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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Capitalist production
Message-ID: <370@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14-Mar-85 17:46:44 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.370
Posted: Thu Mar 14 17:46:44 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Mar-85 04:43:20 EST
Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
Lines: 59

From JoSH:
> Case:  My neighbor makes gears by hand, one every two days.  He
> makes enough for a decent living and some of the amenities (beer,
> tv?).  I do the same but only 3 days a week--I barely make enough
> to survive.  The other days I spend on the gear-making machine I'm
> building.  It's purely my choice--I could live as well as my neighbor
> if I liked.  Finally the machine is finished.  With it, I, or my
> neighbor, alone, can make ten times the gears that both of us could
> make before.  I make a deal with him:  He can use the machine, and
> not working as hard as before, take half the money (making more than
> before); I, on my part, will do absolutely nothing, and collect the
> other half as profit.  Now: is this exploitation?

The deal you describe is not capitalist production.  In capitalist
production, the deal is:  "Hey you.  If you'll work in my factory and
do as I tell you, at the end of the week I'll pay you X dollars per
hour in wages."  The capitalist appropriates the resulting product
and sells it, generally for a profit.  The worker accepts the deal
because he has no other way to make a living than to sell his
capacity for labor to one or another owner of the means of
production.  The crucial point is that one section of the population
controls the means of production and another section does not.  The
capitalist doesn't *provide* the machines and factories, he just
*controls* them.  

> Capital is precisely that which creates the increased productivity of
> labor, and which makes possible the "profit" the capitalist makes.
> *Capital* is the factor separating the man who farms an acre with a
> stick, and the one who farms a square mile with a combine....A
> capitalist is one who has made possible the explosion of wealth of
> the modern industrial world; and justly deserves any profit he has
> gotten therefrom.

Because he *owns* the machines and factories?  But a factory doesn't
need to be owned in order to produce -- it just has to exist and be
operated by people.  And the people who brought it into existence are
the workers who built it, the engineers who designed it, the
inventors who invented the machines -- i.e., the people whose labor
of various kinds brought the factory into being.  (The capitalist qua
capitalist is one who *owns* the means of production -- insofar as he
works (invents, builds, whatever) he's not a capitalist.)  To call
capital productive is to attribute a human quality to something that
is dead, an animate quality to something inanimate (Marx termed it
"fetishism").  It is PEOPLE who do things:  who build machines, who
invent machines, who discover scientific knowledge, who, in short,
create new wealth, and who are therefore productive.  Capitalism,
however, cannot tolerate this truth, since it undermines the
rationale for profit-making.  

To clarify one point:  "Capital" for Marx does not mean the machines,
etc., per se; they are no more intrinsically capital than gold and
silver are intrinsically money.  Capital for Marx is a social
relation in which the means of production are monopolized by one
class and counterposed to another class which must sell its labor
power to the other class to live.  So capital is, for Marx, the
relationship of ownership of the means of production which gives
title to a profit.  

Richard Carnes