ALB
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You are right that passage is not very clear. David Fernbach in the 1981 Penguin translation translates it a bit differently, presumably to try to make it clearer:
“An increase in absolute surplus-value or any extension of surplus labour and hence the working day, with variable capital remaining the same and thus the same number of workers being employed at the same nominal wage, causes a fall in the value of constant capital compared with the total capital and compared with the variable capital, and thus raises the rate of profit, quite apart from the growth in the mass of surplus-value and a possibility rising rate of surplus-value. (It is immaterial here whether overtime is paid or not.)”
Marx seems to be explaining the empirical fact, as noted for instance by the Factory Inspector quoted in a footnote, that prolonging the working day and running the machines longer results in a greater (amount of) profit:
“Since in all factories there is a very large amount of fixed capital in buildings and machinery, the greater the number the hours that machinery can be kept at work the greater will be the return.”
Running the machinery and using the buildings more means they depreciate more quickly, irrespective of whether the amount of profit increases and of whether or not the workers are paid overtime. Later in the following sentences Marx points out, as you note, that this means
“the value of the fixed capital is now reproduced in a shorter series of turnover periods, and the time for which it has to be advanced in order to make a certain profit is reduced.”
In other words, less capital needs to be advanced for buildings and machinery as part of total capital, reducing the proportion of constant capital in total capital and so increasing the rate of profit (even if total profit remains the same, which in practice it won’t but will increase).
Of course the whole of volume 3 of Capital was stitched together by Engels from Marx’s unrevised manuscripts. So, it is not surprising that it contains many passages which are not immediately clear as to what Marx was getting at.
Alan, looks as if you have a recruit to your theory about collapse of civilisation. In fact he seems more apocalyptic than you:
“Boris Johnson has issued an apocalyptic warning that civilisation could collapse “like the Roman Empire” unless runaway climate change is stopped.
En route to the G20 summit in Rome, the prime minister said the world could “go backwards” – as it did after its famous empire fell – unless a deal to halt the climate emergency is struck at the Cop26 summit.
Humanity, civilisation and society can go backwards as well as forwards and when they start to go wrong, they can go wrong at extraordinary speed,” Mr Johnson said.
“You saw that with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.”
And he added: “It’s true today that, unless we get this right in tackling climate change, we could see our civilisation, our world, also go backwards.”
We could consign future generations to a life far less agreeable than our own,” he said – pointing to shortages of food and shortages of water and conflict caused by climate change.
“There is absolutely no question that this is a reality we must face.”
Pointing again to the example of the end of the Romans, the prime minister said: “People lost the ability to read and write and the ability to draw properly. They lost the way to build in the way that the Romans did.”It’s an extraordinary statement for a capitalist politician and a huge hostage to fortune.
Incidentally, I don’t think he is right, is he, that the Roman Empire collapse with “ extraordinary speed”. I thought it took a couple of centuries.
Now they are employing the language of right-wing populism:
Liam Norton from Insulate Britain said: “In a couple of days COP 26 will start in Glasgow and the eyes of the world will be on this country. Britain should be leading the world with radical plans to decarbonise our society.
“What we have instead is a budget that is yet another act of treason by this government upon its own people. It is a plan that facilitates mass murder. The citizens of this country should be in open revolt. We need change and we need it quickly.
“It is clear that this Government has no intention of getting on with the job that they were elected to do. No intention of protecting the country from climate collapse. Our children’s futures have been trashed. Our country sold out.
“We have been betrayed by the traitors now in power. We ask all decent ordinary people to join us, to rise up and take part in nonviolent civil resistance against tyranny.”
Politicians are not solving the problem of global warming and climate change because they are traitors, but because they have to operate within the capitalist economic system that puts profits first and is geared to endless growth (accumulation of capital).They are not solving it because they can’t.
The electors have set them an impossible task — and so have Insulate Britain.
I know the media are speculating that IB are aiming to embarrass the government by being in prison at the time of COPOUT 26. Maybe, but it could also be part of the original XR theory to get to the 3.5% tipping point at which they believe a civil disobedience movement can succeed. People go to prison, get public support and more volunteers come forth, more go to prison and so on.
That could be the strategy of the IB leaders but many in the rank and file seem to be deluded christians with a martyr-complex taking orders from their imaginary god. They probably won’t mind being sent to prison or even beaten up by angry motorists. In fact they probably welcome this as a way of testing and affirming their “faith”.
The ironic thing is that what they are demanding of the government would make hardly any difference to global warming as the contribution to this from not properly isolated houses in an island of 65 million people off the north west coast of the Eurasian land mass will be fairly minimal.
The fightback against the “hated ecomob” escalates.
I tried to get a discussion going on this with a thread under General Discussion:
Like the article you quote says, Johnson is trying to claim that the labour shortages are part of a deliberate plan to raise wages. But this is just populist talk, though he is right that the shortages are in large part attributable to Brexit.
Business, which traditionally supports his party, is not amused.
Sounds as if Berns wants to create an anarcho-capitalist utopia. If he does, it will fail (who would want to live in it?) and the anarcho-capitalists will no longer be able claim that “capitalism has never been tried !”
Manchester comrades will be covering this event. They picked up their leaflets last weekend.
Other branches will be covering similar events in London, Cardiff, Swansea, Sheffield, Portsmouth and Brighton as well of course as the main one in Glasgow.
Anyone wanting copies of the leaflets to distribute in their area should contact Head Office (spgb at worldsocialism.org)
Another pro-China event today:
https://nocoldwar.org/news/europe-against-the-cold-war-china-is-not-our-enemyonline-event-23-october
Why do leftists always want to choose one side or the other in inter-imperialist conflicts?
Neither Washington nor Peking but International Socialism !
I see that Boris has once again stolen Labour’s clothes, right down to the same words:
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/a-green-industrial-revolution/
No wonder Starmer is floundering. As the government is saying it will do what he says he would, he can’t say much.
I think in America they call it a Green New Deal.
They sent that to Head Office too. Transgender Marxism, Gay Marxism, what next? Vegan Marxism? Apart from 3 or 4 titles, it seems they are trying to get rid of unsaleable surplus stock.
In 1995 the Australian Skeptics awarded Tim McCartney-Snape the Bent Spoon Award which they give each year to an Australian, “to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion”
McCartney-Snape was awarded it “for promotion of the beliefs of Jeremy Griffith self described prophet and founder of the World Transformation Movement, the Foundation for the Adulthood of Mankind.”
Scroll down here:
Interesting. I noted this towards the beginning of the last section:
“What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism. The material basis for communism is not proletarian rage or mass-scale dispossession, it is centuries of labor now embodied in the form of fixed capital: machinery, buildings, global productive infrastructure, and countless commodities. There is a cruel irony to the fact that communism has been made possible by the brutal subjugation of the majority of the planet’s population into wage labor, but it is indeed mass manufacturing and global distributive capacity that makes a planned social system, controllable by the collective human desire for wellbeing, possible. Capitalism has created the technical means for a society based on the rational safeguarding and expansion of human welfare, but not necessarily the social forms that are conducive to such a society. Engineering, as it currently exists, represents the overwhelming bulk of the technical knowledge existing within capitalism, but is socially composed in a way that would necessarily be dissolved by the establishment of communism.“
Looks as if the workers are beginning to fight back against what the Daily Mail, not entirely unfairly, calls “the hated eco-mob”.
While we are putting the boot into to the Chinese regime, there’s this. A bit unfair, I admit, like kicking a man when he’s down or taking a candy from a baby.
“President Xi was facing the most serious test of his approach to Chinese capitalism last night as Beijing decided whether it could allow a corporate giant burdened with hundreds of millions of debt to go bankrupt” (Times, 21 September).
The Chinese government still occasionally calls itself socialist, though this is more common amongst its fellow travellers and useful idiots abroad. Everybody can see it isn’t, even the Western media as in the news item above. Its economy is ‘state capitalist’ even in the Leninist sense of the development of private capitalism under the aegis of a supposedly ‘socialist’ state. Lenin, however, envisaged only small-scale capitalist enterprises. The Chinese government has allowed and encouraged big corporations to develop and so finds itself in the position of having to cope with problems caused by the workings of a market economy involving big capitalist corporations.
The ‘corporate giant’ that risked going bankrupt is a property company with the wonderful name of Evergrande that epitomises what every capitalist enterprise has to aim at – growing bigger and bigger through the re-investment of most of its profits as new capital.
Founded in 1996, it expanded rapidly in response to a housing boom, borrowing heavily to meet the demand for new apartment blocks. Then, as always happens sooner or later, the boom turned to bust.
The anarchic expansion of the market led to an oversupply of residential property:‘Supply of apartments exceeds demand and many new apartment blocks stand empty or unfinished’ (Times, 21 September).
‘By some estimates, China now has 90 million units of empty houses’ (Simon Nixon, Times, 23 September).
The oversupply is in relation to paying demand not need:
‘ … there are the very high vacancy rates in China with high prices. In cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen property values are “very extreme” relative to average incomes’ (Patrick Hoskings, Times, 21 September).
Evergrande has been left with huge debts that it cannot meet. The fear amongst stock exchange speculators is that its collapse would be China’s ‘Lehman moment’, as in the US in 2007-8 that provoked the Great Recession from which the world has still not fully recovered. They are afraid that the failure of Evergrande would spread from it to its suppliers and from them to their suppliers and so on, and of the impact of the resulting generalised economic crisis in China on the rest of the world capitalist economy.
It might not come to this, but the point is that it could. This shows that the Chinese government, despite being a one-party dictatorship, is as much at the mercy of unpredictable, anarchic market forces as any elected reformist government in the West.
Chairman Xi is finding that capitalism is not a paper tiger.
