In the social production of their existence, men invevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the devlopment of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and plitical superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
-
preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy, 1859
Marxism is a heuristic more than a theory.
There exists an ideological superstructure, in all societies.
eg. if you want to understand a university in marxism, you have to connect it to its existence as a function of the current mode of production, like in capitalism.
Marx looks at the society of the middle age, ”the feudal mode of production in the middle ages, gives the church the dominant role in society.”
The economic mode of the society makes the ideological superstructure dominant.
In the feudal mode of production there was no distinction between economics and political rule.
So, economics and the superstructure functioned very differently then, and perhaps could not be analysed in the exact same way.
So Marx is trying to create some heuristic concepts through which we can study societies in a scientific way.
”It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and with what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs.”
So according to Marx, it went something like this:
- Primitive communism
A mode of produciton based on hunter-gatherers who lived in ”egalitarian bands”
However, even into our living-world there were people who could not be captured within this term, and so it seems to be a less than functional term
However, it is the difference between different societies through which we can begin to critically examine our own societies
-
Slave mode of production
-
Feudal mode of production
-
Capitalist mode of production
-
And a hypothetical future Communist mode of production
Marx says barely anything about this
-
Asiatic mode of production
In the 1900s it was popular to conceptualise these historical modes of production as a determinstic ”line” through which history must progress (modernism theory), however this was not something Marx specifically supported.
Many ”asiatic” modes of production were not conceptualisable within this deterministic framework.
The asiatic modes of production differ in the way that the asiatic societies (like China) had a centralised system of power with a ”complex” state apparatus. What’s important is that the state had an important economic role, ie. Establishing a large scale irrigation system, expanding the ability of agricultural work.
Marx has concepts that align with a general theory of society
-
Metabolism, labour etc.
But their forms are historically important to Marx
Marx wants to show that a capitalist society is entirely different from any previous kinds of societies and so there is something we really need to pay attention to regarding that.
It’s important to realise that you cannot analyse feudal societies given the same concepts that you analyze capitalism with.
There is something within capitalism that allows the population to grow massively, in a way that hasn’t been desired before.
All societies experience ”crisis”, but they experience them entirely different. The mode of production substantiates how crisis can happen.
In feudal societies, there is crisis if people do not have enough to eat, in capitalist societies there is a crisis when there is too much of a product.
eg. the 2008 financial crisis, there was too much cheap housing from an existence of cheap mortgages.
→ we need to understand the specific mechanims of specific societies.
Many economists will apply their theories ofeg. competition when analysing feudal societies, but that doesn’t make sense at all according to Marx.
Thus the mode of production needs to remain very general in order to understand the superstructures in a society that leads to certain kinds of ”life”.
The ideology of the1800s was to see capitalism as a natural part of historical happenings. Ie. All societies operate within a really captialist framework.
Notice Marx whenever he speaks about form. (form contra content)
Every society has to do its metabolism, but it happens under different social relations.
How does capitalism emerge out of a feudal society?
Feudal mode of production:
How does the direct producers relate to the conditions of production?
If you do agriculture you need access to the land and you need certain tools to work it.
So how does the peasants relate to their production?
They use their own ”primitive” tools to work the land.
They were generally serfs (though not in later feudalism) which means they are attached to the land, they belong to the land of a certain feudal lord. They are not slaves, they are not owned by anyone, but are supposed to stay where they are born, and are a subject of the feudal lord. They cannot choose who they work for.
This means that these peasants have access to their conditions of production, despite not being able to choose very freely what kind.
However, it meant they could produce, reproduce and have a kind of autonomy. The peasants don’t have an intrinsic need for the feudal lords, and so will produce what they need, and perhaps slightly more to pay their taxes i guess.
The role the feudal lords play is, at least technically, for defence but not for production itself.
Because of this set of relations, exploitation takes on a very specific form: violence.
So the feudal lords threaten the peasants for what they have produced in order to to substain themselves; ie. The feudal lords stand outside the production process; expoitation.
Exploitation means: when surplus of products of labour are appropriated by someone who stands outside the process of production.
So a feudal lord is a political governor whilst also serving the role of an economic exploiter.
← In capitalism an employer doesn’t need to threaten their employees with physical violence, which is a fundamental difference between capitalism and feudalism according to Marx.
”There is an apparatus that produces ideology; ie. An apparatus that, in our case, tells that the order of things is natural, and that we have to accept the social relations as we currently have them.”
So an important question in sociology is: why have we differentiated economics, justice and politcs as somehow ”different” things.
Modernity for some sociologists could refer to mass-differentiation. Because of the way the capitalist mode of production functions, which doesn’t need violence, but needs differentiation between different stratas of conceptual society, we see a differentiation between economics and politics.
There is a set of people who exercise political power, and some people who exercise economic power. To what state is the state independent of the capitalist class? 100% Get rid of the state lol.
So in capitalism, according to Marx, oligarchs and similar people will try to influence political power, but they are not the political power. They certainly have strong relations with the state, but there is a clear distinction, unlike in feudalism.
This sort of relation enforces and creates different kinds of class structures. These do not happen in eg. feudalism.
”A state will be conducting capitalist doings even if the state is socialist, because that is fundamentally what the state is, a capitalism-production machine.”
”So, why is that?”
Capitalism = Workers + Labour + Capital
Where does Capital and Workers come from??????
One explanation is the concept of primitive accumulation.
Where would you find people who want to do wage labour? It sucks!
What needs to happen is a process of separation of the producers, the peasants, from their means of production, their tools and their land → then we would get possible wage labourers.
In England, this happened through Enclosure! Fuck enclosure!
Basically, what it is is to put a ”fence” around land and mapping it out specifically as owned by someone (Fuck Locke’s concept of private ownership). Before this, much land was common lands, that everyone had access to.
One of Marx’s first texts ever was about the ”theft of wood”. If you went to a forest in Germany you could not pick up random wood in the forests. Thus, the forests had been privatised, and there was no longer any general access to them.
So the livelihood of homeless people became fucked up.
Servs had been freed, they could move around as they wished and work for whomever they wished, but one could not live off the land as it was. They didn’t have access to nature to maintain their livelihoods. → all they could do was migrate to the cities, to urbanise, and take up a contract of wage labour.
”The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process”
On the countryside there was a struggle, between landholders and poor people, culminating in mass revolts in England at the time, however, they were beaten down and so were forced to urbanise.
Privatisation leads to traditional livelhood becoming impossible.
If you look at any country during industrialisation, these sort of things are a recurring theme.
Where does capital come from?
There is an idealised picture saying that the first capitalists were people who worked themselves up from rags to riches. Marx says that this initial emergence is not a good explanation of the phenomenon.
Marx says that you cannot understand the emergence of Capital outside the struggle of, and plunder of, landowners during the pre-capitalist era of colonialism.
Primitive accumulation is technically a historical phenomenon, but it is still ongoing today.
For example the oligarchs in Russia that bought the existing companies, or rather appropriated them, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Primitive accumulation can be paralellised with ”land-grabbing”.
Another form of primitive accumulation is the concept of rent, where you perhaps create a contract with someone taking a loan or similar where the interest is so high the person becomes an indentured servant, more or less a slave.
Banks have to bankroll these sort of colonial expeditions, and so they also play integral role in that process.
Or, the privatisation of certain genomes of crops, you will be ”land-grabbing” that prop and somehow privatising its production. It is something that exists which you appropriate.
C-M-C: Simple commodity production
You make a product, sell that product, and buy another commodity one needs.
According to Marx this has never been a realised economic fact.
This does not explain capitalism.
It is actually an inversion.
M-C-M+
You have capital, you buy commodities in one place, then sell it for a higher price, somewhere else – for profit.
This plays an important theme in Marx, capitalism is a sort of society that puts everything on its head, which makes it function oppositely to how our common sense would like to conceptualise it.
Commercial capitalism has limits: this system isn’t a long term stable system since the inhabitants of place A can go to place B and make the same profit.
This is when capitalism stops being about trade, but rather about production.
So when does this happen properly?
In the 15-16 century we have commercial capitalism
but with capitalism as a mode of production, this comes way later, around the 18:th to 19:th century.
What happens when capital enters the sphere of production?
Capitalists buy labour-power, through a contract. He buys the capacity of a labourer to work, for a number of hours. Time becomes very essential to capital, and the measurement of it.
So you need labour-power, in a production process, that delivers a number of goods which become commodities and which are sold for surplus value.
So the motivation of capitalist is to valorise their capital and let it expand, infinitely.
Commodity: all the things that can be sold on the market for a price.
Use-value: the utility that something has; air is essential for life
Exchange value: the value something has for its purchase; air lacks exchange-value.
The emergence of capitalism is also the emergence of commodification, you can buy and sell literally everyhing.
A lot of violence and discipline was necessary to make workers have the right attitudes in order to become proper workers.
There was constant resistance throughout history in order to make labour-power steer free of commodification.
So a capitalist invests his capital, creating constant capital (eg. machines or building of a house for a factory to be in)
Then there is variable capital, that capital which is invested in order to pay the workers.
So if a capitalist invests in constant capital as well as variable capital he makes everything he invests back. If then, he makes his workers work a little extra, he will be able to constitute surplus-value.
This is a kind of regressive strategy.
”Our capitalist has two objectives: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, ie. An aritcle destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commoditites used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.
There was much struggle about reducing working days, but this would minimise surplus-value, thus requiring capitalists to increase their surplus-value through other venues, like decrasing pay, or produce more efficiently.
→ this is known as a dynamic strategy for surplus-value.
The realisation problem:
We have created a fuck ton of shoes, how the fuck do we sell them???
This is why we create an ideological impetus for a free market, somewhere where workers can ”freely” choose what products to buy. Marx considers this kind of freedom to be a real kind of liberation from serfdom, but it is still a different kind of exploitation due to the way in which the reality of factory life functions.
Exploitation takes place in the process of production. This is why Marx cares about it.
What really matters to Marx is not what happens on the market, but rather what happens in factory.
”The hidden abode of capitalism”
We don’t have access to the actual place in which we are exploited, not even the workers can understand it.
Because there is no way for a worker to know how big the surplus they have produced is, they have no idea how much value they have produced, they just get a wage.
This was distinctly different from peasants. They could literally see what they feudal lord was taking in taxes. This is not something a worker has any amount of access to.
This is why, sociologically, we need complex material schemes to understand and make visible these kinds of processes.
Capitalism works like a machine of invisibilisation. What matters is the exploitation of everything, but it is set outside of our immediate vision.