Every few days I check my dormant eX-twitter account to see if there were any replies to old posts. A great series of questions showed up a couple of days ago.
Neon Nova asks:
Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke? What does Marx offer that Dilke doesn't? I know Marx revisits some of Dilke's ideas on leisure time, but do you think there are flaws in Marx's approach? Does Dilke ultimately surpass Marx in your view?
I've noticed you've traced Dilke's views on leisure time back to Godwin, and Godwin's ideas to Calvinism. But if Marx's "great ideas" are merely a rehash of Dilke or Godwin's thoughts, what makes Marx's contributions unique or great?
Yes, I would consider myself a follower of Dilke and of Godwin, in that they initiated a discourse that had greater theoretical consequences than they could have ever foreseen. What Marx offered that Dilke didn't is a theory of capital and of crisis that is far more substantial and consequential than Dilke's. There are indeed "flaws" in Marx's approach, most significantly related to how he resolved -- or didn't resolve -- the difficulty of presenting his conclusions. Whether those conclusions are ultimately "right" or "wrong" is another matter, which I am not qualified to judge.
No, Dilke does not ultimately surpass Marx but there is a sense in which readers of Capital arrive at an understanding that may be closer to Dilke's than to Marx's. This is a bit hard to explain but Dilke's presentation was more "common sense." People reading a non-intuitive, theoretical presentation tend to mentally translate it into common sense terms. This is true, for example, of "socially necessary labour time," which incorporates within itself the inversion of the necessary and the superfluous, so that "socially necessary" is at once both "necessary" and "superfluous." That is to say it expresses the essential contradiction of the concept.
What makes Marx's contributions unique or great?
Marx revealed the dark secret of classical political economy: that the writers in that tradition assumed the ubiquity of a distinctive economic sphere that was, in fact, unique to and characteristic of capital. To them capitalism was eternal and earlier forms of society were simply incomplete in their striving toward the absolute. By breaking with that tradition, Marx was able to more completely grasp the dynamic of capital accumulation and crisis.
Marx had a theory of crisis and of the dynamics of capital accumulation already in the late 1840s but his mature theory hinges on the distinction between labour and labour power or capacity that he didn't develop until the next decade. When his "Wage Labour and Capital" was republished by Friedrich Engels in 1891, Engels "updated" it by altering Marx's references to the sale of labour to conform with his later distinction of labour power. But Marx's 1847 critique was not the same as his mature critique of political economy, which only materialized in his Grundrisse notebooks.
Here's where Sandwichman's focus on The Source and Remedy comes into play. My contention is that Marx's 1857 understanding of labour capacity and surplus value owes a good deal to Dilke's discussion from 1821, with one crucial distinction that Marx outlined in his 1862-63 notebooks, published posthumously as Theories of Surplus Value:
Our pamphleteer [Dilke] overlooks two things:
As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time.
Two things: 1. machinery creates a redundant population of workers; 2. this surplus population supplies the labour power for new investments of capital. Machinery thus creates "new" labour power by throwing people out of work. Voila!
In the Grundrisse, Marx presented this same argument in more detail on pages 398-99 (Penguin edition) after having prefaced it with a composite quote from The Source and Remedy on page 397.
Just as capital on one side creates surplus labour, surplus labour is at the same time equally the presupposition of the existence of capital. The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time. The relation of necessary labour time to the superfluous (such it is, initially, from the standpoint of necessary labour) changes with the different stages in the development of the productive forces. In the less productive stages of exchange, people exchange nothing more than their superfluous labour time; this is the measure of their exchange, which therefore extends only to superfluous products. In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time. …
…
It is a law of capital, as we saw, to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion - i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labour to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population - population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. (Hence the correctness of the theory of surplus population and surplus capital.) It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity. Value is nothing but objectified labour, and surplus value (realization of capital) is only the excess above that part of objectified labour which is necessary for the reproduction of labouring capacity. But labour as such is and remains the presupposition, and surplus labour exists only in relation with the necessary, hence only in so far as the latter exists. Capital must therefore constantly posit necessary labour in order to posit surplus labour; it has to multiply it (namely the simultaneous working days) in order to multiply the surplus; but at the same time it must suspend them as necessary, in order to posit them as surplus labour.
The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.
A funny thing happened to "disposable time" between Grundrisse and Capital -- it became, sarcastically, the rightful property of the capitalist:
If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.
Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.
...just as a surplus population also "belongs to capital" in the form of a disposable industrial reserve:
But a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.
And guess what. This is pretty much what Kōzō Uno argued was Marx's theory in The Theory of Crisis! Ken Kawashima, who translated the book, gives an introduction to Uno's theory in the following video: or great?
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