Marx
on the
Profit-
Rate-Raising
Limits
of
Relative
Surplus-Value.
Part 8.:
Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series.
GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.
Dear Reader,
It
is my pleasure,
and my honor, as an elected member
of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.]
General Council, and
as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, Karl Seldon’s commentaries on the
world-historic breakthrough work of Karl Marx.
This 8th text in this by now long-running
series is posted herewith, together
with supporting text-images and diagrams
[Some E.D.
standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors
of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia,
to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s
discourse].
Seldon
–
“In his “rough draft” [“«rohentwurf»”] notes to himself on the critique of capitalist political economy, in the manuscript later known as the Grundrisse, sometime between 29 November and mid-December of 1857, Marx refuted, in advance, those negligent or ideology-serving later critics who claim that both the surplus-value numerator and the constant capital element of the denominator of Marx’s profit-rate ratio are susceptible of unlimited increase, thus rendering the time-trend of his profit-rate ratio, they say, “indeterminate” –
s^/(c^ + v^) ==> ? –
thus seeking to deny the validity of Marx’s, crucial, “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”.”
“Marx wrote, describing capital profitability dynamics at
a sufficiently general context and level, the following: “…The larger the surplus-value of capital before the increase in
productive force, the larger the amount of presupposed surplus-labor or surplus-value
of capital; or, the smaller the fractional part of the working day which forms
the equivalent of the worker, which expresses necessary labor [K.S.: the labor-time value-equivalent of the value of
the commodity-purchases needed to reproduce the worker’s labor-power – i.e., to
keep the worker alive and fit for the next working-day], the smaller is the increase in the [K.S. relative-]surplus-value
which capital obtains from the increase in productive force. Its surplus-value rises, but in an ever
smaller relation to the development of the productive force. Thus, the more developed [K.S.: industrial-]capital
already is, the more surplus-value it has created, the more terribly must it
develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller
proportion, i.e. to add [K.S. any
substantial] surplus-value – because its
barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the [K.S.: duration of the working-]day which expresses necessary labor, and the [K.S.: duration of the] entire working day. It can
only move within those boundaries, The
smaller already the fractional part falling to necessary labor, the
greater the surplus-labor, the less can any increase in productive force
perceptibly diminish necessary labor; since the denominator has [K.S.: already]
grown enormously. The self-realization
of capital becomes more difficult to the extent that it has already been realized.”.”*
“Marx gives a numerical case-example to concretize this,
his general proposition regarding industrial capitalism’s inherent ‘asymptoticity’
of gains to its surplus-value ‘‘‘value-mass’’’ (s), and to its surplus-value rate (s/v), via productive-force-increase-driven increments to “relative
surplus-value” [as distinct from “absolute surplus-value”] –
“If necessary labor
had already been reduced to 1/1,000 [K.S.:
of the working-day’s duration], then the
total [K.S.: relative-]surplus-value would be = 999/1,000. Now if the productive force increased a
thousandfold, then necessary labor would decline to 1/1,000,000 [K.S.: of the duration of the] working day and the total surplus-value would amount
to 999,999/1,000,000 of a working day; whereas before this increase in
productive force it amounted to only 999/1,000 or 999,000/1,000,000; it would
thus have grown by 999/1,000,000…”.”**
“A key point here is that the increase in the fixed capital denominator value-element, f, for the fixed-capital-value participating in a given round of production, and in c for the constant capital also so participating, in the more-concrete Marxian profit-rate ratio,
s/(f + c + v),
has no such inherent asymptotic ceiling,
as does the increase in surplus-value,
s, as described by Marx in the quoted passages above.”
“Thus, as capital accumulation proceeds,
both s and (f + c) increase,
but s must eventually
increase less, because s cannot even
encompass the labor-time of the entire working-day.”
“If s were to do so, then such would imply that no human labor-time was necessary labor-time for the social production process. It would imply an escalation of the productive forces to the point of the complete automation of production –
v = 0.”
“This would model, in the Marxian model’s s/v, rate of labor-exploitation ratio, and in its c/v, productive forces level [“organic composition”] ratio, as well as in the transformed version of the more-concrete Marxian
profit-rate ratio –
(s/v)/( (f/v) + (c/v) + 1 )
–
as [division-by-zero] “singularities” –
(s/0),
(f/0), (c/0) “=” ¥,
and –
(s/0)/( (f/0) + (c/0) + 1) “=” (¥/¥)
– which would model, per our
interpretation of division-by-zero singularities in general, as a ‘dis-existentiation’
of the capital/wage-labor, profits-based social relation of production as the
predominant social relation of social production, i.e., to a concrete
transcendence of the dominance of “the capital-relation” [Marx].”
“Now, it is true that the diminishing profit-rate-returns
of further, fixed-capital-enabled increases in productivity might tend to
increasingly de-motivate industrial capitalists from continuing to invest in such
productive-force innovations and escalations.”
“However, as capital accumulation proceeds, so does the
concentration of industrial capital ownership also “lawfully” proceed. For large-enough-in-scale industrial production
operations, with large-enough wage-worker employments, multiplying tiny
increments to the surplus-value source of profits, by huge numbers for the
numbers of workers being concurrently employed, may come to compensate, via the
‘‘‘value-mass’’’ of profits, for the falling increments to the rate
of profit – enough to incentivize the owning capitalists to continue investing
in via-fixed-capital productive force advances.”
“The above notwithstanding, at a certain level of ownership
concentration, such concentrated-capital owners tend to enter into a condition
of ‘olig-opoly’ or even of ‘du-opoly’ or of ‘mon-opoly’. Price-fixing deals among such ‘-opolists’ may
tend to eliminate any incentive to continue productive-force increases, given
their access to super-profits via «de facto» monopoly pricing. This may result in a tendency to stagnation
in the productivity of industrial production – in the growth of the industrial “forces
of production”.”
“The above constitutes yet another form of the later ‘enfetterment’
of the further growth of the social-productive forces by the capital social
relation of production.”
*[Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Translated and edited by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books [Middlesex, UK, 1973], pp. 333 to 341; excerpt, above, is from p. 340, spellings per American English, as opposed to the British-English spellings in the original. Also, in keeping with Marx’s later usage, e.g., in Capital, we have hyphenated Marxian terms-of-art, such as surplus-value and surplus-labor.].
**[Ibid., p.338.].
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Regards,
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];
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Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;
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