1.0 Introduction
This post is fairly stream of consciousness. It is a bit more about how many find me odd.
I have previously
mentioned,
as an aside, Kozo Uno and his reading of Marx's Capital as a theory of pure capitalism. I like this
idea, although it needs to be noted Marx had a lot to say in Volume I about concrete practices in his
day and the historical development of capitalism. The theory and history are entwined. But Marx certainly
presents the capitalist, not as a person, but as an embodiment of capital, in some sense.
I often bring a book with me when I go out to eat by myself. Sometimes people ask me what I am reading.
For example, I have lately been re-reading the first volume of Capital;
Marx's Value, Price, and Profit; and Böhm-Bawerk's Karl Marx and the Close of his System.
2.0 Small Businessmen Do Not Exist in Pure Capitalism
Many I run into are small businessmen, that is,
petty bourgeois, in
Marxist phraseology. I think of restaurant owners, general handymen, providers of
mowing and plowing services, owners of auto repair shops, landscaping artists,
and even one movie producer, musicians, consultants on Information Technology and
Information Assurance, and so on.
They do not obtain income solely from returns to capital, but, rather,
from some combination of labor and capital. Their labor includes general scut work, managerial
direction, and strategic planning. (Which of these tasks comprises
the labor of superintendence?) Some have partners with finance capital invested in
the business, often family members. Some sometimes have a few employees, and some have many more.
Maybe this is politeness, but I often say that Marx is not writing about you. I do not want
to try to explain that capitalism restricts even your agency. I think many are conscious
of trade-offs in staffing too much or too little on any given day, on the level of
service provided, and on ensuring that staff do not quit. I bet many might agree
that some staff that fall into the category of so-called unskilled labor, such as
bartenders, baristas, waiters, bussers really know a lot about their tasks, do them
well, and would take much time to train replacements. When they bid on jobs, they
are conscious of socially necessary labor time and are worried about whether, for
some reason not necessarily within the control of the worker, a job might take
longer than assumed in the calculations which a bid was based on. Yet they feel
that, with competition as it is, they cannot include a reserve time or even
fully charge their own time. (Come to think of it, I am not including here
those I know who make their income from profit on alienation, by buying
collectibles low and selling high.)
I am more likely to explain to workers that the business owners' income comes from
value added by their labor but not paid out in their wages.
I also say that my income from Apple also comes from the exploitation of
workers, and that this would be so even if Foxconn was not treating their
workers so badly that they had to line their dorms with nets at ground
level. And, of course, I am a consumer of commodities produced
under capitalism.
I am amused to attempt to explain that the labor theory of value
can be seen not to work, as a theory of price, because of the existence
of such products as wine and whiskey.
If you think about it, small businessmen do not fit in with the
abstraction of pure capitalism since their earnings do not come
solely from capital. Self-employed artisans and those close to
such are, for Marx, survivors from a period of time before
capitalism was fully developed. With
John
Kenneth
Galbraith,
I think this sector, however, will always exist, aside with
the large corporate sector, in which many are somewhat sheltered,
for a time, from the gales of competition.
3.0 Workers with Savings Do Not Exist in Pure Capitalism
Many skilled workers in the United States have savings, often
in the form of mutual funds. They might not be able to access
this wealth immediately, without a penalty, if it is in a
401K or Individual Retirement Account (IRA).
(Defined-benefit pensions are now rare.) My casual
empiricism is consistent with the observation that
a tiny fraction of the population owns most of the wealth
in the United States.
Here is another class of people whose income consists of
returns to both labor and ownership of capital. And they
have deferred not only the day-to-day management of the
firms they indirectly have ownership shares in, but
even decisions about investing and disinvesting in
such firms to paid professionals.
Does it matter to how the system
works
whether
these savings are managed by financial experts
on
Wall
Street
or specialists
more closely connected to labor unions?
How should analyze executives corporate suites whose income is often
classified as salaries, but anyways seems to have
something to do with being in a
class
with control, but not
ownership
of the means of production? (I have not actually read that book or the one linked above
by Drucker.)
4.0 Conclusion
So what kind of society is Marx describing abstractly? I think that in pure capitalism, some
capitalists should be making investment decisions, but not being paid for labor power. Perhaps
we want to think of the mid-nineteenth century when industrialists like John D. Rockefeller,
Andrew Carnegie, or Karl Wittgenstein were starting out, but before they had obtained
oligopolistic power.
One can build on this model to describe historic capitalism. You might think my account
of small businesses shows something about a system organized around the production
of commodities by means of commodities. Others have developed analyses of
monopoly and
finance capitalism.
In the Post Keynesian tradition,
Richard Kahn,
Nicholas Kaldor,
Luigi Pasinetti,
and Joan Robinson
had developed a
model
in which workers save, but investment decisions are driven by another class. Maybe a different model
is more appropriate for the neoliberal era after the end of Bretton Woods, and in which workers do
not seem to find their wages growing with productivity.
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