06-05-2021, 07:51 PM
In an 1868 letter to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, Karl Marx makes the following observations with respect to a tendency of Capital to consolidate:
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68\_04\_30.htm
...Then it turns out that, assuming *the rate of surplus value*, i.e. the exploitation of labour, as *equal*, the production of value and therefore the production of surplus value and therefore *the rate of profit* are *different* in different branches of production. But from these varying rates of profit a mean or general rate of profit is formed by competition. This rate of profit, expressed absolutely, can be nothing but the *surplus value* produced (annually) by the *capitalist class* in relation to the total of social capital advanced. E.g., if the social capital = 400c+100v, and the surplus value annually produced by it = 100m, the composition of the social capital = 80c+20v, and that of the product (in percentages) = 80c+20v | +20m = 20% rate of profit. This is the *general rate of profit*.
What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.
Marx's notion of "capitalist communism" is little discussed in relation to his overall thesis, but it bears consideration: such a system, if achieved, would require the mediation of computers to quantify the distribution of surplus value to each capitalist, and require the cessation in large part of overt competitive activity among them. It would also require popular support, and could only be justified rhetorically through an appeal to what Marx called "bourgeois socialism.
The conditions it would produce would be a working class largely dispossessed globally and subjected to renter hyperextraction. This would force the proletariat into consolidation, and, while leaving them universally destitute, forge the connections between workers on a mass scale that might turn them into a revolutionary subject.
I believe this process - Grimes spouting off about Communism on TikTok, the sudden popularity of overtly "socialist" and even "Marxist" rhetoric, etc. - is visible in broad and obvious outline today. If true, it means that the precursor phase of capitalism signifying the possibility of world revolution is in immanent production.
These are the conditions which Marx says must prevail before the revolution. *The German Ideology*.
... This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.
Now compare:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lBBxWtKKQiA/maxresdefault.jpg
![[Image: maxresdefault.jpg]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lBBxWtKKQiA/maxresdefault.jpg)
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68\_04\_30.htm
...Then it turns out that, assuming *the rate of surplus value*, i.e. the exploitation of labour, as *equal*, the production of value and therefore the production of surplus value and therefore *the rate of profit* are *different* in different branches of production. But from these varying rates of profit a mean or general rate of profit is formed by competition. This rate of profit, expressed absolutely, can be nothing but the *surplus value* produced (annually) by the *capitalist class* in relation to the total of social capital advanced. E.g., if the social capital = 400c+100v, and the surplus value annually produced by it = 100m, the composition of the social capital = 80c+20v, and that of the product (in percentages) = 80c+20v | +20m = 20% rate of profit. This is the *general rate of profit*.
What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.
Marx's notion of "capitalist communism" is little discussed in relation to his overall thesis, but it bears consideration: such a system, if achieved, would require the mediation of computers to quantify the distribution of surplus value to each capitalist, and require the cessation in large part of overt competitive activity among them. It would also require popular support, and could only be justified rhetorically through an appeal to what Marx called "bourgeois socialism.
The conditions it would produce would be a working class largely dispossessed globally and subjected to renter hyperextraction. This would force the proletariat into consolidation, and, while leaving them universally destitute, forge the connections between workers on a mass scale that might turn them into a revolutionary subject.
I believe this process - Grimes spouting off about Communism on TikTok, the sudden popularity of overtly "socialist" and even "Marxist" rhetoric, etc. - is visible in broad and obvious outline today. If true, it means that the precursor phase of capitalism signifying the possibility of world revolution is in immanent production.
These are the conditions which Marx says must prevail before the revolution. *The German Ideology*.
... This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.
Now compare:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lBBxWtKKQiA/maxresdefault.jpg