The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 79/No. 11      March 30, 2015

 
(Books of the Month column)
Capitalists’ private interests
collide with needs of billions  
Below is a selection from An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by Ernest Mandel, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. The book explains the contradictions inherent in capitalism since its revolutionary emergence out of small-scale commodity production, such as the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, economic crises caused by overproduction, the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, and the worldwide growth of the working class, the force capable of overthrowing this declining social system. The excerpts are subtitled “Origins of the Capitalist Mode of Production” and “The Fundamental Contradiction in the Capitalist System and the Periodic Crises of Overproduction” from the chapter “Capital and Capitalism.” Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY ERNEST MANDEL
What are the origins of the capitalist mode of production? What are the origins of capitalist society as it has developed over the past 200 years?

They lie first of all in the separation of the producers from their means of production. Subsequently, it is the establishment of these means of production as a monopoly in the hands of a single social class, the bourgeoisie. And finally, it is the appearance of another social class which has been separated from its means of production and therefore has no other resources for its subsistence than the sale of its labor-power to the class which has monopolized the means of production. …

Capitalism has the tendency to extend production without limits, to extend its arena of activity over the whole world, to view all human beings as potential customers. (Parenthetically, there is a pretty contradiction worth stressing, one which Marx already mentioned: each capitalist always likes to see other capitalists increase the wages of their workers, because the wages of those workers are purchasing power for the goods of the capitalist in question. But he cannot allow the wages of his own workers to increase, for this would obviously reduce his own profit.)

The world is consequently structured in a most extraordinary way, having become an economic unit with an interdependence of its different parts which is extremely sensitive. You know all the cliches which have been used to depict this: if someone sneezes on the New York Stock Exchange, 10,000 peasants are ruined in Malaya.

Capitalism produces an extraordinary interdependence in incomes and a unification in tastes for all human beings. Man has suddenly become conscious of the wealth of human possibilities, whereas in precapitalist society, he was enclosed in the narrow natural possibilities of a single region. In the Middle Ages, pineapples were not eaten in Europe, only locally grown fruits, but today we eat fruits which may have been produced anywhere in the world and are even beginning to eat fruits from China and India which we were not accustomed to eating prior to the second world war.

There are consequently mutual links being established among products and among men. Expressed in other terms, there is a progressive socialization of all economic life, which is becoming a single assemblage, a single fabric. But this whole movement of interdependence is simply centered in an insane way around private property, private appropriation, by a small number of capitalists whose private interests, moreover, collide more and more with the interests of the billions of human beings included in this assemblage.

It is in the economic crises that the contradiction between the progressive socialization of production and the private appropriation which serves as its driving power and its support, breaks out in the most extraordinary way. For capitalist economic crises are incredible phenomena like nothing ever seen before. They are not crises of scarcity, like all precapitalist crises; they are crises of overproduction. The unemployed die of hunger not because there is too little to eat but because there is relatively too great a supply of foodstuffs.

At first sight the thing seems incomprehensible. How can anyone die because there is a surplus of food, because there is a surplus of goods? But the mechanism of the capitalist system makes this seeming paradox understandable. Goods which do not find buyers not only do not realize their surplus-value but they do not even return their invested capital. The slump in sales therefore forces businessmen to suspend their operations. They are therefore forced to lay off their workers. And since the laid-off workers have no reserves, since they can subsist only when they are selling their labor-power, unemployment obviously condemns them to the starkest poverty and precisely because the relative abundance of goods has resulted in a slump in sales.

The factor of periodic economic crises is inherent in the capitalist system and remains . … Crises are the clearest manifestation of the fundamental contradiction in the system and a periodic reminder that it is condemned to die sooner or later. But it will never die automatically. It will always be necessary to give it a conscious little push to effect its demise, and it is our job, the job of the working class movement, to do the pushing.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home