The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
II. II
Section summary
Building on Smith and Ricardo, Marx founded the labour theory of value rigorously, showed relations between people behind relations between things, and made surplus value the cornerstone of his economics. Capital ruins small producers, concentrates production, creates monopolies and crises, and in doing so builds the united power of labour.
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted most of his attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to the study of the economic system of modern, that is, capitalist, society.
Classical political economy before Marx took shape in England, the most developed capitalist country. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, investigating the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work. He gave this theory a rigorous foundation and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another), Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between separate producers through the market. Money signifies that this connection is becoming ever closer, inseparably binding the whole economic life of the separate producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the working day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), and the other part of the day he works for nothing, creating surplus value for the capitalist, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but in agriculture too we see the same phenomenon: the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture increases, the use of machinery grows, and peasant farming falls into the noose of money capital, declines and is ruined under the burden of backward technique. In agriculture the decline of small-scale production takes other forms, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in the productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of the biggest capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social: hundreds of thousands and millions of workers are bound together into a planned economic organism, while the product of their common labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. The anarchy of production grows, and with it crises, the furious chase after markets, and the insecurity of existence for the mass of the population.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from the first germs of commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new alike, shows clearly, year by year, to an ever greater number of workers that this teaching of Marx is correct.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.