Eclipse & Re-Emergence
Of The Communist Movement (9)
Capitalism and Communism

f ) Aspects of the Contradiction of Capital On the one hand capital has socialised the world. All production tends to be the result of the activity of all mankind. On the other hand, the world remains divided into competing enterprises, which try to produce what is profitable, and produce to sell as much as possible. Each enterprise tries to valorise its capital in the best possible conditions. Each tends to produce more than the market can absorb, intends to sell all of it, and hopes that only its competitors will suffer from overproduction. [14] What results is the development of activities devoted to the promotion of sales. Unproductive workers, manual or intellectual, who circulate value, increase in relation to manual or intellectual workers who produce value. The circulation in question is not the physical movement of goods. The transportation industry produces real value, since the simple fact of moving goods from one place to another adds value to them, corresponds to a real change of their use value : the result is that goods are available in a different place from the one where they were manufactured, which of course increases their utility. Circulation refers to value, not to physical displacement. A thing does not actually move, for instance, if its owner changes while it remains in the same warehouse. By this operation, it has been bought and sold, but its use value has not been changed, increased. It is different in the case of transport. [15] The problems caused by buying and selling, by the realisation of the value of the product on the market, create a complex mechanism, including credit, banking, insurance and advertisement. Capital becomes a sort of parasite absorbing a huge and growing part of society's total resources in the costs of the management of value. Bookkeeping, which is a necessary function in any developed social organisation, has now become a ruinous and bureaucratic machine overwhelming society and real needs instead of helping to fulfil them. At the same time capital grows more concentrated and centralised : monopolies lessen overproduction problems while further aggravating them. Capital can only get out of this situation through periodic crises, which temporarily solve the problem by re-adjusting supply to demand ( only solvent demand, since capitalism only knows one way of circulating products : buying and selling; it does not care if real demand ( needs ) is not fulfilled; in fact, capital generates under-production in relation to the real needs it does not fulfil ). Capitalist crises are more than crises of commodities. They are crises which link production to value in such a way that production is governed by value. One can understand this by comparing them with some pre-capitalist crisis, before the 19th century. A decrease of agricultural production resulted from bad harvests. The peasants bought fewer industrial goods such as clothes, and industry, which was still very weak, was in trouble. These crises were based on a natural ( climactic ) phenomenon. But merchants speculated on corn and kept it in storage to drive its price up. Eventually there were famines here and there. The very existence of commodities and money is the condition for crises : there is a separation ( materialised in time ) between the two operations of buying and selling. From the standpoint of the merchant and of the money trying to increase its volume, buying and selling corn are two distinct matters : the period of time between them is determined only by the amount and rate of the expected profit. People died during the period that separates production and consumption. But in this case the mercantile system only acted as an aggravating factor in a crisis caused by natural conditions. In such cases, the social context is pre-capitalist, or that of a weak capitalism, as in countries like present-day China and Russia where bad harvests still have a strong influence on the economy. The capitalist crisis, on the other hand, is the product of the forced union of value and production. In capitalism value has taken over production. One produces as if the conditions of absorption of the market were unlimited. Capital tries to go beyond them, by the action of credit, the organisation of the market, the intervention of the State. All these devices do not alter the nature of capital, but improve its laws. The saturation of the market leads to economic slowdowns, and even to the destruction of agricultural and industrial goods, and unemployment. These facts have been known since the industrial revolution, and have not yet disappeared. [16] They are even worse nowadays ( in spite of the various transformations in advanced countries ) if one takes into account the development of productive forces. The gap between what the productive forces could become in another society, and the way capital uses them, has never been so great. Capital has never been as destructive and wasteful as today. Crises do not only show how the link between use value and exchange value, between the utility and the exchangeability of a product, bursts into pieces. They do not only prove that the logic of this world is the need of enterprises to increase the amount of value, and not the fulfilment of people's needs -- nor the enrichment of capitalists, as the vulgar critics of capitalism say. The important thing is the difference with pre-capitalist crises. These originated from an unavoidable necessity ( a bad harvest, for instance ) which mercantile relations only aggravated. Modern crises show that they have no unavoidable rational basis. Their cause is no longer natural; it is social. All the elements of industrial activity are present : raw materials, machines, workers, but they are not used -- or only partially used. They are not just things, material objects, but a social relationship. Actually they only exist in this society if value unites them. This phenomenon is not "industrial"; it does not come from the technical requirements of production. It is a social relation, through which the whole productive complex, and in fact the entire social structure ( in so far as production has conquered society ) are ruled by mercantile logic. Communism's only goal is to destroy this commodity relation, and thus to reorganise and transform the entire society ( see below ). The network of enterprises -- as centres and instruments of value -- becomes a power above society. People's needs of all kinds ( lodging, food, "culture" ) only exist after being subjected to this system, and even shaped by it. [17] Production is not determined by needs, but needs are determined by production -- for valorisation. Offices are built more readily than needed lodgings. And many houses as well as thousands of flats remain empty for 10 months out of 12 because the owners or tenants who bought the dwelling or paid the rent are the only ones who can occupy them. Agriculture is largely neglected by capital, on a world-wide scale, and only developed where it allows valorisation, while hundreds of millions of people starve. The automobile industry is a branch developed beyond people's needs in advanced countries, because its profitability keeps it growing in spite of all its incoherence. Poorly developed countries can only build factories which will yield an average rate of profit. The tendency to over-production requires a permanent war economy in nearly all advanced countries; these destructive forces are made operative when necessary, as wars are still another means of counteracting the tendency to crisis. Wage-labour itself has been an absurdity for several decades. It forces one part of the workers to engage in exhausting factory-work; another part, which is very numerous in countries like the U.S., works in the unproductive sector; the function of this sector is to make sales easier, and to absorb workers rejected by mechanisation and automation, thus providing a mass of consumers, and being another aspect of "crisis management." Capital takes possession of all the sciences and techniques : in the productive field, it orients research toward the study of what will bring a maximum profit; in the unproductive field, it develops management and marketing. Thus mankind tends to be divided into three groups : productive workers, often physically destroyed by their work; unproductive workers, the vast majority of whom are only a source of waste; and the mass of non-wage earners, some of them in the developed countries, but most of them in poor countries : capital cannot integrate them in any way, and hundreds of thousands of them are periodically destroyed in wars directly or indirectly caused by the capitalist-imperialist organisation of the world economy. The development of some backward countries, like Brazil, is quite real, but can only be achieved through the partial or total destruction of former ways of life. The introduction of the commodity economy deprives poor peasants of their means of subsistence and drives them to the misery of the overcrowded towns. Only a minority of the population is "lucky" enough to be able to work in factories and offices; the rest is under-employed or unemployed. Notes [14] Mattick's Marx and Keynes ( Porter Sargent, 1969 ) gives an excellent analysis of capitalist crises, although it fails to grasp the dynamics of communism ( See below, "Leninism and the Ultra-Left" ) [15] Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 1, pp. 389-413. [16] Engels, Selected Writings, pp. 207-216. [17] F. Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life, Black & Red, 1969.