A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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is in the air). So what’s he getting at?
While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses. (433)
Now we need to think long and hard, critically and carefully, about what he is saying. I earlier suggested you remain alert for when the coercive laws of competition come into the argument, and plainly they do so here. Yet Marx seems to want to downplay their import even as he recognizes that he cannot do without them. At this point, I can only offer my own interpretation, knowing full well that many will disagree with me. I think there is a certain parallel between the way in which Marx analyzes the role of supply and demand fluctuations and the role of competition. In the case of supply and demand, Marx concedes that these conditions play a vital surface role in generating price movements for a particular commodity, but when supply and demand are in equilibrium, he argues, supply and demand fail to explain anything. Supply and demand cannot explain why shirts exchange for shoes on average in the ratio that they do. This has to be explained by something totally different, congealed socially necessary labor-time, or value. This does not mean that supply and demand are irrelevant, because without them there could be no equilibrium price. Supply and demand relations are a necessary but not sufficient aspect of a capitalist mode of production. Competition between individual capitalists within a particular line of commodity production plays a similar role. In this instance, however, it redefines the equilibrium position—the average price or value of the commodity—through changes in the general level of productivity in that line of commodity production. Competition as Marx here depicts it is a sort of epiphenomenon that occurs on the surface of society, but, like exchange itself, it has some deeper consequences that cannot be understood by reference to competition. This was the position he took in the Grundrisse: competition does not establish the laws of motion of capitalism
but is rather their executor. Unlimited competition is therefore not the presupposition for the truth of the economic laws, but rather the consequence—the form of appearance in which their necessity realizes itself … Competition therefore does not explain these laws; rather it lets them be seen, but does not produce them.1
Let use see how this process works out in this instance. “For the understanding of the production of relative surplus-value, and merely on the basis of the results already achieved, we may add the following remarks” (433). The value of a commodity, recall, is fixed by the socially necessary “labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129). What happens if an individual capitalist departs from this social average and sets up a productive system which is super-efficient and instead of producing ten widgets in an hour produces twenty? If one capitalist does that but all the others still produce at the rate of ten, then this one capitalist can sell at or close to the social average of ten while producing and selling twenty. “The individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions” (434). The innovative capitalist gains an extra profit, extra surplus-value, by selling at or close to the social average while producing at a rate of productivity far higher than the social average. This gap is crucial and yields a form of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist. In this case, it does not matter whether the capitalist is producing wage goods or luxuries. But how does this capitalist sell the extra ten widgets per hour at the old social-average price? Here the laws of supply and demand come into play. And the answer is, probably, that they cannot be sold at the old price. So prices begin to decline. As prices decline, the other capitalists are faced with less profit. This amounts to a redistribution of surplus-value from those with inferior technologies to those with superior technologies. Those working with an inferior technology, therefore, have an increasing competitive incentive to adopt the new technology. Once all capitalists in this line of production follow suit and adopt the new technology to produce twenty widgets an hour, so the socially necessary labor-time congealed in widgets declines.
This form of relative surplus-value, which accrues to the individual capitalist, only lasts as long as he or she has a superior technology in relationship to everybody else. It is ephemeral.
This extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes. The law of the determination of value by labour time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method. (436)
So the first form of relative surplus-value considered in this chapter is a class phenomenon. It accrues to the whole capitalist class, and it is as permanent as conditions of class struggle over the value of labor-power allow. The second form is individual and ephemeral. It is this second form, the one that confers individual advantage, that individual capitalists are forced to pursue via the coercive laws of competition. The result is that all capitalists at some point or other are forced to adopt the same technology. The two forms of relative surplus-value are not unrelated, since ephemeral innovations in the wage-goods sector will also drive down the value of labor-power at a physically fixed standard of living. “Capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself” (436–7).
But if you are a savvy capitalist, you will know that you can always get this second ephemeral form of relative surplus-value, provided you always have a superior technology. This generates some interesting results. Suppose the new technology is a new machine. Marx has argued that machines, since they are dead labor, can’t produce value. But what happens when you get extra relative surplus-value because of your new machine? While machines are not a source of value, they can be a source of relative surplus-value to the individual capitalist! Once these machines become general, they can then appear to be a source of the relative surplus-value to the whole capitalist class because of declines in the value of labor-power. This produces a peculiar result: machines cannot be a source of value, but they can be a source of surplus-value.
From the way Marx has set up the argument, we see that there is a tremendous incentive for leapfrogging technological innovations among individual capitalists. I get ahead of the pack, I have a superior, more efficient production system than you, I get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years, and you then catch up with me or even go beyond me and get the ephemeral surplus-value for three years. Individual capitalists are all hunting ephemeral surplus-value through new technologies. Hence the technological dynamism of capitalism.
Now, most other theories of technological change treat it as some sort of deus ex machina, some exogenous variable outside the system, attributable to the inherent genius of entrepreneurs or simply to the immanent capacity of human beings for innovation. But Marx is typically reluctant to attribute something as crucial as this to some external power. What he does here is find a simple way to explain why capitalism is so incredibly technologically dynamic from the inside (endogenously, as we like to say). He also explains why capitalists hold the fetishistic view that machines are a source of value, and why all of us are also subject to the same fetish conception. But Marx is resolute. Machines are a source of relative surplus-value but not of value. Since capitalists are interested in the mass of surplus-value, and since they would generally prefer to gain relative surplus-value rather than confront class struggles over absolute surplus-value, then the fetish belief in a “technological fix” as an answer to their ambitions is all too understandable. We even have a hard time disabusing ourselves of it.
But there is another interesting inference to be drawn that Marx refrains from examining, though