SADTU Political Education Blog

Govan Mbeki

2012-02-13T08:28:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 5a

Govan Mbeki, 1910 - 2001

Govan Mbeki

The main item today is Chapter 7, “The New Offensive: The ANC after 1949”, from “The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa” by Govan Mbeki, published in 1992 (attached).

Right at the beginning of this chapter Mbeki recalls the joint ANC/CPSA protest against the Suppression of Communism Act on May Day 1950, and the massacre of 18 people on that day by the National Party regime that had come to power in 1948. This is something South Africans should always remember on the May Day holiday each year.

Consequent to this massacre, 26 June 1950 was observed with a stay-away as Freedom Day. Freedom Day was observed again when the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign was launched in 1952 and again in 1955 when the Freedom Charter was adopted on that date at the Congress of the People in Kliptown.

Note that 26 June, our original Freedom Day, having to do with the protests against the banning of the Communist Party - is not a Public Holiday in South Africa. 24 September was made a public “Heritage Day” holiday at the insistence of the Inkatha Freedom Party (see here).

Govan Mbeki concludes this chapter with a very good section on the “Africanists”, in terms of events in which he himself, as he records, was involved in a major capacity. The first occasion was when the Africanists tried to hi-jack the ANC leadership from the Treason Trialists, taking advantage of the fact that they were locked up.

“Black exclusivism,” says Mbeki, “presents a misguided solution”.

“What has characterised all groups that claimed to be opposed to government policies - groups that either broke away from the ANC like the PAC, or others like the Liberal Party, Unity Movement (NEUM), Inkatha and Black Consciousness Movement - has been that instead of opposing the government directly, they have mounted campaigns aimed at thwarting those initiated by the ANC,” writes Mbeki, and proceeds to tell the whole Sharpeville story, when 69 people were shot, fifty years ago, on 21 March 1960; and then he relates the immediate aftermath.

“At a meeting of the joint executives of the Congress Alliance in June 1961, the situation was reviewed and a decision was taken that in all future stay-at-homes, the possibility of the use of force could not be excluded,” writes Mbeki

To read Govan Mbeki’s book on-line, click here.

The question of armed struggle was settled by the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe on 16 December of that year, 1961. In tomorrow’s item we will see how O R Tambo, as the President-General of the ANC, reflected upon all this heritage in 1969, which was also the year of the ANC’s Morogoro Conference, where the “Strategy and Tactics” document was adopted.

The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Govan Mbeki, The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa, 1992, Chapter 7.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Moses Kotane

2012-02-08T22:03:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 5

Moses Kotane, 1905 - 1978

Moses Kotane

The African National Congress of South Africa is sometimes called “Africa’s Oldest Liberation Movement”. In this limited series we are not attempting a comprehensive sampling of the abundant South African Revolutionary writing. But in this part we will look at four South African revolutionary writers, together.

Starting with Moses Kotane, we go on to Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and “Comrade Mzala” (Jabulani Nxumalo). The first is a letter, the next is a book chapter, the third a radio broadcast script, or transcript, and the fourth is an article for the ANC publication “Sechaba”.

It is a mistake to think that Kotane’s famous “Cradock Letter” (download linked below) was the origin of the Africanisation of the Communist Party of South Africa. The well-known Black Republic thesis, imposed on the South African Party by the Comintern, was far earlier in time (1927-1928). From soon after its founding in 1921 the CPSA had been a majority-black Party, though this was not always reflected in the top leadership, especially not in the beginning.

But Kotane’s plain and direct 1934 letter does perhaps mark a real turning point because of the impact that it had, and because of the consequences. Kotane became General Secretary of the Party in 1939, and then of the SACP, and remained in that office until his death in 1978. He was also Treasure-General of the ANC for several years.

Kotane worked hard to make the Alliance between the Party and the ANC a solid and permanent one, and his name is historically associated with the Party’s approach to the National Question, which has been so influential in South African history up to the present time.

Here is Kotane’s even shorter summary of his short letter from Cradock:

“My first suggestion is that the Party become more Africanised or Afrikanised, that the CPSA must pay special attention to S Africa, study the conditions in this country and concretise the demands of the toiling masses from first hand information, that we must speak the language of the Native masses and must know their demands. That while it must not lose its international allegiance, the Party must be Bolshevised, become South African not only theoretically, but in reality, it should be a Party working in the interests and for the toiling people in S Africa and not a party of a group of Europeans who are merely interested in European affairs.”

The book from which this text was taken (“South African Communists Speak”1981) gives the following note below the “Cradock Letter”:

“The Independent African National Congress (Cape) had been formed in 1931 by Elliot Tonjeni and other left-wing members who had been driven out of the Cape ANC by the dictatorial action of the chairman ‘Professor' Thaele. Tonjeni had been banished to the Eastern Cape by Justice Minister Pirow, and the Independent ANC drew most of its support from country branches in the region.”

Taken all together, the four pieces of writing in this part should provide a good outline of South African revolutionary history, and a good sampling of the South African revolutionary writing style.

The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Moses Kotane, ‘Cradock Letter’ to Johannesburg District Committee, 1934.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Ruth First

2012-02-06T14:11:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4c

Ruth First, 1925-1982

Ruth First

Ruth First was a revolutionary leader in her own right, of the Young Communist League of South Africa, of the Communist Party of South Africa before it was banned in 1950, of the Congress of Democrats, in all the campaigns of the 1950s, and in the clandestine South African Communist Party, before and after being forced into exile in the 1960s.

Ruth First was a lifelong militant of South Africa’s liberation movement, and a martyr to its cause.

But also, Ruth First wrote seriously and profoundly about other countries than her own, and about the African countries in general from the point of view of a scholar, teacher and kournalist.

Aquino de Bragança, the Director of the Centre of African Studies where Ruth First had been co-Director at the time she was slain by the South African bomb, wrote after her death of “her personal struggle to unite political militancy and intellectual work”. It is clear that she excelled in both ways.

Revolutionary leaders need to be readers, and also to be writers. Ruth First’s work shows why.

Of the two linked items, the chapter from Ruth First’s book “Black Gold” called “Workers or Peasants?” is the one that relates to Mozambique. Ruth First’s work in other countries was not unrelated to the South African struggle. This particular summary reveals in a way that becomes shocking, the awful effect of South Africa’s predatory relationship with Mozambique on that country as a whole, and on the migrant labourers and their families in particular.

Ruth First draws some conclusions, which might at this stage be challenged, concerning the co-operatisation of rural Mozambique as a component of socialism, or more broadly, of “development”.

It might be that a better course would have been to simply guarantee a market to the peasants, and then to let them organise themselves within that secure market environment, whether through co-operatives or in diverse other ways. In other words, there may have been more than the two ways to go that Ruth First describes in her concluding paragraphs. Read the piece to see what is meant here.

In the chapter, “The Limits of Nationalism”, from Ruth First’s book on Libya, what is described most clearly is the class dynamic of a state that rests upon the support of the petty bourgeoisie (or “petite bourgeoisie” as First tends to call it). This is a class that typically expanded very quickly after the independence of African countries, First says. It is a class that wants to do everything according to its spontaneous, common-sense bourgeois lights. First describes how in Libya, previously existing organisations were disbanded, to be replaced by new ones created from the top down.

There are aspects of this very fine piece of writing that may apply to South Africa today, and which also to some extent explain both the strength and the weakness of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya of the late Muammar Gaddafi, still in evidence today after the intervention and bombing of Libya by NATO, the sword of the “international community” (Imperialism).

Other books by Ruth First include “South West Africa”, 1963; “117 Days”, 1965; “The Barrel of a Gun: political power in Africa and the coup d'état”, 1970; “Portugal's Wars in Africa”, 1971; “The South African Connection”, 1972 (with Jonathan Steele and Christabel Gurney); and “Olive Schreiner”, 1980 (with Ann Scott). Earlier, Ruth First had worked for the Guardian/New Age, under the editorship of Brian Bunting.

Ruth First’s own archive of her work is available for viewing on microfilm at the Historical Papers Archive, located in the William Cullen Library at Wits University, Johannesburg. The web site of this public institution is at http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/.

The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Ruth First, Workers or Peasants? 1983, and Ruth First, Libya - the Elusive Revolution, 1974.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Agostinho Neto

2012-02-04T12:31:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4b

Agostinho Neto, 1922-1979

Agostinho Neto

Agostinho Neto, the first President of MPLA and the first President of the independent republic of Angola, was a great writer - a poet - as well as a great revolutionary leader.

The attached document, also linked below, is as good an example as could be found of how, through radio, speech, and eventually through the translation and compilation of the same into a pamphlet by the solidarity movement, the kinds of words which held the liberation movement together, and also publicised it, were made and multiplied.

Now, in 2012, it may be thought that the propagation of such words was easy in those days, or automatic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The liberation movements were outsiders. Their supporters in other countries, whom Neto here mentions and acknowledges, were not in the mainstream. The countries which now parade as “the international community”, as “NATO”, the “ICC”, and in other guises - in other words the governments of the metropolitan Imperialist countries - in those days were solidly and quite openly supporting colonialism. Portugal, for example, was then (and has never since ceased to be) a leading member of NATO, which is actually the armed wing of imperialism.

In these particular writings Neto does not, as the linked writings of Mondlane and Cabral did, reflect explicitly on the place of intellectual work in the national democratic revolution.

Instead, this set of three items, presented together as a pamphlet, directly exemplifies such intellectual work in practice.

It is hard not to be moved by these words even after the passage of 40 years. They still have the immediacy and the urgency that they had when they were spoken by Agostinho Neto and when they were heard by the three different audiences to which they were addressed.

These words carry truths and lessons that still need to be learned and re-learned.

In a different mood, some of Agostinho Neto’s poems, translated into English, can be read if you click here.

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Agostinho Neto, Messages to Companions in the Struggle, 1972, Part 1, and Part 2.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Amilcar Cabral

2012-02-02T20:44:00.003+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4a

Amilcar Cabral, 1924 - 1973

Amilcar Cabral

The text for this week (download linked below) is Amilcar Cabral’s speech on National Liberation and Culture. This speech was originally delivered on February 20, 1970, as part of the Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture Series at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. That is more than forty years ago, yet the speech is as fresh and as relevant as if it had been written yesterday, and based on appraisal of our present circumstances.

Foreign domination “can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned,” wrote Cabral. Attempted assimilation is “a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question.” It does not work. In fact there are no ways in which the coloniser can succeed.

“…it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement,” says Cabral.

“…national liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress,” says Cabral.

Cabral develops the idea that “…we must take into account the fact that, faced with the prospect of political independence, the ambition and opportunism from which the liberation movement generally suffers may bring into the struggle unconverted individuals. The latter, on the basis of their level of schooling, their scientific or technical knowledge, but without losing any of their social class biases, may attain the highest positions in the liberation movement,” he warns.

Cabral concludes “…the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and development of these values within a national framework.”

In Portuguese: A luta continua!

Cabral’s “The Weapon of Theory” was used in the introductory part of this course.

The importance that this outstanding revolutionary Amilcar Cabral placed on cultural and intellectual output is plain to see. The Mozambican scholar Aquino de Bragança, colleague of another intellectual (and like Cabral, martyr) Ruth First, called intellectual work “an instrument of the revolution”. It is the ground upon which the revolution stands.

Aquino de Bragança was himself killed in the 19 October 1986 air crash in which President Samora Machel also died, thirteen years after the murder of Amilcar Cabral.

We are not yet safe enough to think that the killing of political intellectuals and political cadres is a thing of the past, or that attempts at “organized repression of the cultural life of the people” have ceased.

At least 13 of our revolutionary writers were violently killed. One of them was killed in the interval between the last time the course was given, and now.

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Amilcar Cabral, National Liberation and Culture, 1970.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Eduardo Mondlane

2012-02-02T00:41:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 4

Eduardo Mondlane, 1920-1969

Eduardo Mondlane

The attached text, given for reading as the main document of this fourth part of the African Revolutionary Writers series, is Chapter 5 from Eduardo Mondlane’s 1969 book, “The Struggle for Mozambique”. The chapter is called “Resistance – the search for a national movement”. It is the part of the book where Mondlane relates the foundation of the united liberation movement, FRELIMO.

The creation of FRELIMO – the movement that in 1975 achieved victory over the Portuguese colonialists in Mozambique – owed a lot to Mondlane’s work. Yet a large proportion of this remarkable chapter is devoted, not to political manoeuvres and negotiations, but to the cultural and intellectual origins of Mozambican national consciousness, some of them quite small. It is evidence of the high degree of importance that this great revolutionary, Eduardo Mondlane, placed upon all kinds of intellectual artefacts, and not just literature.

The place of intellectual output in revolutionary processes is part of “the point” of this African Revolutionary Writers series. It is notable that in this part, which includes three great Lusophone revolutionaries, Mondlane, Cabral and Neto, and one, Ruth First, who devoted the last years of her life to Mozambique (where she was assassinated by a South African apartheid-regime letter-bomb) they all give us strong cause to think how “to unite political militancy and intellectual work” and make intellectual work “an instrument of the revolution”. These quoted words are from a note by Aquino de Bragança, Director of the Centre of African Studies where Ruth First was working when she was killed by the South African bomb.

Mondlane, too was assassinated, as was Amilcar Cabral. Mondlane’s successor Samora Machel was also killed, in the contrived downing of the aircraft he was in. Aquino de Bragança also died in that crash.

Mondlane relates that in Mueda, Mozambique, on 16 June 1960, over 500 people were shot down by the Portuguese. This was in the same year as the infamous Sharpeville massacre in neighbouring South Africa. The Mueda massacre, he writes, propelled increased numbers of Mozambicans into the armed struggle. Yet this event is hardly spoken of or written about in the English language.

The rediscovery of the texts used in this series was difficult, and took many months. No suitable text has yet been found to represent the thinking of Samora Machel in this series. Such texts of Samora Machel do exist – the references in books such as Barry Munslow’s “Mozambique: the Revolution and its Origins” are good evidence of their existence – but they are in Portuguese.

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, 1969.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Ahmed Sékou Touré

2012-01-30T12:11:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3c

Ahmed Sékou Touré, 1922 - 1984

Ahmed Sékou Touré

Before becoming President of Guinea at independence in 1958 – a position he held until his death in 1984 – Ahmed Sékou Touré led a trade union federation.

At an early stage in his presidency, Sékou Touré led his country to vote against the neo-colonial arrangement known as the “French Community”. Guinea was the only one of many former French African colonies to vote against.

This refusal of neo-colonialism was the heroic act for which Sékou Touré has never been forgotten, or in the case of the French imperialists, forgiven.

Later, Sékou Touré became well-known as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. Guinea attracted personalities including the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba, who became Guinea’s ambassador to the United Nations, and her then husband the US Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, who changed his name to Kwame Ture.

Yet in spite of the celebrity he enjoyed in his lifetime, there is surprisingly little of Sékou Touré’s legacy visible on the Internet today. Also in hard copy, his output has been difficult to find. A 1979 book of Sékou Touré’s called “Africa on the Move”, published in English, was finally located in a library. From it the quotation in the downloadable document was extracted.

Sékou Touré’s posthumous opponents have been busier than his supporters, so that there is plenty of off-hand denigration of the man to be found, and also plain confusion, as in the current Wikipedia entry, for example.

But there may be other reasons why this man’s memory is now so obscure. He left many volumes of speeches, in hard copy, in French. He was keen to leave a legacy. So why has this one-time giant of African politics, formerly a household name all over the world, shrunk so much in terms of reputation?

His own book, “Africa on the Move”, gives clues as to why this might be so. It is more than 600 pages long, yet it reads like the conference report of the general secretary of a trade union federation. It is the kind of document that has the same predictable headings and the same voluminous narrative time after time, as if it was the “matters arising” of an on-going series of unresolved meetings. “Africa Going Round in Circles” might have been a better title for this book.

Judge it for yourself from the quoted part of the downloadable document. It is clear, at least, that Sékou Touré based his output on “common sense”, and on such touchstones as “efficiency”, “responsibility” and other presumed universal values that constantly crop up in his text. Frankly, it is quite dull and boring. Sékou Touré, contrary to what one might expect after his heroic stand against neo-colonialism in 1958, turns out to be a “neutralist” (his word). His politics are ad hoc and appear personal, but are actually made up of the commonplace platitudes that capitalism holds out in front of itself, to cover itself.

Like a typical reformist trade unionist, Sékou Touré rejects the wickedness of capitalism but takes all of capitalism’s lip-service to morality at face value. He never escapes from the ideology of the bourgeois ruling class.

Sékou Touré never mentions any other politician, contemporary or historical. It is not lack of knowledge or mental capacity that renders his work so unscholarly, but the absence of any correspondence with other thinkers. Perhaps this is evidence of simple vanity (simple, but vast). If so, this would also partly explain the lack of defenders for the memory of a man who quite possibly bored his fellow-Guineans terribly, for the entire 26 years of an egocentric presidency.

For this series, we have sought out the original words of revolutionaries, including Sékou Touré’s. But contrary to our own CU practice, we find that Touré shunned the works of others. He ignores them all. His inclusion in our series therefore stands as an example to show that there are those who hold themselves apart from history, and to whom history consequently tends to return the same kind of compliment: neglect. We include him anyway, and allow his supporters to defend him if they will.

In a part of the book not quoted here, Sékou Touré relates how his party (the PDG) is the one in a one-party state. He says that the one-party rule was brought in for the sake of “efficiency”. Then he says that subsequent to this original act, he has heard of something called National Democracy which he regards as the same thing as the one-party state. Sékou Touré saw something called NDR, but missed the democracy in it.

Sad to say, Sékou Touré missed the point.

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Ahmed Sékou Touré, Africa’s Future and the World, 1979.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Albert Luthuli

2012-01-29T09:36:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3b

Albert Luthuli, 1898 - 1967

Albert Luthuli

Chief Albert Luthuli was President-General of the African National Congress from 1952 until his death in 1967. In 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Our sample of his work is his Peace Prize lecture, delivered in Stockholm, Sweden (attached).

This speech fits in well with our course. It followed the first batch of African independence-struggle victories after the World War of 1939-45. In the same year of 1960, 16 African countries achieved independence.

We have already seen material from Paul Robeson and W E B Du Bois, helping us to recall the worldwide uprising of internationalist political will for the end of direct colonialism, which was to a large extent a consequence of the victorious Anti-Fascist World War. Luthuli’s speech shows his consciousness of this internationalism, of which the awarding of his Peace Prize was one expression.

Note that Luthuli’s speech accepting the Peace Prize is not a pacifist speech. It does not condemn armed struggle, but on the contrary, justifies it. Here are some relevant paragraphs from the speech:

“This award could not be for me alone, nor for just South Africa, but for Africa as a whole. Africa presently is most deeply torn with strife and most bitterly stricken with racial conflict. How strange then it is that a man of Africa should be here to receive an award given for service to the cause of peace and brotherhood between men. There has been little peace in Africa in our time. From the northernmost end of our continent, where war has raged for seven years, to the centre and to the south there are battles being fought out, some with arms, some without. In my own country, in the year 1960, for which this award is given, there was a state of emergency for many months. At Sharpeville, a small village, in a single afternoon sixty-nine people were shot dead and 180 wounded by small arms fire; and in parts like the Transkei, a state of emergency is still continuing. Ours is a continent in revolution against oppression. And peace and revolution make uneasy bedfellows. There can be no peace until the forces of oppression are overthrown.

“Our continent has been carved up by the great powers; alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military conquest and by economic domination; strivings for nationhood and national dignity have been beaten down by force; traditional economics and ancient customs have been disrupted, and human skills and energy have been harnessed for the advantage of our conquerors. In these times there has been no peace; there could be no brotherhood between men.

“But now, the revolutionary stirrings of our continent are setting the past aside. Our people everywhere from north to south of the continent are reclaiming their land, their right to participate in government, their dignity as men, their nationhood. Thus, in the turmoil of revolution, the basis for peace and brotherhood in Africa is being restored by the resurrection of national sovereignty and independence, of equality and the dignity of man.

“It should not be difficult for you here in Europe to appreciate this. Your continent passed through a longer series of revolutionary upheavals, in which your age of feudal backwardness gave way to the new age of industrialization, true nationhood, democracy, and rising living standards - the golden age for which men have striven for generations. Your age of revolution, stretching across all the years from the eighteenth century to our own, encompassed some of the bloodiest civil wars in all history. By comparison, the African revolution has swept across three quarters of the continent in less than a decade; its final completion is within sight of our own generation…

“Perhaps, by your standards, our surge to revolutionary reforms is late. If it is so - if we are late in joining the modern age of social enlightenment, late in gaining self-rule, independence, and democracy, it is because in the past the pace has not been set by us. Europe set the pattern for the nineteenth and twentieth-century development of Africa. Only now is our continent coming into its own and recapturing its own fate from foreign rule.

“Though I speak of Africa as a single entity, it is divided in many ways by race, language, history, and custom; by political, economic, and ethnic frontiers. But in truth, despite these multiple divisions, Africa has a single common purpose and a single goal - the achievement of its own independence. All Africa, both lands which have won their political victories but have still to overcome the legacy of economic backwardness, and lands like my own whose political battles have still to be waged to their conclusion - all Africa has this single aim: our goal is a united Africa in which the standards of life and liberty are constantly expanding; in which the ancient legacy of illiteracy and disease is swept aside; in which the dignity of man is rescued from beneath the heels of colonialism which have trampled it. This goal, pursued by millions of our people with revolutionary zeal, by means of books, representations, demonstrations, and in some places armed force provoked by the adamancy of white rule, carries the only real promise of peace in Africa. Whatever means have been used, the efforts have gone to end alien rule and race oppression.”

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Africa and Freedom, Albert Luthuli, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1960.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Frantz Fanon

2012-01-27T06:47:00.004+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3a

Frantz Fanon, 1925 - 1961

Frantz Fanon

The extraordinary co-incidence of dates of both birth and death as between Frantz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba, both born in 1925 and both deceased in 1961, highlights the precociousness of Fanon’s critique of the post-colonial regimes which had so recently, from his standpoint, come into existence. Please read the essay “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, attached.

This essay was published in the book “The Wretched of the Earth” in French in 1961 and in English translation in 1963. The title of the book is a direct quotation from the song, the “Internationale”, written by Eugene Pottier during the Paris Commune of 1871, the lyrics of which in the original French begin: “Debout, Les Damnés de la Terre!” Les Damnés de la Terre became the title of Fanon’s book and was well translated into English as “The Wretched of the Earth” – a phrase since then embraced by generations of militants.

Fanon is so intelligent and so witty that it is easy to be charmed by him to such an extent that critical faculties are put aside. So much of what he wrote nearly fifty years ago has come to pass, not once, but repeatedly, and not in one, but in many countries, that one has to be astonished.

No other writer on this topic has come close to the range and the brilliance that Fanon exhibits with such apparent ease in this essay. To find literary comparisons one has to go far back, to the likes of Voltaire and Jonathan Swift.

Fanon is particularly emphatic here in his denunciation of the national bourgeoisie in the circumstances of the newly independent country. Among other things he says:

“In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petu¬lance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.”

Is Fanon right? In South Africa, we certainly have problems of “tenderpreneurs”, “narrow BEE”, corruption and many other manifestations of the premature degeneration of the bourgeoisie, similar to Fanon’s descriptions.

But we also have a theory and practice of National Democratic Revolution involving Unity-in-Action between classes, particularly between the working class and the national bourgeoisie. We have found this class alliance to be indispensible. Fanon did not have this theory.

This document is a great classic and is typical of the best of African Revolutionary Writing.

But it is not a Bible.

The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Frantz Fanon, Pitfalls of National Consciousness, 1963, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

PDF files of the reading text are attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Patrice Lumumba

2012-01-26T06:49:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3

Patrice Lumumba, 1925 - 1961

Patrice Lumumba

This third part of our African Revolutionary Writers’ Series is dedicated to the “Uhuru Years” that followed the 1960 “Year of Africa”, when sixteen countries took their independence. In this instalment we feature Patrice Lumumba’s short, powerful, historic Independence Day speech of 30 June 1960 (PDF download linked below).

In the Western Imperialist literature the independence of all of these countries has been recorded as a “granting” (e.g. thus: “Congo was granted independence by Belgium”). This contradictory view of what happened during the greatest worldwide political change in the 20^th Century - the National Democratic Revolutions in the former colonial countries - mirrors the theme of Frederick Douglass’s most famous speech, (“If there is no Struggle, there is no Progress”) where Douglass says that “power concedes nothing without a demand”.

Lumumba’s speech is still famous for making the same point, and particularly because he made the speech in the presence of the monarch of the colonial power, King Baudouin of Belgium (grandson of the original colonist and butcher King Leopold) who had already spoken in a paternalistic and euphemistic manner at an earlier stage during the same event.

Lumumba at once spoke of struggle, and of victory, and he spoke frankly of the vicious colonialism which had been overcome by that struggle.

Congo at that time was on a par with South Africa as a wealthy, quickly-modernising African country. The subsequent history of the Congo has been a tragedy of neo-colonialism including the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba in the following year, 1961, and the imposition of the stooge dictator Mobutu who ruled until the 1990s.

It is absurd to suggest, as some Imperialist writers continue to do, that the neo-colonial reaction was Lumumba’s fault for being cheeky in front of the Belgian king. No-one must be allowed to forget that these words of Lumumba’s expressed the historical truth, as well as the feelings of millions of Africans at the time, and that these words needed to be said and had to be said, so that they can now be remembered and glorified again in the 21^st Century while Africa gains its “second independence” born out of the struggle against neo-colonialism and Imperialism.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Patrice Lumumba, Congo Independence Day Speech, 30 June 1960.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Martin Luther King

2012-01-23T13:15:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2c

Martin Luther King, 1929-1968

Martin Luther King

The main item “Beyond Vietnam” (download linked below) of the late Rev Martin Luther King Junior, is a classic. Nowadays it has become commonplace to refer to “international solidarity” as if it is both a narrow idea, and also a universal one.

But this concept that we have received and then stripped of its particularity, does actually have a tremendous and specific history whose meaning is not fully conveyed by the mere formula-phrase, “international solidarity”.

The anti-Imperialist struggle and the democratic struggle can and should be one. It is not a matter of charity of the rich to the poor. It is also not solely a matter of good-hearted and exceptional individuals, but there have indeed been such individuals, and there will be again. Martin Luther King was such a man.

What Martin Luther King describes, and justifies, is: “why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church - the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate - leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.”

In other words, MLK at the meeting of the “Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam” in April, 1967, was preaching the intrinsic, organic unity of the struggle of the common people everywhere. It is not an artificial altruism but it is a unity of purpose, in concerted action against the single enemy: monopoly capitalist Imperialism; and it involves personalities, and actual events, and places.

Further than his literal message, there is also the extraordinary power and style of MLK’s oration. In September 1917, just prior to the Great October Russian Revolution that he led, Lenin spoke of “insurrection as an art”. It is an art that goes beyond the military, and encompasses all of our activities. Therefore when reading such a piece, one should regard them as a source of learning of the art of advocacy, which is part of the art of leadership, and essential to the art of insurrection.

Exactly one year after making this speech, King was gunned down by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to show solidarity for workers who were on strike there.

Picture: Rev. Martin Luther King, Junior, at the White House, Washington DC, USA

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam, Time to Break Silence, 1967.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Malcolm X

2012-01-20T21:55:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2b

Malcolm X, 1925-1965

Malcolm X

In this speech (“By Any Means Necessary”), linked below, Malcolm X recalls the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and how inspiring it was to him. The speech goes on:

“So we have formed an organization known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity which has the same aim and objective-to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary.

“That's our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.”

The phrase “by any means necessary” is repeated throughout the speech, and it ends:

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

Other speeches of Malcolm X include (these are links to PDF downloads): “The Ballot or the Bullet”; “Message to the Grassroots”; and “Confronting White Oppression”. You can also find videos of Malcolm X on YouTube, and MP3 files of his speeches.

Malcolm X, a great revolutionary leader of his people, and an inspiring orator, (Barack Obama tries to fake Malcolm X’s style) was gunned down in 1965.

Reading these speeches confirms the close and active relationship that remained between the struggling masses in Africa and in America.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Excerpts from the Speech Founding the OAAU, Malcolm X, 28 June 1964.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Paul Robeson

2012-01-19T21:23:00.002+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2a

Paul Robeson, 1898-1976

Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was the Chairman of the Council on African Affairs, an organisation based in New York from 1937 until it was shut down by McCarthyism in 1955. W. E. B. Du Bois was vice-chair.

The Council on African Affairs was a vital link between the struggles of the African-Americans of the Americas, and the National Democratic Revolutions that were getting under way in those years.

In the Council on African Affairs can be seen the historical and not just the theoretical unity between the descendents of the slaves that had been taken from Africa, and the people struggling for freedom from colonialism in Africa itself. The connection with the South African liberation struggle was direct, via Mr E. S. Reddy and Dr Yusuf Dadoo, among others.

It was a two-way street. Sometimes the African-American (and Afro-Caribbean) leadership was in front, and at other times the African example was to an extent impelling the trans-Atlantic struggles. This is the main reason why this body of literature, called “African Revolutionary Writers” does, and must of necessity, include many African writers from across the sea.

Paul Robeson himself was an extraordinary man who achieved excellence in many fields, including sport and scholarship, before becoming a star of the theatre and the cinema, and becoming a performing, recording and broadcasting artist as a singer.

The document can give a good idea of who Paul Robeson was and the role that he played in the liberation struggle, as well as among the people of the United States of America.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Excerpts from “Paul Robeson Speaks”, 1953.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

W. E. B. Du Bois

2012-01-18T21:06:00.003+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 2

Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1963

W. E. B. Du Bois

Dr W. E. B. Du Bois is a legend. How much is owed to this man’s life’s work is impossible to over-estimate. He began his political career in the 19^th Century and went on through the 20^th Century, eventually dying in independent Ghana, where he had gone to serve the revolution, although well into his 90s by that time.

Yet in spite of his eminence and the great amount that he wrote, it has been extremely difficult to find original documents of Du Bois’ on the Internet, especially documents that coincide with his leadership, together with Paul Robeson, of the Council on African Affairs, based in New York, after the anti-fascist war of 1939-1945, when the independence of African countries started to get under way. The first was Libya, on 24 December 1951.

Eventually a friend in New York sent the two rare documents that can be downloaded via the link below. What they at the very least demonstrate is the very broad consciousness that Du Bois had, together with his tremendous sense of history and of historical time.

The 1946 letter to the New York Times is evidence of the unique leadership that Du Bois gave on the national and colonial question, while the article on M. K. Gandhi shows his great understanding of all the difficulties.

Du Bois is also particularly famous for his role as an organiser and participant in several of the five Pan-African Conferences, especially the last one in Manchester in 1945.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: W. E. B. Du Bois, Two Pieces of His Writing, 1946 and 1956.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

George Padmore

2012-01-16T12:11:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1c

George Padmore, 1903 - 1959

George Padmore

George Padmore was born in Trinidad, in the West Indies. After studying in the USA he spent four or five years, from 1929, based in the Soviet Union, heading the Negro Bureau of the Communist International of Labour Unions (Profintern, or RILU). This organisation held a First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, Germany on July 7-8, 1930. South Africans W Thibedi and Moses Kotane were elected to the Executive Committee of the organisation at this conference.

In London from 1934, Padmore teamed up with his contemporary and fellow-Trinidadian C L R James, forming the International African Services Bureau.

Padmore organised the 5^th Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, England, in 1945. This famous Congress was also attended by Kwame Nkrumah, W E B Du Bois, and Jomo Kenyatta, among others, including a young man called Norman Atkinson, who later became a Labour member of the British Parliament.

After Ghanaian independence in 1957, Padmore moved there to serve under Nkrumah, but died in 1959.

There is a web site dedicated to Padmore, here, and there is a section within the Marxists Internet Archive for Padmore, here.

Apart from the texts that we have of Padmore’s - such as in the attached document - for the purposes of this course Padmore’s story can serve to show that the many National Democratic Revolutions that subsequently took place in Africa had common, inter-twining roots, and those roots were not far from the Great October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the founding of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, and the founding of the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921.

As usual, the best remedy for the varying and contradictory interpretations that can be found of the life of a revolutionary like Padmore is to read the person’s own work. The downloadable selection given here contains work written in Padmore’s Profintern days, and also during the Anti-Fascist War when he was in Britain, anticipating the “dollar imperialism” that would follow that conflict.

Padmore brings us from the time of Sol Plaatje through the 1920s and 1930s to the war years and into the great post-war season of national liberation of colonies all over the world.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Selections from the writings of George Padmore.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

2012-01-13T20:44:00.005+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1b

Sol Plaatje, 1876 - 1932

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

Sol Plaatje was the first Secretary-General of the African National Congress. He was a journalist and a novelist, among other things.

Attached is one of the Chapters of Plaatje’s “Native Life in South Africa” (1916). The full work can be found here.

Sol Plaatje also wrote the epic novel “Mhudi”, published in 1913. It does not appear to be on the Internet, but it does appear to be still available in hard copy.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Sol Plaatje’s 1916 “Native Life in South Africa” (Wrong Carries the Day).

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Toussaint L’Ouverture

2012-01-13T12:40:00.003+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1a

François-Dominique Toussaint, 1743 - 1803

Toussaint L’Ouverture

Toussaint L’Ouverture – “Toussaint the Opening” – was the leader, both military and civilian, of the slave revolt in the French West Indian colony of “Saint Domingue”, which is now the Republic of Haiti.

Toussaint brought his country to the brink of independence. The constitution of which he was the author (download linked below), though not the constitution of an independent republic, was enough to lead to his capture, transportation to France, and death in captivity two years after its publication.

Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines, did achieve independence, though on harsh terms that crippled the country with “reparations” to the French Republic - one of the great scandals of history.

C L R James wrote a famous work about the Haitian revolution, calling the book “The Black Jacobins”. The title was a reference to the bourgeois take-over of the Great French Revolution that had taken place a few years earlier, the “Terror” under Robespierre, and the eventual bourgeois dictatorship that was the consequence of the revolution.

In other words the freed slaves became subordinated to a dictatorship of “their own” black bourgeoisie, of which Toussaint was one of the first. This was hardly surprising, and practically inevitable. The first dictatorship of the proletariat (The Paris Commune) was not seen until seventy years later, in 1871.

Even if a “Jacobin”, Toussaint was still an “Opening” in history, and one of the greatest of them.

The Haiti Constitution of 1801 is the best representation we have of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s writing.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text: Toussaint, Haiti Constitution of 1801

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Frederick Douglass

2012-01-12T09:08:00.000+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 1

Frederick Douglass, 1818 - 1895

Frederick Douglass

This is the first main post of our new series of African Revolutionary Writers. You will receive four instalments in each weekly part, over ten weeks, with each instalment highlighting one revolutionary writer. These are your regular political education posts for the first quarter of 2012. They are distinguished from other posts by the background colour, and are also clearly marked as “African Revolutionary Writers”. We begin with a giant: Frederick Douglass.

Context

The first part of this ten-part series on African Revolutionary Writers covers the period from slavery to Imperialism. The slave trade begun when Portuguese ships passed Cape Bojador on the coast of Western Sahara in 1434, bringing them south of the great desert for the first time.

They immediately took slaves. These, the first slaves of the bourgeoisie, were sold to Spanish colonists on the Canary Islands, where the original inhabitants (the Guanches) had already been enslaved and worked to extinction. The triangular slave-trade pattern: Portugal - Africa - Canary Islands - was soon afterwards scaled up to Britain - Africa - West Indies (or alternatively Brazil or North America). The Atlantic Slave Trade took slaves across the ocean via the “Middle Passage”, and brought back sugar, tobacco, cotton and other plantation-grown commodities.

Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies in 1492 and touched the continent of South America in 1498, the same year that Vasco da Gama reached India by the Cape sea route. By 1502 the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in full flow, first as a Portuguese monopoly, later as a British monopoly.

Although Marx notes in “Capital” that capitalism began in the 1500s, yet for more than three centuries the dominant business of the Western European bourgeoisie was not capitalism, but the Atlantic slave trade, and the biggest operator in that business was Britain. This situation lasted until the capitalist “Industrial Revolution” of the late 1700s, also in Britain.

Only when the Western bourgeoisie made its turn towards capitalism did it become expedient for it to avail some blacks, released slaves, to create a literary genre called the “slave narrative”, as part of the capitalist campaign to suppress slavery so as to make room for a new, more productive, exploited class: the wage-slaves or working proletariat. An early example of this genre is the work of Olaudah Equiano, who wrote a book about his “Interesting Life” as a slave and rescued slave, published in 1789. These slave-narrative books tended not only to expose the evils of slavery, but also to praise Christianity and capitalism in equal measure, in order to flatter their sponsors and readers.

Douglass

In this regard Frederick Douglass’s work was exceptional for the breadth and the rebellious fearlessness of his rhetoric. Douglass broke free from the limits of the slave narrative genre so as to begin to create a truly revolutionary black literature, and this is why our series begins with him.

After escaping by train from twenty years of slavery Douglass wrote an extraordinary slave narrative called My Bondage and My Freedom, first published in 1855. He included, in the same volume, a series of six transcripts of speeches or orations that he had given as a campaigner against slavery. Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865 at the end of the US Civil War, and ten years after the publication of Frederick Douglass’s book.

These six particular lectures of Douglass’s are contained in one of the two documents prepared for reading. “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” is a famous one, but they are all outstanding. This was an orator! The reading documents can be accessed via the link given below.

Power concedes nothing without a demand

The main reading is the most immortal of all of Frederick Douglass’s speeches, known as “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” from 1857, which contains the famous phrase: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” If you read nothing else of Douglass’s, do read this extraordinary piece of revolutionary literature, for the good advice that it gives: power concedes nothing without a demand.

The American Civil War of 1861-1865 was an armed conflict between one part of the bourgeoisie and another. It represented the real capitalist revolution in the USA, when the specifically capitalist bourgeoisie gained its dictatorship, the same US bourgeois dictatorship that still exists today.

For Africans, the global abolition of slavery was a relief after three centuries of terrible mass-scale atrocity. But the abolition of outright slavery also marked the beginning of wage slavery, and of military invasions, conquest, domination, plunder, settlement and colonialism. In the second half of the 20^th century, globalist neo-colonialism and Imperialism followed.

African political writing tracked all these changes. In this week’s part we look briefly at the literature of the period of slavery and colonial expansion. In the next, we will move into the literature of the post-WW2 era of decolonisation.

The above serves to introduce the original reading-text - Frederick Douglass’s 1957 “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress”

PDF files of the reading text are attached, including six more lectures of Frederick Douglass

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Use Your Head

2012-01-09T21:14:00.002+02:00

Pedagogy 2

Use Your Head

This is the last preliminary posting before the courses re-start next week. It is a “conspectus” (overview) of Tony Buzan’s book, “Use Your Head”. Please find the file attached. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

The original author Buzan does not propose, or proceed from, any overt political premises. He appears at first sight to resemble a utilitarian bourgeois “management guru” or a “motivational speaker”. His work stands out from the others of that kind only because of its great practical effectiveness, and not because of any open political aspect.

But Buzan’s work also fits in very well, politically, with our Communist University pedagogy, because it is dialectical. And it is intentional.

Practical

From a practical point of view, Buzan’s appeal is that he offers assistance with faster, more purposeful reading; with memorising; and with note-taking, particularly using his invention, the “mind-map” technique. An example of a mind-map is reproduced above.

These techniques are just what students need to help them get through their studies, and just what conventional education often failed to give them. Students used to be obliged to learn before having learned how to learn. Buzan filled this gap very well.

But what underlies Buzan’s approach? It is not that he was just lucky to stumble upon three techniques, like an old-time prospector discovering gold in a lucky strike.

Dialectical

What distinguishes the mind-map, in particular, from other forms of note-taking characterised by lists and bullet-points, is that it begins and ends as a “unity and struggle of opposites”. It is a representation, in one glance, of the way in which any concrete phenomenon, or discrete system, is the product (or resultant) of many abstract dynamic forces (or vectors) pulling in different directions.

The mind-map is therefore a very good illustration of exactly what is meant by “dialectics”.

Intentional

The other main underlying characteristic of Buzan’s approach is its “intentionality”, to use a term from Paulo Freire’s vocabulary.

Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire quotes Alvaro Vieira Pinto saying that intentionality is “the fundamental property of consciousness”, remarking that this concept is “of great importance for the understanding of a problem-posing pedagogy”.

Buzan’s approach is full of intentionality. There is no question, for Buzan, of wandering, or learning for learning’s sake, in a random, eclectic way. Buzan says that you must be looking for a result.

Karl Marx, in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach, said that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. That’s intentionality.

Intentionality, as well as dialectics and dialogue, are common themes in Freire, Buzan and Marx – and in the Communist University.

This introduction serves to introduce the original reading-text which is the CU’s Conspectus of Tony Buzan’s “Use Your Head”.

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Pedagogy by the method of Paulo Freire

2012-01-05T21:31:00.001+02:00

Pedagogy 1

Paulo Freire, 1921-1997

Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire

The Communist University has a tradition of starting every year with a reflection upon our methodology, and on the theory of pedagogy (i.e. theory of learning and teaching) in general, and on the way that practical pedagogy relates to politics.

The great 20^th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. It was Freire who gave us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy, is not well designed to educate. Instead, its primary purpose is to reproduce the class relations that suit the ruling class. Please read Paulo Freire’s own words about this, in the attached file.

Education, which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the ruling class into a means of repression, said Freire.

How can revolutionaries ensure that education ceases to reproduce oppressive landlord-dominated or bourgeois-dominated class relations, and instead starts to generate socialism and communism?

Problematising Education

To ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue” about education. Freire thought that for the political education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing the features of the oppressive state, then the educational method for this revolutionary purpose would have to be different and new.

In the dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate, doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and learners are teachers; yet all are free-willing “subjects”, having “agency”, capable of leadership.

As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object for the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom. Instead we recognise that the oppressor is around us and even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual, socialising pedagogical dialogue.

In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of “problematising”, beginning with education itself.

As a rule, the CU uses original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In that spirit, text attached today is the second chapter of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy” terms (the link to the download is below). This text provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching. You may ask each other: What is political education for?

For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, all education is a political act and a social act, an act of liberation and of self-liberation.

There will be one further preliminary posting. The first instalment of the course proper will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.

This introduction only serves to introduce the original reading-text. In this case it is Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.

Weapon of Theory

2012-01-05T08:05:00.001+02:00

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 0

Amilcar Cabral, 1924 - 1973

Weapon of Theory

Next week, the SADTU Political Education Forum begins a ten-part course on African Revolutionary Writers. This will be the first of four ten-week courses to be run through this e-mail channel in 2012.

The course on African Revolutionary Writers will be followed by three further ten-week courses, on Basics, on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, and on Hegel’s Philosophy of Dialectics, Logic and Right.

As a suitable introduction to the new course, herewith attached is Amilcar Cabral’s “Weapon of Theory”.

Cabral is the most profound and the most sublime of African Revolutionary writers. He is one of those Africans who contributed indispensable new lessons to the universal revolutionary legacy. “The Weapon of Theory” is relevant to our course as a whole, and to all our courses, for that matter.

At a later stage in this course we will return to Amilcar Cabral and to the great single-volume compendium of his work called “Unity and Struggle”, recently republished in English in South Africa.

The Weapon of Theory

The Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America was held in Havana in January, 1966, 46 years after the Baku Conference of the Peoples of the East and seven years after the Cuban Revolution.

Forty-six more years have passed since the Tricontinental. A lot has been achieved in that time, including our South African democratic breakthrough, eighteen years ago, and the unbanning of the ANC, twenty-two years ago.

The full defeat of Imperialism has not yet occurred. What we can say is that from early in the 20^th Century the historical agenda was set by the liberation movements, and that Imperialism represents the degeneration and the decline of bourgeois class power, and not its heyday.

The great political change in the world in the last century was the taking of sovereign independence by the formerly oppressed peoples of the former colonies, affecting the great majority of the population of the planet and opening the road of democracy for them.

This gigantic movement and huge change was achieved with the weapon of theory.

In 2012 with direct Imperialist armed aggression still taking place on the continent of Africa it is, however, clear that the struggle continues.

In this connection we can note that Amilcar Cabral, in the speech to the Tricontinental that has always been known by the title “The Weapon of Theory”, said the following:

“It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces.

“For this reason, in our opinion, any national liberation movement which does not take into consideration this basis and this objective may certainly struggle against imperialism, but will surely not be struggling for national liberation.

“This means that, bearing in mind the essential characteristics of the present world economy, as well as experiences already gained in the field of anti-imperialist struggle, the principal aspect of national liberation struggle is the struggle against neo-colonialism.”

Amilcar Cabral was a true vanguardist. He was both a great leader, and a great intellectual.

The struggle against neo-colonialism continues.

A PDF file of the reading text is attached

To download the full African Revolutionary Writers course in PDF files, please click here

Revenues and their Sources

2011-11-10T12:24:00.000+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 7

Revenues and their Sources

Capital Volume 3, Part 7, Revenues and their Sources

The last part, of the last book, of Capital begins as Volume 1 ended, with a reminder that capital is not a thing, but is a relationship. In Part 1 of our chosen text, Chapter 48, The Trinity Formula (download linked below) Marx writes:

“Capital, land, labour! However, capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money. It is the means of production monopolised by a certain section of society, confronting living labour-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified through this antithesis in capital…”

Shortly afterwards, Marx turns to a summary of the illusory and impossible conception of the same relationship as seen by self-serving “vulgar” bourgeois economists, starting like this:

“Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. Thus, vulgar economy has not the slightest suspicion that the trinity which it takes as its point of departure, namely, land — rent, capital — interest, labour — wages or the price of labour, are prima facie three impossible combinations.”

Later in this paragraph (section III of the chapter), Marx refers to Volume 1 (“Book 1”) and contrasts the irrational bourgeois concept of value with the true understanding of surplus value.

To finish by returning to Engels’ introductory remarks: Yes, Capital Volume 3 is important. It is not superfluous. Volume 3 is directly helpful in the current circumstances of “Global Economic Meltdown” and “Debt Crisis”. But Volume 3 does not render Volume 1 redundant. On the contrary, Volume 3 relies upon and leans upon Volume 1 and constantly confirms Volume 1, throughout.

The last Chapter of Capital Volume 3 is Chapter 52, “Classes”, and it ends: “[Here the manuscript breaks off.]”

Engels provided a supplement to Volume 3 which can be found on MIA, here.

Picture: A representation of the Christian “Holy Trinity”. “Pater”, “filius” and “spiritus sanctus” are Father, Son and holy spirit (Holy Ghost), and “deus” is God. “Est” means “is”, and “non est” means “is not”. These are “prima facie three impossible combinations.” If all are God, then it follows in logic that all must be the same as each other; but the diagram says they are not the same as each other. This is a logical “non sequitur” (i.e. “it does not follow”).

Marx is not challenging Christianity. Christians may, as some of them do, accept the Trinity as an article of faith, while others may say (as do the Jesuits, for example) that the Trinity is a mystery, but we must constantly strive to understand it.

Marx is rather saying that the Christian Trinity is not reconcilable by logic, and the bourgeois Trinity of capital, land, and labour likewise does not constitute three of a kind, and, like the Christian Trinity, this bourgeois Trinity it does not constitute a logical unity.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 48, The Trinity Formula (7327 words)

Land and Mining. Ground Rent.

2011-11-03T11:22:00.002+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 6

Ground Rent

Capital Volume 3, Part 6, Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent

In this 11-chapter part of Capital Volume 3, Karl Marx relates capital (reproduction of surplus value) to the much older, pre-capitalist concept and practice of rent. He shows how rent became, and remains, part of the capitalistic system. Our chosen Chapter 38 (download linked below) deals with the “surplus-profit” over and above the general rate of profit, that may arise from fortuitous factors like the possession of a waterfall; and the concept of differential rent as a means of taking account of such a variation from the norm.

But first, let us exploit the summarising paragraphs on rent, given below in a shortened version, which Marx gives in the Introduction to this section. Note that, as Marx reminds us, these remarks bear upon the question of mining as much as they bear upon agriculture:

“The analysis of landed property in its various historical forms is beyond the scope of this work. We shall be concerned with it only in so far as a portion of the surplus-value produced by capital falls to the share of the landowner. We assume, then, that agriculture is dominated by the capitalist mode of production just as manufacture is; in other words, that agriculture is carried on by capitalists who differ from other capitalists primarily in the manner in which their capital, and the wage-labour set in motion by this capital, are invested. So far as we are concerned, the farmer produces wheat, etc., in much the same way as the manufacturer produces yarn or machines. The assumption that the capitalist mode of production has encompassed agriculture implies that it rules over all spheres of production and bourgeois society, i.e., that its prerequisites, such as free competition among capitals, the possibility of transferring the latter from one production sphere to another, and a uniform level of the average profit, etc., are fully matured. The form of landed property which we shall consider here is a specifically historical one, a form transformed through the influence of capital and of the capitalist mode of production, either of feudal landownership, or of small-peasant agriculture as a means of livelihood, in which the possession of the land and the soil constitutes one of the prerequisites of production for the direct producer, and in which his ownership of land appears as the most advantageous condition for the prosperity of his mode of production.

“Just as the capitalist mode of production in general is based on the expropriation of the conditions of labour from the labourers, so does it in agriculture presuppose the expropriation of the rural labourers from the land and their subordination to a capitalist, who carries on agriculture for the sake of profit…

“For our purposes it is necessary to study the modern form of landed property, because our task is to consider the specific conditions of production and circulation which arise from the investment of capital in agriculture. Without this, our analysis of capital would not be complete… (Or, instead of agriculture, we can use mining because the laws are the same for both.)

“Landed property is based on the monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others. With this in mind, the problem is to ascertain the economic value, that is, the realisation of this monopoly on the basis of capitalist production.

“With the legal power of these persons to use or misuse certain portions of the globe, nothing is decided. The use of this power depends wholly upon economic conditions, which are independent of their will. The legal view itself only means that the landowner can do with the land what every owner of commodities can do with his commodities. And this view, this legal view of free private ownership of land, arises in the ancient world only with the dissolution of the organic order of society, and in the modern world only with the development of capitalist production…

“In the section (in Volume 1) dealing with primitive accumulation we saw that this mode of production presupposes, on the one hand, the separation of the direct producers from their position as mere accessories to the land (in the form of vassals, serfs, slaves, etc.), and, on the other hand, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land.

“To this extent the monopoly of landed property is a historical premise, and continues to remain the basis of the capitalist mode of production, just as in all previous modes of production which are based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or another. But the form of landed property with which the incipient capitalist mode of production is confronted does not suit it. It first creates for itself the form required by subordinating agriculture to capital. It thus transforms feudal landed property, clan property, small peasant property in mark communes — no matter how divergent their juristic forms may be — into the economic form corresponding to the requirements of this mode of production.

“One of the major results of the capitalist mode of production is that, on the one hand, it transforms agriculture from a mere empirical and mechanical self-perpetuating process employed by the least developed part of society into the conscious scientific application of agronomy, in so far as this is at all feasible under conditions of private property; that it divorces landed property from the relations of dominion and servitude, on the one hand, and, on the other, totally separates land as an instrument of production from landed property and landowner — for whom the land merely represents a certain money assessment which he collects by virtue of his monopoly from the industrial capitalist, the capitalist farmer; it dissolves the connection between landownership and the land so thoroughly that the landowner may spend his whole life in Constantinople, while his estates lie in Scotland. Landed property thus receives its purely economic form by discarding all its former political and social embellishments and associations, in brief all [its] traditional accessories…

“The rationalising of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale, and the reduction ad absurdum of property in land, on the other, are the great achievements of the capitalist mode of production. Like all of its other historical advances, it also attained these by first completely impoverishing the direct producers.”

Once again, Marx refers back to matters dealt with in Volume 1.

Among other things, Marx is here providing us with explanations as to why the land question in South Africa is so intractable. Land is part of capitalism, and so are mines. There can be no going back, but only forward, because in its productive aspect land has never been more socialised. Only in its ownership can land become more socialised, and it can only be fully re-socialised by the complete abolition of capitalism.

As with banking, so also with landowning: Under capitalism the take is a portion of surplus-value. This part shows how such rent arises and how it is calculated for the various conditions, of which the first one given is as clear as any, and can serve as a typical example.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 38, Differential Rent: General Remarks (3752 words)

Interest-Bearing Capital

2011-10-27T10:51:00.001+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 5

Interest-Bearing Capital

Capital Volume 3, Part 5, Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital.

This is a long part of Volume 3 and really too much with its sixteen chapters (21 – 36), almost a book in itself, to be covered in a single discussion. Therefore let us concentrate as before on the question of whether Volume 1 of Capital is undermined or over-ruled by Volume 3.

Marx makes it clear that this is not the case at the beginning of Chapter 23 where he writes:

“Interest, as we have seen in the two preceding chapters, appears originally, is originally, and remains in fact merely a portion of the profit, i.e., of the surplus-value, which the functioning capitalist, industrialist or merchant has to pay to the owner and lender of money-capital whenever he uses loaned capital instead of his own.”

These pages contain great good sense and a lot of assistance to people trying to understand the “Global Economic Meltdown” that has been going on since 2008, and is now generally referred to as “the crisis”. As an example, here are some paragraphs from our sample Chapter 29, Component Parts of Bank Capital, (download linked below).

“We shall now consider labour-power in contrast to the capital of the national debt, where a negative quantity appears as capital — just as interest-bearing capital, in general, is the fountainhead of all manner of insane forms, so that debts, for instance, can appear to the banker as commodities. Wages are conceived here as interest, and therefore labour-power as the capital yielding this interest. For example, if the wage for one year amounts to £50 and the rate of interest is 5%, the annual labour-power is equal to a capital of £1,000. The insanity of the capitalist mode of conception reaches its climax here, for instead of explaining the expansion of capital on the basis of the exploitation of labour-power, the matter is reversed and the productivity of labour power is explained by attributing this mystical quality of interest-bearing capital to labour-power itself. In the second half of the 17th century, this used to be a favourite conception (for example, of Petty), but it is used even nowadays in all seriousness by some vulgar economists and more particularly by some German statisticians.[1] Unfortunately two disagreeably frustrating facts mar this thoughtless conception. In the first place, the labourer must work in order to obtain this interest. In the second place, he cannot transform the capital-value of his labour-power into cash by transferring it. Rather, the annual value of his labour-power is equal to his average annual wage, and what he has to give the buyer in return through his labour is this same value plus a surplus-value, i.e., the increment added by his labour. In a slave society, the labourer has a capital-value, namely, his purchase price. And when he is hired out, the hirer must pay, in the first place, the interest on this purchase price, and, in addition, replace the annual wear and tear on the capital.

“The formation of a fictitious capital is called capitalisation. Every periodic income is capitalised by calculating it on the basis of the average rate of interest, as an income which would be realised by a capital loaned at this rate of interest. For example, if the annual income is £100 and the rate of interest 5%, then the £100 would represent the annual interest on £2,000, and the £2,000 is regarded as the capital-value of the legal title of ownership on the £100 annually. For the person who buys this title of ownership, the annual income of £100 represents indeed the interest on his capital invested at 5%. All connection with the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened.

“Even when the promissory note — the security — does not represent a purely fictitious capital, as it does in the case of state debts, the capital-value of such paper is nevertheless wholly illusory. We have previously seen in what manner the credit system creates associated capital. The paper serves as title of ownership which represents this capital. The stocks of railways, mines, navigation companies, and the like, represent actual capital, namely, the capital invested and functioning in such enterprises, or the amount of money advanced by the stockholders for the purpose of being used as capital in such enterprises. This does not preclude the possibility that these may represent pure swindle. But this capital does not exist twice, once as the capital-value of titles of ownership (stocks) on the one hand and on the other hand as the actual capital invested, or to be invested, in those enterprises. It exists only in the latter form, and a share of stock is merely a title of ownership to a corresponding portion of the surplus-value to be realised by it. A may sell this title to B, and B may sell it to C. These transactions do not alter anything in the nature of the problem. A or B then has his title in the form of capital, but C has transformed his capital into a mere title of ownership to the anticipated surplus-value from the stock capital.”

It remains the case that in Volume 3, Karl Marx is constantly referring back to Volume 1, and reminding us that whatever “financial” profits (as we would now call them) there may be, these are only portions of the surplus value generated at the point of production by the capitalistic exploitation of living labour-power.

Picture: Max Keiser, of Russia Today’s “Keiser Report” television programme, in a London taxi. Keiser is particularly eloquent about the insane role of “fictitious capital” in present conditions, which appear not to have changed at all from the time of Karl Marx, where finance capital is concerned.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 29, Component Parts of Bank Capital (5397 words)

Money-Dealing Capital

2011-10-20T09:42:00.000+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 4

Money-Dealing Capital

Capital Volume 3, Part 4, Conversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant's Capital)

Since 2008 in particular, the world has been described as being in a “global economic meltdown”. This crude bogey is not in fact a new phenomenon. The nature of banking and money-dealing has been well known since the publication of Capital Volume 3, as was noted in various publications at the start of the “meltdown”. One good example is an article by Dave Lindorff in CounterPunch on 3 October 2008, which quotes Chapter 30 in Part 5 of Capital Volume 3 (“Money Capital and Real Capital”) to show that Marx had in that chapter described the working of the “meltdown” very completely and very concisely.

Here is the quote, with Lindorff’s edits:

"In a system...where the entire continuity of the...process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur -- a tremendous rush for means of payment -- when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realized again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the [economy] cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the [Federal Reserve], give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centres where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London [or New York]...the entire process becomes incomprehensible."

Broadly it appears that the ability of bankers and of traders in financial instruments to create money is unrestrained. In Marx’s time there was a link between money and gold and silver, and this link remained officially until the 1970s. The de-facto position of gold remains, but even gold has now been fictionalised to an extent, so that there is a lot more gold “on the books” than physically exists.

This is therefore another area wherein the writings of Karl Marx, particularly here in Capital volume 3, speak directly to the bourgeois economists of today. Marx is however quite explicit in saying that the source of increase of wealth in capitalist society remains one and the same as before: surplus value extracted by the exploitation of labour power paid for with wages at the point of production.

In Chapter 19, on “Money-Dealing Capital” download linked below) Marx states at the beginning:

“A definite part of the total capital dissociates itself from the rest and stands apart in the form of money-capital, whose capitalist function consists exclusively in performing these operations for the entire class of industrial and commercial capitalists. As in the case of commercial capital, a portion of industrial capital engaged in the circulation process in the form of money-capital separates from the rest and performs these operations of the reproduction process for all the other capital. The movements of this money-capital are, therefore, once more merely movements of an individualised part of industrial capital engaged in the reproduction process.”

There is nothing in the above to suggest that the identification of the extraction of surplus value in Capital Volume 1 as the essence of capital has been surpassed or rendered obsolete. On the contrary, Capital Volume 1 is hereby confirmed as continuing to be the essential and necessary basis and foundation in reality upon which the ever-more-fantastic world of money-dealing is erected.

Marx concludes the chapter as follows:

“It is evident that the mass of money-capital with which the money-dealers operate is the money-capital of merchants and industrial capitalists in the process of circulation, and that the money-dealers' operations are actually operations of merchants and industrial capitalists, in which they act as middlemen.

“It is equally evident that the money-dealers' profit is nothing but a deduction from the surplus-value, since they operate with already realised values (even when realised in the form of creditors' claims).”

“Nothing but a deduction from the surplus-value” is as plain a statement as could be, and this corresponds to the current jargon of “the real economy”, or otherwise “Main Street” as opposed to “Wall Street”.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 19, Money-Dealing Capital (3323 words)

Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

2011-10-13T09:00:00.004+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 3

Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

Capital Volume 3, Part 3, The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

The most well-known insight of Capital Volume 3 is the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, often abbreviated to “TPRF”.

Chapter 13 (linked below) describes the Law very directly and simply.

The TPRF is not a mystical law. The TPRF is in the first place a consequence of the simple fact that surplus value extracted from wage-workers is the only source of increase, and profit is surplus value less the capitalists’ other costs, or what Marx calls “constant capital”, where wages are “variable capital”.

The tendency for these other costs to increase over time in relation to the amount of labour-power used, is what causes the TPRF, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The constant capital includes technology and the cost of technological inputs rises as more scientific methods are used, in relation to the amount of labour applied.

This produces an apparent paradox: When productivity rises, profits fall. The more “capital-intensive” is a business, the less profit is made in proportion to the amount of money invested.

Does this mean that capitalism is going to fade away? Does it mean that there is an entropy in play for capitalism, like the winding-down of the solar system? So that profits will eventually reduce almost to zero, and the capitalist relationship therefore become unsustainable and cease to exist?

Perhaps Kautsky might have thought so, but there are “counteracting influences”, some of which Marx describes in the following Chapter 14 of Capital Volume 3. Wikipedia (here) lists Marx’s ones as follows (and then follows with some additional ones of its own):

more intense exploitation of labour (raising the rate of exploitation)
reduction of wages below the value of labour power
cheapening the elements of constant capital by various means
the growth and utilization of a relative surplus population (the reserve army of labour)
foreign trade reducing the cost of industrial inputs and consumer goods
the increase in share capital which devolves part of the costs of using capital on others.

Do the “counteracting influences” balance out the TRPF and produce a capitalist equilibrium?

No, not exactly. Instead, what we actually have is a very dynamic, unstable, and finally political, living world. We have constant crises, contradictions, and conflict.

“Marxism” is for many purposes a hidden science in capitalist society. For example, the business pages of newspapers seldom relate what is happening in businesses from day to day to theories of surplus value. Marx gets a nod now and again but mostly he is ignored.

But it is not the case that in the world of economic theory, Marx is never consulted by bourgeois economists. The terrain on which the parlay happens is here, in Capital Volume 3. The TRPF and its countervailing tendencies are familiar to bourgeois economists. They have their own variations on the problematisation of the TPRF, or its equivalent as they see it, such as “the law of diminishing returns”.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 13, The Law As Such (9109 words)

The General Rate of Profit

2011-10-06T12:23:00.000+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 2

The General Rate of Profit

Capital Volume 3, Part 2, Conversion of Profit into Average Profit

The source of increase under capitalism is surplus value. This is the truth that is revealed in exhaustive detail in Capital, Volume 1, and it is not going to be contradicted here in Volume 3.

But what is called “profit” is not the increase as a whole, but the increase in relation to all costs of production.

Marx’s definition of the rate of profit is “the ratio of surplus labour (s) to necessary labour plus the value of components and materials used in production (v + c) – the capitalist’s costs of production.”

Labour power is paid for at cost, but yields more labour than is required to reproduce labour-power. The extra labour thus found (i.e. surplus labour) generates surplus value

All other inputs such as materials, equipment and general overhead expenses are inert costs that have no regenerative power. They are simply consumed in production and their cost is passed on directly to form part of the commodity price of the resultant product.

Only labour can produce surplus value. All other inputs, even if their cost is passed on in full into the selling-price, neither add nor take away from profit, but go to reduce the overall rate of profit. When labour and the corresponding surplus-value it produces become a smaller proportion of the whole, the rate of profit on the whole outlay is less.

It follows that the only way that profit can be made is by the employment of people. This is in turn is why the threat of employers to employ machinery instead of people is hollow. To make more money, the capitalist must generally employ more people.

The jargon used today is “labour-intensive” versus “capital-intensive”. In a capital-intensive business, the costs of other inputs are higher in proportion to the labour-power employed, and the rate of profit is consequently lower.

This is shown in the table given at the beginning of the well-known Chapter 9 of Volume 3 (download linked below).

This chapter is full of quite simple examples, interspersed with categorical general statements. It is readable to people with a business background.

In general, the chapter is about the development of the overall “economy” out of its individual-capitalist parts, so that we now enter the world of “financial markets”, with an idea of what comes through from the basic relationships and what begins to feed back from the overall (social) level so as to affect individual enterprises.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 9, Formation of a General Rate of Profit (7453 words)

Rate of Profit

2011-09-29T15:42:00.001+02:00

Capital Volume 3, Part 1

The Rate of Profit

Capital Volume 3, Part 1: The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Profit and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit

Marx begins Volume 3 as follows:

“In Book I we analysed the phenomena which constitute the process of capitalist production as such, as the immediate productive process, with no regard for any of the secondary effects of outside influences.

“But this immediate process of production does not exhaust the life span of capital. It is supplemented in the actual world by the process of circulation, which was the object of study in Book II. In the latter, namely in Part III, which treated the process of circulation as a medium for the process of social reproduction, it developed that the capitalist process of production taken as a whole represents a synthesis of the processes of production and circulation.

“Considering what this third book treats, it cannot confine itself to general reflection relative to this synthesis. On the contrary, it must locate and describe the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole. In their actual movement capitals confront each other in such concrete shape, for which the form of capital in the immediate process of production, just as its form in the process of circulation, appear only as special instances. The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.”

In Chapter 21 of Volume 2 Marx had written:

“Let us note by the way: Once more we find here, as we did in the case of simple reproduction, that the exchange of the various component parts of the annual product, i.e., their circulation …does not by any means presuppose mere purchase of commodities supplemented by a subsequent sale, or a sale supplemented by a subsequent purchase, so that there would actually be a bare exchange of commodity for commodity, as Political Economy assumes, especially the free-trade school since the physiocrats and Adam Smith.”

Like that of the physiocrats and Adam Smith, the “ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves” is confined to “the surface of society”. In the journey through Volume 1 and Volume 2, from Marx’s point of departure in the first line of the entire work (“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’") we have submerged among the deep and hidden workings of the system, so as to comprehend its true nature. Now, in Volume 3, we are going to emerge again into the visible world, and examine the phenomena that form the conscious narrative of politics, and which inform the subjective reactions of men and women from day to day and year to year.

But we must continue to hold in mind the revelations of Volumes 1 and 2. Marx is still exploring “the secret of the self-expansion of capital”.

In the beginning of Chapter 2 of Volume III, Marx again allows himself to be terse and direct:

“The general formula of capital is M-C-M'. In other words, a sum of value is thrown into circulation to extract a larger sum out of it. The process which produces this larger sum is capitalist production. The process that realises it is circulation of capital. The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use-value, or his personal consumption. The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it.

“…he is a capitalist, and can undertake the process of exploiting labour only because, being the owner of the conditions of labour, he confronts the labourer as the owner of only labour-power. As already shown in the first book, (i.e. Volume 1) it is precisely the fact that non-workers own the means of production which turns labourers into wage-workers and non-workers into capitalists.”

Capital is more of a relationship than a thing. It is permanently a relationship. It may have a money-form as part of its cycle, but the relationship of labourer to capitalist is constant throughout the cycle.

Volume III is already divided into seven parts. We will take one part at a time, and choose one chapter from each part as a reading text.

Please download and read this text:

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 2, The Rate of Profit (3355 words)

Accumulation and Reproduction of Capital

2011-09-22T12:23:00.000+02:00

Capital Volume 2, Part 3

Accumulation and Reproduction of Capital

Marx begins this third part of Capital, Volume 2 as follows:

“The direct process of the production of capital is its labour and self-expansion process, the process whose result is the commodity-product and whose compelling motive is the production of surplus-value.”

Here Marx is confirming, in direct terms, the order of things as explained in Capital, Volume 1. The motive of capital is the production of surplus-value and the commodity-product is the consequence. Some would call this production for profit and not for need; others might say that it is the creation and the reproduction of a power relationship of the bourgeois owners over the working class.

Marx continues to assist. In contrast to the end of the second section of Volume 2, where he left us with more questions than answers, at the beginning of the third section he lays out the scheme of Volume 1 (“ Book 1”) and all three sections of Volume 2 as follows (shortened; see Chapter 18 for the full text):

“In Book I the process of capitalist production was analysed as an individual act as well as a process of reproduction: the production of surplus-value and the production of capital itself. The only act within the sphere of circulation on which we have dwelt was the purchase and sale of labour-power as the fundamental condition of capitalist production.

“In the first part of this Book II, the various forms were considered which capital assumes its circular movement, and the various forms of this movement itself. The circulation time must now be added to the working times discussed in Book I.

“In the second Part, the circuit was studied as being periodic, i.e., as a turnover.

“…Especially money-capital came forward with distinctive features not shown in Book I. Certain laws were found according to which diverse large components of a given capital must be continually advanced and renewed — depending on the conditions of the turnover — in the form of money-capital in order to keep a productive capital of a given size constantly functioning.

“But in both the first and the second Parts it was always only a question of some individual capital, of the movement of some individualised part of social capital.

“However the circuits of the individual capitals intertwine, presuppose and necessitate one another, and form, precisely in this interlacing, the movement of the total social capital.

“We have now to study the process of circulation (which in its entirety is a form of the process of reproduction) of the individual capitals as components of the aggregate social capital, that is to say, the process of circulation of this aggregate social capital.”

There are four chapters in the third part of Volume 2. Chapter 18 is covered above. Chapter 19 doubles back to the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. Chapter 20 is very long, covering many kinds of ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, divided into four parts; but it begins with a useful schematic summary, as follows:

“The total product, and therefore the total production, of society may be divided into two major departments:

“I. Means of Production, commodities having a form in which they must, or at least may, pass into productive consumption.

“II. Articles of Consumption, commodities having a form in which they pass into the individual consumption of the capitalist and the working-class.

“All the various branches of production pertaining to each of these two departments form one single great branch of production, that of the means of production in the one case, and that of articles of consumption in the other. The aggregate capital employed in each of these two branches of production constitutes a separate large department of the social capital.

“In each department the capital consists of two parts:

“1) Variable Capital. This capital, so far as its value is concerned, is equal to the value of the social labour-power employed in this branch of production; in other words, it is equal to the sum of the wages paid for this labour-power. So far as its substance is concerned, it consists of the labour-power in action, i.e., of the living labour set in motion by this capital-value.

“2) Constant Capital. This is the value of all the means of production employed for productive purposes in this branch. These, again, are divided into fixed capital, such as machines, instruments of labour, buildings, labouring animals, etc., and circulating constant capital, such as materials of production: raw and auxiliary materials, semi-finished products, etc.

“The value of the total annual product created with the aid of this capital in each of the two departments consists of one portion which represents the constant capital c consumed in the process of production and only transferred to the product in accordance with its value, and of another portion added by the entire labour of the year. This latter portion is divided in turn into the replacement of the advanced variable capital v and the excess over and above it, which forms the surplus-value s. And just as the value of every individual commodity, that of the entire annual product of each department consists of c + v + s.”

Reading for Discussion

We shall use Part 1 of Chapter 21, the last chapter in Volume 2, for a reading text, downloadable via the link below.

It is called “Accumulation and Reproduction on an Extended Scale”, thus confirming what Volume 2 is about, namely these two words which feature very prominently in 21^st century South African communist literature: Reproduction and Accumulation. At seven thousand words, Part 1 of Chapter 21 is sufficiently short and sufficiently plain in its prose to be read as a discussion document.

Let it suffice, therefore, for this introduction, to point out that in Volume 2, Marx is examining the leads and lags in the full cycle of the accumulation and reproduction of capital, and discovering features that arise during this circulation (e.g. “…money-capital came forward with distinctive features not shown in Book I”) which have a material effect on the entire concrete social phenomenon which is Capital with a capital “C”.

One such feature is the “hoard” of money that is a necessary phenomenon within the cycle – the indispensible slack or easement without which the machinery could not move.

In Volume 1, Marx takes considerable pains to distinguish the miser (who hoards money) from the capitalist (who puts money into circulation). There is no contradiction, however, in Marx’s thinking. The hoard that arises in the cycle of capital is a transitional, usable and re-chargeable reservoir, and not, like the miser’s hoard of buried treasure, money that is permanently withheld from circulation and use of any kind.

Where one must be careful is with the unclear and conflicted representation of these matters that appears in the vulgar economics of “analysts” in newspapers and in the mouths of pundits and politicians today, where “capital” is invariably conceptualised in a limited sense as a hoard. For example the sentence “I need capital to start my business” always refers to a hoard, and only to a hoard.

In Marx, “accumulation” refers to the assembly, and the constant reassembly of all of the prerequisites for the extraction of surplus value, and not just to the pump-priming hoard of money.

These prerequisites for Capital also include the market, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state with its bourgeois constitution and laws, the means of transport and trade, and the subordination of all other classes to the rapacious needs of the bourgeois class. In the case of an individual business, the market for its goods or services is in particular a far more critical prerequisite than the prior possession of a hoard of money.

Please download and read this text:

Capital, V 2, Chapter 21, Part 1, Accumulation and Reproduction on an Extended Scale, Marx (7158 words)

Turnover of Capital

2011-09-15T11:25:00.001+02:00

Capital Volume 2, Part 2

Turnover of Capital

In the fourth paragraph of Chapter 7, which is the first chapter of Part 2 of Capital Volume 2 (“The Turnover of Capital”), Karl Marx quotes Chapter 23 of “Capital”, Volume 1 as follows: ‘We have seen previously: “If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. Just as in the former the labour-process figures but as a means towards the self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but as a means of reproducing as capital — i.e., as self-expanding value — the value advanced.”

Capital Volume 2 is an elaboration, and not a contradiction or a supersession, of Capital Volume 1. Far from the latter being the case, the concepts of “accumulation” and of “reproduction” are rather strongly confirmed and reinforced in the same sense as they were introduced in Volume 1.

Part 2 proceeds to cover variations from the simple, typical cases, so as to prove the validity of the general theory advanced in Volume 1.

For the purpose of stimulating discussion on Part 2, we offer for reading its final chapter, Chapter 17 (linked below as a downloadable file).

Note that Marx continues to reference back to “Buch I” (i.e. Capital, Volume 1).

Here is a typical paragraph from the early part of this chapter:

“The simplest form in which the additional latent money-capital may be represented is that of a hoard. It may be that this hoard is additional gold or silver secured directly or indirectly in exchange with countries producing precious metals. And only in this manner does the hoarded money in a country grow absolutely. On the other hand it may be — and is so in the majority of cases — that this hoard is nothing but money which has been withdrawn from circulation at home and has assumed the form of a hoard in the hands of individual capitalists. It is furthermore possibly that this latent money-capital consists only of tokens of value — we still ignore credit-money at this point — or of mere claims of capitalists (titles) against third persons conferred by legal documents. In all such cases, whatever may be the form of existence of this additional money-capital, it represents, so far as it is capital in spe, nothing but additional and reserved legal titles of capitalists to future annual additional social production.”

This is followed by a very lengthy quotation from William Thompson in an 1850 book, and then this summary of Marx’s:

“For reproduction only two normal cases are possible, apart from disturbances, which interfere with reproduction even on a fixed scale.

“There is either reproduction on a simple scale.

“Or there is capitalisation of surplus-value, accumulation.”

This is what Capital Volume 2 is about: Reproduction, Accumulation, and the relation between these two.

Later on, Marx writes directly:

“None of the laws established with reference to the quantity of the circulating money in the circulation of commodities (Buch I, Kap. III), [English edition: Ch. III. — Ed.] are changed in any way by the capitalist character of the process of production.”

Yet then he develops a question in various ways, expressed most simply as follows:

“The capitalist class remains consequently the sole point of departure of the circulation of money. If they need £400 for the payment of means of production and £100 for the payment of labour-power, they throw £500 into circulation. But the surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value of 100%, is equal in value to £100. How can they continually draw £600 out of circulation, when they continually throw only £500 into it? Nothing comes from nothing. The capitalist class as a whole cannot draw out of circulation what was not previously thrown into it.”

Marx continues to problematise this question until the end of the chapter, and leaves some of his questions unanswered.

For example, on the question of the substitution of credit for gold in the process of circulation, Marx writes:

“…so far as the expediencies developing with the credit system have this effect, they increase capitalist wealth directly, either by performing a large portion of the social production and labour-power without any intervention of real money, or by raising the functional capacity of the quantity of money really functioning.

“This disposes also of the absurd question whether capitalist production in its present volume would be possible without the credit system (even if regarded only from this point of view), that is, with the circulation of metallic coin alone. Evidently this is not the case. It would rather have encountered barriers in the volume of production of precious metals. On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital. A further analysis of this question is out of place here.”

We must look for those answers in Capital Volume 3, which we will come to immediately after dealing with the third and final Part of Capital Volume 2.

Please download and read this text:

Chapter 17, The Circulation of Surplus Value, from Capital, Volume 2, Karl Marx (13208 words)

Metamorphoses of Capital

2011-09-08T13:56:00.001+02:00

Capital Volume 2, Part 1

Metamorphoses of Capital

Having completed our course on Volume 1 of “Capital” here on “SADTU Political Education”, we now begin Part 2. We will proceed in ten parts through to the end of Part 3 before the end of 2011.

“The Metamorphoses of Capital and their Circuits” is the title of Part 1 of Karl Marx’s “Capital, Volume 2. A “metamorphosis” (plural “metamorphoses”) in science is a profound change in form, such as from a tadpole to a frog or from a caterpillar to a butterfly. [The illustration above refers to the story “Metamorphosis”, by Franz Kafka, wherein a man turns into a beetle].

Skimming through the first chapters of Volume 2, even though they contain some rather obscure formulas, it quickly becomes clear that what Marx is describing are the changes and movements that take place during the repeated acting-out of the capitalistic relationship (i.e. sale by the working proletarian and purchase by the capitalist of commodified labour-power, extraction of surplus value, and sale of the commodified product of labour). These changes and movements are somewhat invisible to the actors, or else are only visible to them in an illusory form.

From Chapter 2:

“So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer. The circuit of capital-value he is identified with is not interrupted. And if this process is expanded — which includes increased productive consumption of the means of production — this reproduction of capital may be accompanied by increased individual consumption (hence demand) on the part of the labourers, since this process is initiated and effected by productive consumption. Thus the production of surplus-value, and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist, may increase, the entire process of reproduction may be in a flourishing condition, and yet a large part of the commodities may have entered into consumption only apparently, while in reality they may still remain unsold in the hands of dealers, may in fact still be lying in the market. Now one stream of commodities follows another, and finally it is discovered that the previous streams had been absorbed only apparently by consumption. The commodity-capitals compete with one another for a place in the market. Late-comers, to sell at all, sell at lower prices. The former streams have not yet been disposed of when payment for them falls due. Their owners must declare their insolvency or sell at any price to meet their obligations. This sale has nothing whatever to do with the actual state of the demand. It only concerns the demand for payment, the pressing necessity of transforming commodities into money. Then a crisis breaks out. It becomes visible not in the direct decrease of consumer demand, the demand for individual consumption, but in the decrease of exchanges of capital for capital, of the reproductive process of capital.”

Different capitals compete with one another, says Marx. The fundamental type of capital has been described in Volume 1. Here we see “capitals”, plural, interacting with each other to produce a secondary phenomenon – a crisis.

Later in the same Chapter (under Part 3), Marx is very clear about the difference between “accumulation” and “hoarding”. This is a crucial point in terms of recent SACP theory, which has at times leant heavily on the term “accumulation”, or alternatively “accumulation path”. Marx says:

“Hence the accumulation of money, hoarding, appears here as a process by which real accumulation, the extension of the scale on which industrial capital operates, is temporarily accompanied. Temporarily, for so long as the hoard remains in the condition of a hoard, it does not function as capital, does not take part in the process of creating surplus-value, remains a sum of money which grows only because money, come by without its doing anything, is thrown in the same coffer.”

“Accumulation” for Marx is always the assembly of the prerequisites for the relationship “Capital” to appear, or reappear. Anything else, whether transitional or permanent, is “hoarding”.

For a reading of part of the original text, we offer Chapter 6, the last chapter in Part 1 of Volume 2 of Capital (see below for a link to download this chapter). It is clear from this chapter that in this Part 1, called “Metamorphoses of Capital and their Circuits”, Marx is dealing with the Reproduction and Accumulation of capital, where “reproduction” is accomplished by the reassembly (called accumulation) of the elements of production so that the cycle of extraction of surplus value can be re-enacted.

The following quotation can suffice to show that there is no question of Marx backsliding on the question of surplus-value being the source of “the self-increase of capital”, as expounded repeatedly in Volume 1:

“To the capitalist who has others working for him, buying and selling becomes a primary function. Since he appropriates the product of many on a large social scale, he must sell it on the same scale and then reconvert it from money into elements of production. Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant’s capital give rise to an illusion.”

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Chapter 6, The Costs of Circulation, from Capital, Volume 2, Karl Marx (10037 words)

Introduction to the new course: Karl Marx’s Capital, Volumes 2 and 3

2011-09-07T15:49:00.000+02:00

Capital Volumes 2 and 3

General Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital, Volumes 2 and 3

What we are looking for is a way to pass through these works, which appear difficult, and long.

This will not be done by examining every detail, but it will be done in such a way as we can gain an idea of the scope and direction of Marx’s intentions.

Division

Fortunately, Marx’s division of Volume 2 into three Parts, and Volume 3 into seven Parts, will allow a convenient arrangement of the two volumes together into a “Generic Course” of ten parts, like the other eleven courses of the Communist University.

Each Part of the two books is further divided into several Chapters. We will not attempt to tackle each chapter, or to amalgamate chapters. Instead, as a rule, a suitable chapter will be chosen from each part to serve as basis for discussion, while the Introduction will attempt to relate the chosen chapter to the entire Part.

Thus, while we will not have completed an exhaustive reading of the two works, yet we will have a much better idea of their scope, their shape, and their trajectory, and with luck, a good understanding of some of their highlights, or “salient points”.

Those will be deemed suitable chapters for discussion which are short enough, and written in prose rather than relying on formulae. Otherwise, the content of the chapters will dictate.

The Puzzle of Volumes 2 & 3

The major question that arises with Volumes 2 & 3 of “Capital” is whether, as Engels wrote in his Preface to Volume 3, they contain “the most important parts of the entire work”, or whether Volume 1 remains the essential answer to the quest for “the secret of the self-increase of capital” - surplus value. Marx’s words, also from the beginning of Volume 3, provide a clue:

“The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.”

It is becoming a fashion to quote from Volume 3 in particular, in a manner that implies that a good knowledge of Volume 1 is not enough any more, or can be “trumped” by those with knowledge of Volume 3.

But if it is understood that Marx’s purpose was to challenge “economics”, and not to confirm it, and thereby to go beneath “the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production” to the real relations that exist, then Volume 1 must remain the ruling and determinant volume out of the three main volumes (Volume Four is Marx’s summarised reading notes, called “Theories of Surplus Value”).

If this is the case, then the purpose of Volumes 2 & 3 is to return to “the surface of society” so as to look at its surface phenomena in the light of the discoveries of Volume 1. Volumes 2 & 3 are then derivative of Volume 1 and do not supersede or surpass Volume 1’s “Critique of Political Economy”.

If this is the case, then the vogue for Volume 3 is clearly a retreat, and can only pass as a superior knowledge by virtue of the fact that relatively few of the “Marxian school” of today have actually studied Volumes 2 and 3, or in many cases, even Volume 1 of “Capital”.

This is a strong incentive towards covering these works. If it is the case that pseudo-Marxists and “Legal Marxists” are using the extrapolations of the great Volume 1 into the surface of society to re-present Marx as an economist of the surface, like themselves, then Marx needs defending. To construct that defence, it should be necessary to study more closely what is actually contained in Volumes 2 & 3.

To consult a different study guide mainly composed of questions but with some fruitful links, go to the MIA Study Guide for Capital Volume Two, and the MIA Study Guide for Capital Volume Three.

Colonialism

2011-09-05T11:10:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 10b

Mogadishu, 1993

Colonialism

Here we are, nearly at the end of Capital, Volume 1, the famous and huge book that so many people talk about and so few people read. We have read it. We are more fit to be cadres. We are more fit to be the vanguard. What remain are only the three last chapters, which are not difficult to read, although as always they challenge us to be brave and to act, and action will never be easy.

In Chapter 31 Marx states that the origin of the industrial (not farming) capitalist is in colonialism.

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”

“To-day industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was "the strange God" who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.”

This last describes in a single sentence, the state of affairs that Marx's book was written to expose; and Marx did succeed in exposing “capital” as “surplus-value making”.

Yet it appears that Marx did not deal with Primitive Accumulation in the sense that the phrase would nowadays be understood. Marx does not establish that capitalism required a ready pile of money or its equivalent. What he establishes is how the requisite class forces were brought into being, in Western Europe, in the revolutions that overthrew feudalism.

It is a mistake to think that a capitalist business requires “capital” in advance, if by “capital” is meant money in the bank, or land, buildings, equipment et cetera. It does require such things, but they do not make it a capitalist business as opposed to any other kind of project. What makes a business work as capitalism is a dual relationship. The first part of it is the relationship between the worker and the capitalist. The second part is the relationship of the capitalist with his market. If these two relationships do not exist, or are faulty, then a capitalist business will not survive. But if they do exist, then the other means will probably be found without too much difficulty.

Marx shows clearly how the proletariat arose historically in Europe in the 16th century. He shows how the bourgeois class arrives on the scene. He shows how all the social building blocks including proletariat and market, are assembled, but not the money. In any case, capital is not money, it is a relation. Marx says so, directly, in Chapter 33. So the accumulation necessary for capitalism is not treasure, but is an accumulation of relationships; this is what we learn from the chapters in “Capital” on Primitive Accumulation.

Marx does not, in Capital, make a strong distinction between slavery and capitalism. He describes slavery candidly and without flinching from the horror of it. But he never discusses slavery in a comparative way, as distinct from surplus-value-extracting bourgeois-and-proletarian capitalism. Yet (bourgeois) slavery also started in the 16th century, or slightly before, and it ran on as a transcontinental Atlantic system for the next three hundred years, in parallel with the early development of capitalism proper, until Marx’s time, such that the last end of bourgeois slavery was the cataclysm of the American Civil War, that was happening while Marx was writing Capital.

Chapter 32 of Capital, Volume 1 contains about 1000 words in only four paragraphs. It is a full historical sweep from the past of slaves and serfs through present capitalism to the future, when the expropriators will be expropriated. It resembles the Communist Manifesto.

Chapter 33 is very interesting but in spite of its title, it is not really about colonialism. Instead, Marx uses the example of part of one colony of the time, Australia, to make points about capitalism and to “discover in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country”. Also note the very last paragraph of the chapter (and the book), which says:

“We are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.”

“...capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things,” says Marx.

In the next part, we will commence a ten-week course Capital, Volumes 2 and 3.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C31, 32, 33, Capitalist, Accumulation, Colonialism (8277 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C28, 29, 30, Expropriated, Farmer, and Home Market (4804 words)

Capital V1, C26, 27, Primitive Accumulation, Expropriation, Capital (5993 words)

Home Market

2011-09-03T06:58:00.003+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 10a

Poverty map of part of London, 1889; darker areas show slums or “rookeries”.

Home Market

Marx's first concern in his description of Primitive Accumulation is to establish where the labour power came from, in the metropolitan countries where capitalism was established as a system for the first time, and where it eventually proved itself to be even more profitable than the slave trade that stole people from Africa and worked them to death on plantations in North and South America, and in the Caribbean islands.

The expectation that the reader brings, on seeing the phrase “primitive accumulation”, is therefore not necessarily fulfilled. It is not the case that a hoard of money was first created, whether by plunder or by any other means, so as to purchase the commencement of capitalism. Rather, it was a case of piecing together the component parts of the capitalist system, which were: the bourgeois class that had arisen from the peasantry; the dispossessed “free labouring” proletariat, also originally peasants; and the ready market for commodities constituted by both of these two new classes, together.

This new abundance of available labour power in the metropolis, personified in citizens without property, was the consequence of deliberate dispossession. It had the immediate consequence of producing what we now call “unemployment”, which was immediately criminalised as “vagrancy”. The unemployment was an essential precondition for capitalism to arise, yet the bourgeoisie in its eternal hypocrisy criminalised its own victims.

Our text today, downloadable via the link given below, is a compilation of Chapters 28, 29 and 30 from Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1. It describes a time, long ago, when the slogan could have been “Capitalism is the future, build it now”. The elements of capitalism were being assembled then.

Chapter 28 is an easy read detailing the legal steps in the original case, that of England.

Having shown where their labour power came from, Marx at the beginning of Chapter 29 asks “whence came the capitalists originally?” This very short chapter answers the question in the case of the capitalist farmers, who were the necessary original capitalists, and who were already a historically-existing class in England by the late 16^th century (from which class later came, for example, Oliver Cromwell).

In Chapter 30, Marx turns his attention to the question of just how yet another of the necessary pre-requisites of capitalism came into being, namely the “home market”. The very same peasants who had been thrown off the land into the towns to live in shacks had to eat, whether they were working or not, and the farms that they had left were still the only source of food. Thus was set in motion the relation of demand and supply, and also of concentration of industries into “manufactories” as opposed to the family-scale production of earlier times. These kinds of changes can still be observed as they happen, in South Africa today.

Good images of the slums of England, also once known as “rookeries” (the equivalent of South Africa’s present-day “informal settlements”, less politely called “squatter camps”) are hard to find. The illustration above is from the “Poverty Map” of part of the East End of London, prepared by or on the orders of Charles Booth, a “philanthropist”. The red areas are "middle class, well-to-do", light blue areas are “poor, 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”, dark blue areas are “very poor, casual, chronic want”, and black areas are the "lowest class...occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals".

Booth’s 1889 survey found that 35% of London’s huge 1889 population was living in poverty.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C28, 29, 30, Expropriated, Farmer, and Home Market (4804 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C31, 32, 33, Capitalist, Accumulation, Colonialism (8277 words)

Capital V1, C26, 27, Primitive Accumulation, Expropriation, Capital (5993 words)

Expropriation

2011-09-01T10:33:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 10

Expropriation

In the first of the two vivid chapters on primitive accumulation (compiled together in one document downloadable via the link below), Karl Marx describes what is required before the system of surplus value can start pumping and reproducing itself.

As Marx says, the myths around this origin are many, but the truth is written in blood and fire, the ruin of the feudal system, and the destruction of the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois guilds in the towns of Western Europe.

These revolutions made possible the existence of “free labourers”, which is to say people with no means of production or subsistence, who must sell their only possession – their labour power – in order to survive from day to day. These are the working proletariat.

According to Marx, the capitalistic era began in the 16th century, but he does not say that capitalism was dominant or hegemonic at that time. Many of the bourgeois institutions that are nowadays taken as part of capitalism, such as double-entry book-keeping, banks, stock and bond markets, insurance, contract law and global freight navigation, were first developed under late feudalism, but especially in the 17^th century, in the service of the big, bourgeois, transcontinental business of slavery, which is very different from capitalism.

How the “free labourers” historically came into existence is exemplified in the second of the two chapters, where Marx takes the “classic form” of this process as being that of England, starting from the 16th Century (i.e. 1501 to 1600). Clearly, the creation of the proletariat was contemporary with the slave trade, while the latter was dominant. Capitalism only began to supersede and to actively suppress slavery after it had matured during the period 1500 to 1800, or in other words, not until after the “industrial revolution” of the late 18^th Century.

The process of eviction of people from the land is popularly known in England as “the enclosures” and in Scotland as the “Highland clearances”. To South Africans, one can say that the book describes processes of dispossession that are familiar even up to the present time. In the case of the Highlands of Scotland, one can also read that game parks (called deer forests) were replacing settlements of people from two centuries ago. The same thing is happening today in South Africa under cover of “green ecology”, and not only with game parks, but also with golf estates and horse-riding establishments.

With Chapter 27, it is not necessary to understand every local term, or to remember every local event. What is applicable still is the class struggle that underlay it all, the victorious bourgeoisie that came out on top, and the great, dispossessed, working proletariat that was left as the principal basis for capitalist extraction of surplus labour from then onwards - but also as capitalism’s inevitable gravedigger.

Picture: Brutal force, as in Sharpeville, 1960, is what has enabled the expropriation of land.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C26, 27, Primitive Accumulation, Expropriation, Capital (5993 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C28, 29, 30, Expropriated, Farmer, and Home Market (4804 words)

Capital V1, C31, 32, 33, Capitalist, Accumulation, Colonialism (8277 words)

Unemployment

2011-08-27T15:01:00.001+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 9a

Unemployment

Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, called The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, is about the effects of Capital on the workforce.

Section 3 of Chapter 25 is concerned with what we nowadays refer to as Unemployment. Marx argues very directly and very convincingly in this section that unemployment is a necessary, constant, conscious and deliberate part of the capitalist system. He writes:

“The over-work of the employed part of the working-class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists”.

In the light of what Marx says here, it can be argued that all protestations from bourgeois democrats that they are intending to provide "jobs" for all of the unemployed are false.

Early in this chapter, Marx writes:

“[The] accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.”

In other words, whatever may be the intention, it is capitalism itself that creates unemployment. The stories about the birthrate being too high, the immigration too much, the rand too high, the interest rate too high, et cetera, are wrong. The truth is that unemployment is intrinsic to capitalism, as much as employment is.

Although we are obliged to do everything possible to increase employment and to reduce unemployment, yet there is eventually no escape from unemployment within the capitalist mode of production.

What is required, as Marx wrote in “Value, Price and Profit”, is “abolition of the wages system”, and the wages-system’s replacement with another mode of production.

Picture: A South African mine worker (AP).

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C25, Section 3 on Unemployment (4423 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C23, 24, Accumulation of Capital, in MS-Word file format (14246 words)

Reproduction and Accumulation of Capital

2011-08-25T14:20:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 9

Reproduction and Accumulation of Capital

“The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production, is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value.”

Thus Marx describes the working of capitalism, and he goes on to describe this cycle as the origin of capital. As chapter 23 goes on, Marx describes the position of the working class in terms that are easy to understand today. This chapter of Capital speaks of what has in recent years been referred to as the “accumulation path”. Marx concludes Chapter 23 by saying:

“Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.”

And he begins Chapter 24 by saying:

“Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus-value. Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital.”

Later on, Marx writes that the result of capitalistic production is threefold:

1) “that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

2) “that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

3) “that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer.”

This and the subsequent is material that is familiar and widely accepted today.

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” says Marx.

Image: Photograph of women workers (welders), USA, 1940s

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C23, 24, Accumulation of Capital, in MS-Word file format (14246 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C25, Section 3 on Unemployment (4423 words)

Wages

2011-08-20T08:29:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 8a

Wages

Part VI of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 is devoted to wages. We will use the first three chapters, 19, 20 and 21 in this section (download linked below). The short Chapter 22, on international differences in wages, is one of the very few chapters from Volume 1 that we will leave out of this course, but you can still read it on the Marxists Internet Archive, here.

On the first page of Chapter 19 Marx says, among other things, that the "value of labour… is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth”.

The commodity that is exchanged by the worker for money is not Labour, but Labour-Power. After that, the entire product of the worker’s labour during the contracted time belongs to the boss. The product of the worker is greater than the payment given for the worker’s labour-power. The difference is surplus-value. The extraction of surplus-value from workers in this way is the defining characteristic of capitalism.

Through these three chapters on wages Marx continues to discuss this basic point in different ways. The minimum price of labour-power is that which is sufficient to keep the worker going until the next day. Or, it may be calculated over a worker’s lifetime, as Marx demonstrates here, and divided out to give an average day-rate. In all cases, including piece-work, the capitalist pays only for labour-power, and at the minimum price that will ensure the return of the worker to the workplace, next day.

Marx finishes Chapter 21 by declaring that if, under piece-work, the workers think they can get more by producing more, the boss will remind them quickly of the true relationship, which is not payment for labour, or the product of labour, but only payment for maintenance and reproduction of labour power.

“The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross errors as to the nature of wage-labour. He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of industry, and declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.”

The image above is a photograph of one of the striking workers in the 1968 “Memphis Sanitation Strike”. Their union was AFSCME. Martin Luther King went to Memphis, Tennessee to show solidarity with the strikers, who were badly paid, badly treated, not recognised and racially discriminated against. King was shot dead by an assassin at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he was staying while supporting the strike.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V 1, C19, 20 and 21, Wages (7291 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C16, 17, 18, Absolute and Relative Surplus Value (9197 words)

Absolute and Relative

2011-08-18T20:18:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 8

Absolute and Relative

Chapters 16, 17 and 18 of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 (download linked below) have very interesting things to say about absolute and relative Surplus-Value, and about the old political economists’ mistakes about it. Here are some of the points made by Karl Marx:

“Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital.”

“The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length of the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society. It therefore pre-supposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development, the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour to capital.”

“Assuming that labour-power is paid for at its value, we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by the actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand, given the length of the working-day, that rise can be effected only by a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working-day, viz., necessary labour and surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change either in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour.”

“Bourgeois economists instinctively saw, and rightly so, that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus-value.”

“Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor.”

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C16, 17, 18, Absolute and Relative Surplus Value (9197 words)

Further reading:

Capital V 1, C19, 20 and 21, Wages (7291 words)

Machinery

2011-08-12T10:24:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 7b

Machinery

Marx begins this great chapter on “Machinery and Modern Industry” (download linked below) by developing the idea of division of labour in manufacture, to the division of processes among machines.

“A real machinery system, however, does not take the place of these independent machines, until the subject of labour goes through a connected series of detail processes, that are carried out by a chain of machines of various kinds, the one supplementing the other. Here we have again the co-operation by division of labour that characterises Manufacture; only now, it is a combination of detail machines.”

“As soon as a machine executes, without man's help, all the movements requisite to elaborate the raw material, needing only attendance from him, we have an automatic system of machinery, and one that is susceptible of constant improvement in its details.”

“Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines by machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up for itself a fitting technical foundation, and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously with the increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century, appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper. But it was only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of railways and ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean machines now employed in the construction of prime movers.”

“Modern Industry raises the productiveness of labour to an extraordinary degree, [but] it is by no means equally clear, that this increased productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased by an increased expenditure of labour. Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product that it serves to beget.”

The last paragraph of Section 3 is one of the most memorable and shocking in the whole of Capital, Volume 1, and the long last paragraph of Section 4 is a denunciation of the horrors of the factory system.

Section 5 shows the brutal effect of machinery on the working class from the beginning of machine-working, which effects have been felt all along and still are felt today, two centuries after the “industrial revolution”. Marx was an eye-witness to a great expansion of this system and a true witness of its terrible consequences for the working class.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C15, Machinery and Modern Industry (13333 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C14, Division of Labour and Manufacture (15258 words)

Capital V1, C11, 12, 13, SV - Absolute, Relative, Co-operation (14801 words)

Division of Labour

2011-08-05T20:03:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 7a

Division of Labour

Karl Marx makes use of the original distinction between Manufacture, meaning organised co-operation of many workers in a single workshop, and Industrial Production, which is the same, but with powered machinery. In modern usage, this distinction is not always clear. So, Marx begins this chapter thus:

“That co-operation which is based on division of labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century.”

The rest of Section 1 of this chapter is a description of division of labour in the early form of capitalism: Manufacture.

Then, in Section 2, Marx describes the effect on an individual or “detail labourer”, and on production, as a consequence of division of labour.

In Section 3, Marx looks at the gain that is made when serial production can be achieved, as opposed to batch or individual piece production.

“The different detail processes, which were successive in time, have become simultaneous, go on side by side in space. Hence, production of a greater quantum of finished commodities in a given time. [11] This simultaneity, it is true, is due to the general co-operative form of the process as a whole; but Manufacture not only finds the conditions for co-operation ready to hand, it also, to some extent, creates them by the sub-division of handicraft labour. On the other hand, it accomplishes this social organisation of the labour-process only by riveting each labourer to a single fractional detail.”

In Section 4, Marx compares division of labour in a factory, with division of labour in society.

Section 5 is a readable essay on division of labour as treated by the bourgeois Political Economists, including Adam Smith.

In short, this is another chapter of “Capital” that you can conquer without difficulty.

Image: Walter Crane was a 19^th-century artist who illustrated many socialist pamphlets. This work was done for May Day, the Workers’ Day, in 1895.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C14, Division of Labour and Manufacture (15258 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C15, Machinery and Modern Industry (13333 words)

Capital V1, C11, 12, 13, SV - Absolute, Relative, Co-operation (14801 words)

Co-operation

2011-08-04T11:42:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 7

Co-operation

Chapters 11, 12 and 13 of Capital, Volume 1 (download linked below) which follow the enormous Chapter 10, are short, and require little introduction, because they are straightforward.

They are plain enough to provide plenty of material for study-circle discussion, especially if there are people with work-experience present.

Note that the co-operation Marx writes about here is co-operation in general, whereby people work together under a capitalist. It is not about "co-ops" as such.

The following two excerpts demonstrate how well Karl Marx understood the workplace.

Rate and Mass of Surplus Value

“Within the process of production, capital acquired the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or the labourer himself. Personified capital, the capitalist takes care that the labourer does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.

“Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels the working-class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a pumper-out of surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in energy, disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production based on directly compulsory labour.

“At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it. It does not, therefore, change immediately the mode of production. The production of surplus value — in the form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple extension of the working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode of production itself. It was not less active in the old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.”

Co-operation

“When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes, they are said to co-operate.”

“By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle.”

“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature of the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits.”

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, C11, 12, 13, SV - Absolute, Relative, Co-operation (14801 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, C14, Division of Labour and Manufacture (15258 words)

Capital V1, C15, Machinery and Modern Industry (13333 words)

All bounds broken down

2011-07-29T21:45:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 6a

Innocent-looking factory

All bounds broken down

In the previous three sections of Chapter 10 of Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx is concerned to show the unrestrained pressure for the “unnatural extension of the working day”.

“Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer's life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility,” says Marx.

In a notable aside in Section 5 on slavery, Marx remarks: “once trading in slaves is practiced, become reasons for racking to the uttermost the toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth.”

Marx uses this remark on slavery to compare with capital, which he finds equally careless of life, and narrates how workers were terrorised into accepting these terrible conditions.

In Section 6, Marx records: “After capital had taken centuries in extending the working-day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours, [98] there followed on the birth of machinism and modern industry in the last third of the 18th century, a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night, were broken down.”

This is the Section that contains Marx’s account of the Chartists, some of whom he had befriended, and of their campaign for a Ten Hour Day.

At the beginning of Section 7 Marx writes, in case we should forget: “The reader will bear in mind that the production of surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus-labour, is the specific end and aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production, quite apart from any changes in the mode of production, which may arise from the subordination of labour to capital.” This section, two pages long, summarises the chapter on The Working Day, while also mentioning the US agitation for the 8 Hour Day, and the support it got from the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) of which Marx had been the founding Secretary.

The Working Day is a readable, prose chapter. Anyone can understand it.

Image: Johnson and Johnson factory, USA, 1886

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, Chapter 10, The Working Day, parts 5 to 7 (11736 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, Chapter 10, The Working Day, parts 1 to 4 (11024 words)

Force Decides

2011-07-28T13:23:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 6

Force Decides

Capital, Volume 1 has 33 chapters. After Chapters 1, 2 and 3, on Commodities, Exchange and Money, and after Chapters 4 and 5, on the general form of Capital, the remainder of the book is a continuous development of the concept of Surplus-Value.

There are two main interruptions to this steady tempo, however. One is the long Chapter 10, called “The Working Day”. We will divide this big chapter into two. Please download and read Parts 1 to 4 of Chapter 10 via the link given below.

Some notes on “The Working Day”

Marx ends the first section of the Chapter on “The Working Day” thus: “Between equal rights force decides.”

In present-day “human rights” parlance, the opposite is held to be the case, but Marx is certainly correct. Capitalism is brutal. Equal “human” rights are a fiction in class-divided society.

“Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.”

In the second section, Marx generalises the concept of Surplus Labour to all class-divided societies, thus:

“Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, [7] whether this proprietor be the Athenian ***** ******** [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist.”

Section 3 turns back to the most capitalist country that Marx knew, England, and tells stories of terrible horror having to do with people being worked to death, including the well-know story of Mary-Anne Walkley, 20 years of age when she died.

Section 4, called Day and Night Work, deals with the “relay system”, summed up as follows:

“The prolongation of the working-day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production,” says Marx.

The vampire thirst of capital for the living blood of labour is still in evidence.

Illustration: The “Wobbly” (IWW) version of the poster originally called “The Czar’s Wedding
Cake”.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, Chapter 10, The Working Day, parts 1 to 4 (11024 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, Chapter 10, The Working Day, parts 5 to 7 (11736 words)

The Rate of Surplus Value

2011-07-23T18:39:00.000+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 5a

Peterloo Massacre, 1819

The Rate of Surplus Value

Karl Marx’s “Capital” is not a hasty book. It proceeds at a measured pace, with a degree of repetition. Some parts appear difficult, only to yield up their secrets at a second reading with ease.

The chapter on the Rate of Surplus Value is a good example of all this. At first reading it appears dense. It appears to contain new things unconnected to what has gone before, or to what comes afterwards. Yet nothing could be further from the truth: In this chapter are re-stated some of the simplest, basic relationships, derived from the earlier chapters, and explicitly anticipating Volume 3 of the great work.

Let us pick out some of the easier passages. Marx begins with a “tautology” – a truism, or statement of the obvious, but one that has to do with “the expansion of capital”, the secret of which is the key to the entire work. Marx writes:

“Since the value of the constituent elements of the product is equal to the value of the advanced capital, it is mere tautology to say, that the excess of the value of the product over the value of its constituent elements, is equal to the expansion of the capital advanced or to the surplus-value produced. Nevertheless, we must examine this tautology a little more closely.”

Soon he puts down an important working definition, “constant capital”. Important because similar formulations, but with different meanings, are used in bourgeois accounting. Marx says:

“Throughout this Book therefore, by constant capital advanced for the production of value, we always mean, unless the context is repugnant thereto, the value of the means of production actually consumed in the process, and that value alone.”

“Constant” is the companion of “variable” capital, which is the capital advanced for labour. Says Marx:

“From what has gone before, we know that surplus-value is purely the result of a variation in the value of v, of that portion of the capital which is transformed into labour-power; consequently, v + s = v + v, or v plus an increment of v. But the fact that it is v alone that varies, and the conditions of that variation, are obscured by the circumstance that in consequence of the increase in the variable component of the capital, there is also an increase in the sum total of the advanced capital.”

Returning to constant capital, Marx says that for the sake of particular calculations, it may be taken out of the equation. Marx did not live to see something called Value Added Tax (VAT) but if he had, he would have recognised the same move. In the calculation of VAT, that portion of money advanced that does not increase, is removed out of the calculation. Marx put it thus:

“At first sight it appears a strange proceeding, to equate the constant capital to zero. Yet it is what we do every day. If, for example, we wish to calculate the amount of England's profits from the cotton industry, we first of all deduct the sums paid for cotton to the United States, India, Egypt and other countries; in other words, the value of the capital that merely re-appears in the value of the product, is put = 0.”

Then at once Marx reminds us of the importance of the constant and apparently inert part of the capital. This is where he refers to “the third book” (Volume 3), which was not actually published until after he died, and which deals among other things with the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, the discovery of which depends upon these simple preliminaries:

“Of course the ratio of surplus-value not only to that portion of the capital from which it immediately springs, and whose change of value it represents, but also to the sum total of the capital advanced is economically of very great importance. We shall, therefore, in the third book, treat of this ratio exhaustively. In order to enable one portion of a capital to expand its value by being converted into labour-power, it is necessary that another portion be converted into means of production.”

There are more definitions in this chapter. Here is what Marx means by “necessary” labour-time, and incidentally, the reason why capitalists pay their labourers:

“That portion of the working-day, then, during which this reproduction takes place, I call "necessary" labour-time, and the labour expended during that time I call "necessary" labour [5] Necessary, as regards the labourer, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary, as regards capital, and the world of capitalists, because on the continued existence of the labourer depends their existence also.”

Here we return to the key of the book: Surplus Value, the secret of the self-increase of capital, which Marx says “has all the charms of a creation out of nothing”. It’s what the capitalist loves and constantly seeks:

“During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour.”

Marx gives a simple procedure:

“The method of calculating the rate of surplus-value is therefore, shortly, as follows. We take the total value of the product and put the constant capital which merely re-appears in it, equal to zero. What remains, is the only value that has, in the process of producing the commodity, been actually created. If the amount of surplus-value be given, we have only to deduct it from this remainder, to find the variable capital. And vice versa, if the latter be given, and we require to find the surplus-value. If both be given, we have only to perform the concluding operation, viz., to calculate s/v, the ratio of the surplus-value to the v variable capital.”

The second part of this chapter consists of examples. The third, containing Nassau W. Senior’s theory of the “last hour” is easier.

This gentleman Mr Senior also appears in “Theories of Surplus Value”, sometimes called “Capital Volume 4”, which is Marx’s distilled notes from his exhaustive study of all the preceding writers about political economy, the study that allowed him to arrive at a confident position of scholarly authority.

The arguments that Senior proposes are very far-fetched, yet one would not be surprised to hear such things from employers of today, and we still rely on Marx to refute them.

The last section is a transitional paragraph leading into the next great chapter, almost a book by itself: “The Working Day”.

Illustration: The Peterloo Massacre, Manchester, England, 1819. A crowd of 60,000-80,000 gathered for a protest rally against unemployment and poverty. They were then charged by soldiers on horseback (cavalry) and cut down with sabres, killing 15 and injuring up to 700.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, Chapter 9, The Rate of Surplus Value (6832 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, Chapter 8, Constant and Variable Capital (5808 words)

Constant and Variable Capital

2011-07-21T15:26:00.002+02:00

Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 5

Constant and Variable Capital

This is a short chapter, easy to read, but very interesting, bearing on the reasons why fixed capital (machinery &c.) does not yield any surplus value during production.

This is in turn the reason for the tendency of the rate of profit to be less in “capital-intensive” as opposed to “labour-intensive” industries; and why, as industries become more capital-intensive, their rate of profit tends to fall.

You can be confident that the capitalists can never do away with workers. They are compelled, unless they are to perish altogether as capitalists, to employ people.

Capitalists are compelled to continue to extract Surplus-Value from human workers because it is the only way that their Capital can be sustained. Without the constant extraction of Surplus-Value from people, Capital is bound to shrivel away to nothing.

It is useful to read this chapter together with the previous one. There, it was shown that value comes from human labour. Here, it is shown how the labour contained in the makings of a product, such as machinery and raw materials, is transferred from the original products into the new ones without being increased.

The graph, above, is a standard type of illustration in capitalist accounting theory, to show how the cost of a fixed asset, such as a piece of machinery, can be “written off” over, say, five years, for example. Such an asset is said to “depreciate”. It is used up, at a constant rate.

The concept of Surplus Value is the same as the concept of Value Added, which is the basis of Value Added Tax, or VAT. For VAT, the inputs are deducted and only the increase in their value gained through the application of labour to the inputs, is taxed.

These things (Value Added and Depreciation), which are commonplace in capitalist accounting, show that at the practical level, the basic facts of business life have to be recognised, even while the ideologues and theorists of capitalism deny them.

The source of increase of capital is labour (that is labour expended, minus labour power paid for, creating Surplus Value). Machines do not, and cannot, produce Surplus Value. As businesses employ relatively more machinery and relatively less labour, so their rate of profit must fall.

Says Marx:

“That part of capital then, which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and the instruments of labour does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly, constant capital.

“On the other hand, that part of capital, represented by labour-power, does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, variable capital.”

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Capital V1, Chapter 8, Constant and Variable Capital (5808 words)

Further reading:

Capital V1, Chapter 9, The Rate of Surplus Value (6832 words)