Is capitalism collapsing?
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Strange reply here to this article in the current Socialist Standard:
The collapse already happened, Adam
Apparently, in speculating about a theoretical end to capitalism if productivity rose so high that the prices of commodities would fall to zero, Marx was referring to the collapse of the Gold Standard, which happened in the 1930s when the rate of profit also fell to zero and has not risen since, i.e capitalism already collapsed 80-90 years ago. Jehu also unnecessarily makes Marx the co-author of Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Marx was not referring to the gold standard,( and that concept did not exist on his time ) and during the 1930 capitalism did not collapse either , that is a false theory created by the Trotskyists and the Marxist-Humanists, and Raya Dunayeskaya which indicated that it was saved by State Capitalism. Marx was talking about the probability of commodity prices falling down to zero. Capitalism is still alive and it has not fallen yet, and it will not fall by itself. If we go according to this analysis we can also say that capitalism collapsed in 2008, therefore, it happened again 11 years ago , and the rate of profits fell too. It is not a strange rely, it is a weird reply
Whoever departs from the experiences of the Soviet Union and any of its ideologist will alway fail on his/her conclusions. The main idea is to indicate that state capitalism started in 1930 when Stalin came to power instead of admitting that state capitalism was established since the very beginning of the Soviet Union in 1917 and capitalism was not saved by establishing state capitalism in a world scale. Capitalism suffered one of its normal cyclical crisis but it did not collapse
For those would might be interested, here is Jehu’s reply in what is promising to be a saga:
Breakdown was more than a thought experiment
Not sure if this directly relates to your discussion with Jehu, certainly not concerning what Marx thought, but just read this on prices.
“U.S. natural gas prices in West Texas have been trading in negative territory for more than two weeks…prices for gas in the Permian basin are set – fell to a record low of minus $4.28 per million British thermal units last week. Prices have been negative in the real-time or next-day markets since March 22. ”
This is “largely due to a lack of pipeline space, forcing some drillers to pay those with spare pipeline capacity to take unwanted gas…
Permian drillers flared a record 0.4 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) in the third quarter of 2018 and are expected to flare at least 0.6 bcfd by mid-2019, according to Oslo-based energy data provider Rystad Energy. One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to fuel about 5 million U.S. homes for a day. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an environmental group believes drillers are burning more than the official figures. Anyone who ships gas on a pipe must pay the pipeline company for use of the space. Normally, gas producers or their customers pay this fee, but can then sell the gas at the end of the line for a profit. And shippers with long-term deals aren’t affected. Those that are paying negative prices are the drillers who did not in the past commit to shipments already. Because they don’t have the space on the pipeline, they are paying others who already have it to take that gas, effectively losing money despite producing the gas…”
I said it was going to become a saga:
Getting past semantics with Adam
He makes some odd claims here. First, that workers have been paid less than the value of their labour power since the 1930s and, second, that the labour-time content of most commodities has not been falling. Hardy dealt with this last point in this article from 1957:
ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1957/risingprices.htm
ALB wrote:And, incidentally, to go back to our starting point, the problem of the writer of the letter to the Daily Mail will be solved in a way he has not thought of. Under Socialism prices will not be high or low; there will be no prices!
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Another nail in the coffin for the social democrats calling themselves socialists. There would not be any commodity and prices in a socialist society, it must be a free access society. Many of them do not even understand the concept of commodity and the concept of capital, they are not ‘economists”, they are accountant
Its an interesting exchange but what does Jehu mean by the “value of labour power” when he says, following Grossman, that workers have been paid less than the value of their labour power since the 1930s? If the value of labour power equates in value terms with what is required to produce and reproduce the working abilities that workers sell to the capitalists for wages then almost by definition these two things must coincide in the long run, the wage being the monetary expression of price of labour power.
Granted, wages can temporarily fall below what is conventionally considered the value of labour power as in recession or rise above it as in a boom due to fluctuations in the demand for labour power. But surely if this was threatening to become a permanent state of affairs the notional “value of labour power” would itself adjust downwards bringing it more into line with wages once again?
I can’t understand how it would be possible for workers to be paid less than the value of their labour-power for a period of some ninety years. Wages are supposed to cover the cost of maintaining a worker’s skill and health, i.e to reproduce their working skills, and the cost of doing this is the value (in the Marxian sense) of their skills. So, if they are paid less than this they can’t reproduce their labour-power properlt and their working skills and health will deteriorate, which would be detrimental to the capitalist class by reducing their productivity. The capitalists would be weakening, if not killing, the golden goose. The whole idea is preposterous and hasn’t been the case because it couldn’t have been.
Exactly ALB. But surely also “the value of labour power” would decline under these circumstances if workers were paid less for any length of time? What I am trying to say is that discrepancies between wage levels and the value of labour power can only ever be short term phenomena governed by fluctuations in the demand for labour built into the capitalist trade cycle – meaning there is a long term tendency for each to equilibrate with the other. You cant possibly have a long term discrepancy lasting all of 90 years where these two things consistently diverge which is what has been suggested It just doesn’t make sense in terms of Marxian theory.
You are right. When introducing the concept of labour-power and its value in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital Marx explains that, unlike other commodities, the value of labour-power contains “a historical and moral element” that varies from country to country and depends “to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country”. However, “at any given period” this is fixed. What this suggests is that the value of labour-power can change over a longer period, either up or down. In other words, as you point out, the value of labour can change through this historical and moral element coming to be reduced.
Marx is also fairly explicit about what paying workers less than the value of their labour-power over a long period would mean:
The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable. If the price of labour-power fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state. But the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time requisite to turn it out so as to be of normal quality.
It also means that reducing wages below the value of labour power is not likely to increase profits in the long run, as is being suggested, but rather to reduce them as a sub-normal quality of labour-power won’t be able to produce as much surplus value as labour-power of normal quality would.
I think Robbo is correct . That was the case of the workers living in Company Town ( Bateyes ) who were working for the sugar industry
I think the most illuminating chapter on this ; or the crippling of labour power due to either over work or not providing labourers sufficient remuneration to maintain their labour power is in chapter 10 ;
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm
It broadens the subject out to slavery proper as well as wage slavery.
And talks about replacing crippled labour power of the [Manchester] manufacturers with fresh stock from the ‘peasantry’;
……..from pastures of Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in Wiltshire,……..
Or in the southern slave states or replacing the cripple labour power
…….of the swamps of the Mississippi….
… from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky……
Or fresh African stock from the slave markets of New Orleans
So it can ultimately be a bit like over working the land, without ‘guano’ like fertilisation to restore it, resulting in diminishing returns on productivity.
Which required remedial action like the Factory Acts;
………the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France…………..
I suppose the ‘demoralisation’ of a national stock of labour power from overwork and/or underpay could have other effects other the obviously physical.
So you might see increasing mental health problems, addictive drug abuse and a rising prison population; as in the US?
The saga continues:
This time Jehu has changed tack — what workers are paid is not wages let alone the value of their labour-power, apparently because it’s no longer possible to calculate how many troy ounces of gold what they are paid is the equivalent of.
I’ve also come across a new word “to gaslight” which seems to be all the vogue in America as a criticism of Trump’s behaviour. It seems a bit of nasty accusation. Anybody know exactly what it means?
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