from the Communist Party—controlled the means of production, allocating
labor power and resources where it saw fit. Market competition was phased out, but many
other aspects of capitalism retained: alienated wage labor, commodity production and
centralized state power. Those who define “capitalism” in terms of the social relations
outlined by Marx in the first chapter of Capital have even termed the Soviet system “state
capitalist.” Because the Soviet leadership rejected the liberal political tradition as
“bourgeois,” democratic civil liberties, a free press and free elections did not exist.

Neither in China, nor Cuba, nor Vietnam, nor anywhere in the Soviet bloc, was the working
class in control of the means of production. Rather, a state bureaucracy drawn largely from
the educated urban middle classes managed both state and economy for the good (as they saw
it) of the society, and to maintain its own privileges. In short, the state exploited the workers.

In effect, these regimes treated Marxism as a formula for the rapid development of
economically backward countries, helping those countries withstand the pressures of western
imperialism. National liberation movements in the Third World turned to Marxism as a
weapon in the fight against domination by more established world powers. In many cases, the
leaders of these countries were motivated more by nationalist concerns than by the
internationalism on display in the Manifesto. Though he later changed his stripes due to the
prospect of Soviet assistance during the Cold War, Fidel Castro came out of the nationalist
wing of the resistance to the pro-American Batista regime, not the socialist one.

The model for all of these developmentalist dictatorships was Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin in
fact provided an explanation of his policies that can illuminate many other states as well.
Looking back at the long development of industrial capitalism in the West, Stalin told the
Soviet Politburo in 1928 that “we must accomplish within ten years what took the advanced
nations over a century to accomplish, otherwise they will crush us.”

The state-managed planned economy has indeed proven successful at building the industrial
bases of numerous countries. Stalin’s Soviet Union displayed rapid economic growth at a time
when the rest of the world was mired in the Great Depression. China has grown impressively
for several decades, retaining a great degree of centralized state planning. Yet the human cost
of such rapid development has been enormous. Mass murder and repression has in general
characterized these regimes.

To understand why, let us consider what Marx wrote about the origins of capitalism in
western Europe. In the section we have read on “primitive accumulation” (toward the end of
Vol. I of Capital), Marx reasons that capitalists and wage-laborers have not always existed;
these classes had to emerge historically. There were not always people with capital to invest
in production and other people with nothing to sell but their own labor-time. In order for the
class of “free workers” to emerge, England’s peasant population (for instance) had to be
“freed” from the land, separated from the means of production, and thus made dependent on
capital for their livelihood. On the other hand, the capitalists themselves needed seed capital
sufficient to employ these new wage-workers. In part, this seed capital came from the
colonies, where employers were able to play by different rules: enslaving people, for instance.

Trying to do within ten years what Europe had done over centuries of land enclosures and
colonial conquest, the Stalinist regime had neither the initial capital nor the obedient class of
wage-laborers ready to hand. By the early 1930’s, Stalin’s dictatorship had begun to apply
tremendous pressure on the Soviet population in order to build the industrial power that it
thought the country needed. The Stalinist formula for primitive accumulation consisted of
forced labor, meager wages and the murder of anyone who resisted, and indeed of anyone
considered superfluous to the production project. By massively ramping up the exploitation of
the Russian workers and peasants in whose name they spoke, the Stalinists were able to
“catch up” with the West militarily (more or less) and build other public institutions (again,
more or less) on the level of other industrialized countries. Sadly, the ecological devastation
wrought by Stalinism has also been on the level of that wrought by western capitalism.

Such was the regime that served as a model to many developing countries in the past century,
and which common parlance calls “communist.” Stalin and other dictators indeed justified
their actions by reference to Marx’s writings, especially his rather obscure notion of the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” (from the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program).
Commentators debate what exactly Marx meant by it, with some arguing that it was a
reference to the kind of working-class-led democracy on display in the 1871 Paris Commune.
Yet leaders of twentieth-century Communist Parties unanimously understood it as a
transitional period between capitalism and communism, in which a “vanguard party” would
lay the groundwork for a more developed and egalitarian society, in preparation for future
communism. When the day arrived, party and state would both “wither away.”

History has of course judged this idea harshly. What actually withered away in the Soviet bloc
was the “Communist” system itself. This is not surprising, from the standpoint of Marx’s
analysis of “primitive accumulation”—a transitional period on the way to capitalism. In a
number of formerly “Communist” countries—Russia and its satellites most of all—the old
state bureaucracy has come to form the nucleus of a new private bourgeoisie, having
“privatized” state assets to themselves. Something similar seems to be happening in Cuba as
well, while the still statist regime of Vietnam has now integrated Vietnamese labor into the
production system of globalized capitalism—and has become friends with the USA! All in all,
primitive accumulation has found its usual climax: Russia and its imitators are now capitalist.

In light of this history, we can now see that the confidence of some early twentieth-century
Marxists that the USSR was pushing forward the process of history toward the inevitable
triumph of communism was way off the mark. Insofar as we can discern a process of history
operating in and through the actions of leaders, states and economies over the last century,
this process has just led to more capitalism. What, then, does Marx have to say to us today?

The Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani has aptly written that Marx’s Capital does not
reveal the necessity of revolution, but only the necessity of crisis. Marx and his interpreters
agree that economic crisis is an intrinsic and even necessary feature of capitalist growth—in
line with today’s argot, we might say, “it’s a feature, not a bug.” Why should this be?

Banks lend money to business owners, who repay it later with a portion of the profits they
earn from the commodities that their workers produce. If this cycle repeats itself, then capital
continues to accumulate. But there is nothing to guarantee that this will indeed happen.

The business press and public opinion typically praises entrepreneurs and investors as risk-
takers, thus acknowledging the many dangers that lie in wait for the accumulation of capital.
Each business wants to maximize profit for the sake of attaining more profit that it can invest
back into production, and attract loans from banks or sell shares to investors. Hence each
capitalist is motivated to keep his labor costs low, skimping on wages if possible. Yet if the
whole of the working class sees its wages decline to the point that they can no longer buy
anything but the bare necessities, then sales may dip and along with them, profits. On the
other hand, if wages rise “too” high, then profits are in danger. In both cases banks and
shareholders will lose confidence in the productive economy and investment will sink. (The
first scenario is known as “overproduction” and the latter as a “wage squeeze”).
In times of crisis, people are thrown out of work, leaving job-seekers more plentiful than jobs.
With labor-power cheapened, capital can rewrite the rules, asserting once again its dominant
position. With unproductive capitals out of the game, the capitalist class also narrows,
concentrating its wealth in fewer hands. There were some people who got richer in the
immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the US—benefiting from foreclosures and
the like—but they were far fewer than the now proverbial “1%.”

Pushing the economy into crisis is of course a risky move, since the social unrest it provokes
has at least the potential to overturn the whole system. But there is no guarantee that the
proletariat will ever take advantage of one of the periodic breakdowns of economic growth to
bring about a new, post-capitalist system. To do so would likely require risk-taking on a much
larger scale than that undertaken by capitalists who sometimes make a bad bet.

Driving down the value of labor is crucial to maintaining capital’s power over the working
class, since workers in position to demand ever more concessions from their bosses threaten
profits, and with them the maintenance of the system. Developing new technology that
increases productivity is one way to make labor-power more disposable, hence cheaper. Marx
wrote that under the advancing industrial capitalism of his own day, workers cease to use
machines to execute tasks; rather, the worker now works for the machine. In our own day,
automation serves this function. Yet there is a problem with this approach. Given that labor-
power, as the commodity that binds the other commodities (raw materials, instruments)
together to form new commodities, is the source of new value in the production process,
employing less of it ultimately puts the accumulation of further surplus value in danger.

All of these dangers help explain Marx’s comment in the Manifesto that the bourgeoisie must
continually revolutionize the means of production if it is to survive as a class. In order for
things to stay the same, they have to keep changing. Much of the dizzying technological
progress of our own day, even if it emerged due to public investment (e.g. the Internet),
currently serves this purpose. Could it serve some other purpose under a different system?

During the Great Depression, the US government paid farmers to burn crops. From the
standpoint of a social system designed to meet human needs, can there be anything more
insane than that? Yet that is how it is in a system in which “overproduction” can mean ruin to
the producers. The government was acting to help farmers protect their place on the market.
Its action was eminently logical in market terms, though by another logic one might wonder
whether it would have made more sense to feed the urban poor with the surplus crops.

From an environmental standpoint, there can be almost no doubt that we now produce too
much, consuming too much of the earth’s resources in doing so, yet fail to meet the needs of a
lot of people in the world, even though it would be easy to do so given the state of
technology. In some western cities, empty office space and homes in which no one lives (kept
for the sake of investment) could easily house the entire homeless population. Meanwhile,
technological advances make our needs easier to meet, yet this fact confronts many workers
as a threat rather than a promise, since it threatens to devalue the one commodity they
possess, their labor-power—and in the worst case even threatens to make that labor-power
superfluous, consigning them to the “surplus population” of the impoverished. Arguably, all
these contradictions express the nature of a system that treats the fulfillment of our needs and
desires only as a side effect of the expansion of surplus value: that we work, not for ourselves
or each other, but for capital.