Another one from Goldner
From: Loren Goldner lrgoldner@yahoo.com Date: December 8, 2006 10:59:52 AM EST To: dhenwood@panix.com Subject: Another one
Dear Doug,
The following is an intervention from another list, in response to
certain critics who argue that primitive accumulation in Marx was a
one-off development of the early modern period and no longer exists.
It follows my recent message about imperialism and, I think, deepens
it. If you think it’s worthwhile, I’d be grateful if you’d post it on
your list.
Thanks
Loren
First, on the term “primitive accumulation”. It may be the case that
I, for one, cast the net a bit too wide in the use of the term
“primitive accumulation”. So let’s find another one, if necessary. We
need a concept that includes all forms of non-reproduction: in
addition to the classical recruitment of petty producers to the wage-
labor proletariat, the free inputs capital takes from the looting of
nature, and the free inputs that come from non-reproduction of labor
power, of capital plant and infrastructure, where they occur. The
Marxian critique of capitalism insists on explaining capitalism in
terms of “exchange of equivalents” (Marx’s reply to the befuddlement
of Smith and Ricardo over where profit came from, once one eliminated
populist ideas about swindle, selling commodities above their value,
etc.) and I have used the term “primitive accumulation” to describe
those phenomena (as per above) which do not NOT involve the exchange
of equivalents, but rather “loot” for the system.
That said, I think a few points are in order.
Vols. I and II of Capital are of necessity a hermetic model of a
world in which there are only capitalists and wage laborers (or
people being drafted to become wage laborers), and mainly describes
capital from the viewpoint of the single enterprise. This is
fundamental both for analyzing the relationship between actual
capitalism (wage workers and capitalists in Depts. I and II) on one
hand and both the large (and ever-growing) wage labor force made up
of unproductive consumers, from civil servants to corporate
bureaucrats to the military sector, as well as the petty producers
(now primarily in the Third World) where classical “separation from
the means of production” continues to this day. The vol. I and II
pure capitalist model “draws a circle” around capitalists and wage
laborers and sets the stage for showing how that “circle” interracts
with the people and nature outside it. Only at the end of vol. II
does Marx introduce the fundamental concept of the TOTAL SOCIAL
CAPITAL and discard the vantage point of the single enterprise.
Marx never finished the book, and as Engels says in his preface to
vol. II, Marx was most dissatisfied with the concluding chapter in
the section on expanded reproduction. Rosa Luxemburg took up the
unresolved issues where Marx left off, as she saw them, and proposed
the solution of the sale of part of the surplus product to non-
capitalist buyers as completing the circuit. Further, she emphasized
the centrality of the international system of loans through which
part of the non-capitalist product came “free” to the capitalist
world. I don’t see how anyone can argue with her portraits of the
looting of American farmers by finance capital, of the Egyptian
cotton crop by Anglo-French banks, and of Africa and China by the
British as forms of primitive accumulation providing “loot” (in the
form of concrete goods) to the “core”, pure system.
Luxemburg was unique, of all the theoreticians mentioned in this
debate, (I have not read Bonefeld on this) in insisting on the
concrete material conditions of reproduction (see her Anti-Kritik, or
reply to the critics of the Accumulation of Capital) as fundamental
to the understanding of how expanded reproduction is possible. I have
never seen in Grossmann or Bukharin or any of her other critics any
comparable insistence on the limits of the abstract reproduction
schema in settling this question. Luxemburg uses the example of an
entrepreneur launching a new railroad based merely on mathematical
calculations of its profitability, instead of an analysis of the real
conditions for its potential operation, to show the folly of an
approach that relies merely on some abstract solution to the schema
of vol. II.
Luxemburg’s model of imperialism was, in my opinion, far more
convincing than Lenin’s, who took the idea of export of capital
because of flagging demand in the metropolis from the Fabian Hobson.
For Luxemburg the issue was not the “export of capital” as such but
both the external sale of part of the surplus product PLUS the “free”
element (free in the sense of non-reproduction) that came back to the
core system from the outside. Luxemburg’s model explains better than
Lenin’s why subjection to primitive accumulation short-circuits any
serious development in regions open to imperialist looting, as the
20th century so amply demonstrated.
Critics of Luxemburg have focused on flaws in her model of the
internal dynamic of the pure system, and seen her (as Comrade Antonio
does in the letter I translated) as being concerned with “markets”.
(I’m glad he didn’t drag out the old canard of her
“underconsumptionism”) I think this is a caricature, because she
clearly argues that the system of international loans (not
particularly voluntary, as the case of the Egyptian cotton crop
shows) supplements the weak buying power of the colonial or (today)
under-developed world. What is fundamental to Luxemburg, following
Marx’s closed (vols. I and II) and open (last section of vol. II and
vol. III) models, is the exchange of non-equivalents between the core
of the system and labor power resources outside it. The advanced
countries sell commodities to the petty producers, and lend them
money to buy such commodities, and then get an important segment of
loot in the commodities which return to the center for debt repayment.
Further, to the extent it was possible in her lifetime, Luxemburg
shows how capitalism solves the problems of “markets” for a time with
finance (in her case, once again, international finance). She was
writing long before capitalism discovered consumer credit for the
working class as another temporary supplement to “underconsumption”.
The only sense in which Luxemburg was an “underconsumptionist” in the
usual use of the term is in her demonstration of how taxation for
armaments pushes workers’ wages below a reproductive level.
Obviously, credit has increased a thousand times in significance
since Luxemburg’s time, as a way of temporarily prolonging business
cycles, while changing nothing of the fundamental contradictions of
the system.
So I’ll try out my own theory, a modified version of Luxemburg, which
I have been developing since the 1970’s. What I have called permanent
“primitive accumulation’ (or any other appropriate term we might
decide upon) is necessary to capitalism because the closed system
(only capitalists and wage laborers) necessarily in the course of a
cycle, because of the anarchic character of the system, develops an
ever increasing gap between the total capitalist valuation of assets
and their actual value in terms of their cost of reproduction in the
present. A capitalist depression or crisis is a kind of retroactive
“planning’ where a huge shakeout re-equilibrates capitalist
valuations and real reproductive value in a deflationary crash. This
was obvious in the 19th century when such a crisis occurred every ten
years or so (1808- 1819- 1827- 1837- 1846- 1857- 1866- 1873, etc.) It
is less obvious in the period since 1914 when the state has much more
actively attempted to preserve capitalist valuations against
devalorization by techniques usually associated with “Keynesianism’.
We are of course in 2006 in the midst of probably the biggest
fictitious credit bubble in the history of capitalism.
We have to remember that capital appears to capitalists as claims on
future cash flow from whatever asset, in the form of profit (stocks)
interest (bonds, and the myriad new “financial products”) and rent
(deeds and other titles to real property). For long periods of
‘normality’ these pieces of paper are “valued’ as a capitalization of
the anticipated cash flow in an environment ultimately determined by
the prevailing rate of profit, but only ultimately.
During these periods, and above all in the run-up to the crisis when
the bloated paper values are far out of alignment with real
reproductive values in the closed system (capitalists and wage
laborers) THIS GAP IS COVERED BY LOOT, i.e. primitive accumulation in
the broad sense I use it. Hence its permanence: because capitalism is
an anarchic system, it necessarily generates that gap, and it must
cover it by sucking in material wealth (labor power, commodities)
wherever they can be found, to compliment the surplus value generated
in the pure system, or cannibalize existing labor power, plant and
infrastructure inside the closed system.
One can declaim all one wants about “Luxemburg’s errors”, but I don’t
see how anyone can deny how her problematic, posed in this way, is a
reality.
People puzzled by my personal fascination with these forms of
FICTITIOUS CAPITAL, as in international monetary questions, or the
evolution of new forms of “money” created in the post-1980’s world of
hedge funds and new “financial products”, might now better understand
that I am interested in them precisely because they are fundamental
to the shift of value from c and v to s (particularly where c and v
are not being reproduced) as well as in sucking loot from sources
outside the pure system, all to save the paper values from
deflationary collapse.
The implicit final stage of this process is the self-cannibalization
of the system, if and when the sources of loot outside the “closed
system” are exhausted. We have not yet seen this in dramatic form in
the case of the era of U.S. world hegemony. But history does provide
the example of the Nazi period in Germany, when Hjalmar Schacht ran
up a huge debt pyramid to finance German rearmament in the 1933-1938
period, while holding real wages at 50% of 1929 levels. The
difference between Germany then and the U.S. today is that Germany
had been shorn of most of its external sources of loot after 1918,
and hence had to seize some new ones militarily after 1938.
Without wanting to sound apocalyptic, something similar could happen
in the U.S.-centered system if and when the U.S. loses its ability to
tap wealth throughout the world with dollar-denominated accumulation.
Comments, anyone?
Loren lrgoldner@yahoo.com