The New Reading of Capital in the US

Article for Kapital neu lessen (2004)

Richard D. Wolff

Marx’s New Concept of Class

Prior: noun – based on property and power

          Marx: Adjective – based on appropriation and distribution

Society’s mode of organizing the production, appropriation, and distribution of the surplus also shaped its functioning in crucial ways and therefore needed to be changed.

Marx as an Overdeterminist

          Cannot “understand” the world – no theory can do that. [3] Different theories change the world in different ways; that is what matters.

Some results of the New Reading

n        New mode of understanding the relationships among (1) the economy, polity, and culture of any society and (2) production, distribution, and consumption within any economy.

n        Focuses attention on surplus

n        Crisis: pattern of oscillations between private and state forms of capitalism.

n        Changed understanding of the labor theory of value

o       Productive vs. unproductive labor

§          Producers

§          Enablers – managers, supervisors, clerks, purchasing and sales agents…

§          Paid from surplus produced by productive labor

o       Productive vs. unproductive capitalists

§          Productive capitalists create surplus

§          Unproductive capitalists provide conditions for productive capitalists to appropriate surplus from productive workers

·        Merchant capitalists

·        Money-lending capitalists

n        Capital accumulation

o       Occurs when industrial capitalists devote a portion of their appropriated surplus value to purchase additional means of production and/or labor power

§          Provides growth

o       Distributed to merchants to distribute commodity and realize its value

o       Distributed to bankers for credit

o       Distributed to managers

o       Etc.

n        Rate of capital accumulation no longer functions as the measure of a capitalist class structure’s health.

o       Surplus may be distributed to secure other more pressing conditions for reproduction [ 5-6]

n        Class positions

o       Productive worker

o       Productive capitalist

o       “subsumed” classes

o       Multiple class structures co-exist (feudal, slave, capitalist…) à inability to label individuals or groups with a singular term

n        Empirical analysis thin and glib.