Interest is a relationship between two capitalists, not between capitalist and labourer. In interest, therefore, in that specific form of profit in which the antithetical character of capital assumes an independent form, this is done in such a way that the antithesis is completely obliterated and abstracted. Interest represents this characteristic not as directly counterposed to labour, but rather as unrelated to labour, and simply as a relationship of one capitalist to another. . . . But it represents this characteristic of capital as something which belongs to it outside the production process. the ownership of capital as a means of appropriating the products of the labour of others. In this sense, the division between the money-capitalist and the industrial capitalist blurs the lines of social conflict. Not only that, the two often experience themselves as opposed. One effect of this separation is to obscure the link between profit and the labor process: the money-owners who receive profit in the form of interest (or dividends) are different from the actual managers of the production process. So now we have one set of individuals personifying capital at the M moment, when capital is in its most abstract form as money, and a different set of individuals personifying it in the C and P moments, when capital is crystallized in a particular productive activity. Therefore, the industrial capitalist, as distinct from the owner of capital as a functionary irrespective of capital. So “the other part of surplus-value - profit of enterprise - must necessarily appear as coming not from capital as such, but from the process of production. “The specific social attribute of capital under capitalist production - that of being property commanding the labor-power of another,” now appears as interest, the return simply on owning money. The possibility of carrying out a capitalist enterprise with borrowed funds implies a division of the surplus into two parts - one attributable to the management of the enterprise, the other to ownership as such. as are prescribed by the branch of industry concerned.” it is profitably invested in industry or commerce, and such operations are undertaken with it. “He is the personification of capital as long as. “The productive capitalist who operates on borrowed funds,” he writes, “represents capital only as functioning capital,” that is, only in the production process itself. There, Marx introduces the distinction between the money-capitalist who owns money but does not manage the production process, and the industrial, functioning, or productive capitalist who controls the enterprise but depends on money acquired from elsewhere. This is the subject of Part V of Volume 3 of Capital, which explores the relation of ownership of money as such (“interest-bearing capital”) with ownership of capitalist enterprises.įor present purposes, the interesting part begins in Chapter 23. And it is not at all obvious what the relationships are between them, or which of them should be considered the capitalist. But once credit markets allow capitalists to use loaned funds rather than their own, and even more once we have joint-stock enterprises with salaried managers in charge of the production process, these roles are no longer played by the same individuals. There, the capitalist is just the personification of capital. This is the framework of Volume 1 of Capital. Whatever happens in the circuit of capital, the capitalist is the one who makes it happen. They are the owner of the money, and they are the steward of the means of production, and they are the master of the production process. When we have a single representative enterprise, managed by its owner and financed out of its own retained profits, then there’s no need to worry about where the “capitalist” is in this process. Capital is a sum of money yielding a return, and it is a mass of commodities used in production, and it is a form of authority over the production process, each in turn. It’s the conversion of a sum of money into a mass of commodities, which are transformed through a production process into a different mass of commodities, which are converted back into a (hopefully greater) sum of money, allowing the process to start again. Or from another point of view, it’s a process. Capital, for Marx, is not a thing, it’s a social relation, a way of organizing human activity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |