Letters

Value added

Arthur Bough continues to assert that the approach of the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) is “to consider things subjectively from the perspective of the individual capitalist” (Letters, September 6). A few paragraphs later, with no hint of embarrassment, he backs up an argument about changes in the value of constant capital by recounting his own personal experience of costing contracts for a protective clothing manufacturer.

I think Arthur’s personal reminiscences are actually quite interesting. It is just a shame that he misrepresents the TSSI. How measuring aggregate prices and aggregate profits across a whole economy constitutes “the perspective of the individual capitalist” defeats me. After all, an increase in the value of capital held by capitalists in aggregate is not a capital gain by one capital at the expense of another. It is precisely an example of “capital as self-expanding value” that Arthur correctly says is the concern of Marxist economics.

Nor is Arthur correct when he accuses the proponents of the TSSI of “holding nominal prices constant”, as he would have discovered if he had bothered to engage with Andrew Kliman’s The failure of capitalist production (my review of that book initiated these exchanges).

As for Arthur’s musings on the impossibility of identifying single instances of time, I gather that Arthur is not a fan of modern cosmological theories about singularities of time and space - the big bang and black holes. But since when is measuring change across a specific time period (the “discrete blocks” of time to which he objects) a non-dialectical practice? How else do we incorporate change into our analysis?

Remember, it was Marx who discussed (and modelled) cycles of production, circulation and reproduction that for the purposes of his analysis had a beginning and an end. These models involve radical abstractions from the real world but that is how scientific enquiry proceeds.

And Arthur himself goes on to talk of “commodities of the same kind existing in the same period of time” (my emphasis). Yet he denies the possibility of any such period having a discrete beginning or end and therefore - in the caricature of a dialectical universe that he inhabits - any existence. Consistency is not Arthur’s strongest suit.

Nevertheless, there is a serious discussion to be had about how, in the context of changes of value over the course of a production cycle, the exchange values of the constant capital inputs (raw materials, energy, production equipment, buildings, etc) are transferred to the exchange value of the final output. The topic may be dry, but it is central to the debate about how Marxists should measure the rate of profit and whether some of Marx’s central propositions were internally consistent.

The trouble is, Arthur is not really trying to understand my thesis, which, by the way, is not the same as Andrew Kliman’s, much as that may disappoint Arthur, who has seized on me as a proxy for the TSSI dragon he seeks to slay. Of course, individual capitalists are in no position to pass on their individual costs in the prices of their outputs - unless they enjoy a monopoly position. They are constrained by competition to operate within the general (constantly changing) price levels that apply to all capitalists within an economy. Competition imposes aggregate economic reality on individual capitalists. If that means they make a smaller profit than their competitors or go bust, too bad.

The question is how we model the formation of those (aggregate) prices and the relationship of prices to exchange values and ultimately the socially necessary labour time required to produce commodities. A fundamental difference between me and Arthur (and possibly me and Andrew Kliman) is that I do not think socially necessary labour time is determined simply by the production conditions from which the latest batch of a commodity has emerged onto the market. In fact I argue that a range of production processes (incorporating those that produced the bulk of commodities still on the market) play their part in forming the socially necessary labour time needed to produce any commodity.

Now, constant capital can be and is devalued. That is, once adequate supplies at a lower value and therefore cheaper price are readily available, the production process which produced the more expensive commodities no longer bears on the calculation of the socially necessary labour time for the production of that type of commodity.

It strikes me that capital appreciation - in the case of commodities that were produced under more favourable circumstances in the past - works differently. In fact it is those commodities that have emerged from production more recently and embody more labour that will struggle to realise their value.

I do not have the space in this letter to develop this argument further. However, it would be worthwhile to draw one or two lessons from Arthur’s tales of life in manufacturing, while bearing in mind Marx’s warning about the fetishistic understanding of the source of surplus value held by capitalists as a result of the procedure of marking up costs described by Arthur - it appears that capital itself rather than labour is the source of profit.

Arthur is quite correct to say that in putting together a bid for a contract, the price or prices he paid for any raw materials in stock (cloth in this case) is irrelevant. But then his expressed desire to make a return in this production round sufficient to maintain production levels in a future production round is equally irrelevant.

Who said capitalist production was a stable phenomenon? Marx explores this aspect of the circulation of capital in volume two of Capital. When he wants to model stable reproduction he has to explicitly exclude “revolutions in value”.

What Arthur was doing for his capitalist boss was attempting to submit a bid that would win the contract by being at least no more expensive than rival bids. When costing cloth inputs to the price of the final commodity was he targeting the current replacement cost of cloth, as he believes? Well, no. It was the current market price at the time he made the costing, but he had not won the contract yet. Production had not begun. He may well not have bought the cloth he would require had he won the contract.

The current replacement cost would have been the market price of cloth at the time the final product (the protective clothing) was sold. The price of cloth required as input to a subsequent production round - for which Arthur insists he could deliver sufficient funding - was several months (or a year or two) down the line.

The market price at the time Arthur made his costing was actually something between the historical price (ie, the price of the actual input) and Andrew Kliman’s pre-production reproduction cost (the price at the time production began). It just goes to show that in political economy the consciousness of capitalists and their agents do not necessarily coincide with reality.

Two quick points. Arthur has misinterpreted Marx’s July 11 1868 letter to Kugelmann about the law of value, which Arthur thinks operates as an eternal feature of human society. It is actually the “distribution of social labour in specific proportions” that Marx describes as a “natural law” that transcends all forms of social organisation. He does so in contrast to “exchange value” (crucial to Marx’s understanding of value), which is appropriate only to a “state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour” (ie, capitalism).

Marx believed that the law of value only fully comes into its own in a society in which commodity production is fully generalised - even to the extent that the human capacity to work becomes a commodity. It is because the law of value came into being, reached maturity and is linked to a far from eternal mode of production that it is legitimate to discuss its decline.

Finally, there is the question of whether Arthur is an underconsumptionist. This argument began because Arthur took offence at my critique of the perspective of Marxist economists (Arthur was not mentioned) who offer an underconsumptionist interpretation of the 1980s and 90s. It continued because Arthur suggests that a chronic mismatch between production and consumption is the cause of capitalist crisis.

In his latest contribution Arthur quotes a passage from volume three of Capital that is often cited by underconsumptionists: “… a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier”. Arthur may understand why I am inclined to think that he should embrace his inner underconsumptionist.

However, it is true that his explanation of why he thinks the rate of profit rose in the 1980s (Andrew Kliman’s book challenges this assumption) lists factors that would be of interest to those Marxist economists who focus on changes in value relationships within production - although he still fails to account for the low rate of accumulation. It could be that Arthur is edging towards a more interesting analysis.

Whether the global production model of Apple or the high profits of Manchester United (do they not have a lot of debt?) represent a fundamental shift in the organic composition of global capital is another question. Generally, the “smoke stacks and assembly lines” that Arthur dismisses have not disappeared. They have either relocated or now employ so few workers operating hundreds of million of pounds or dollars worth of equipment that they barely figure in popular consciousness. Dare I suggest that a focus on a few high-profile ‘brands’ might risk an overly subjective view of modern capitalism?

Value added
Value added

Mythology

In ‘A textbook paranoid narcissist’ (September 6) Paul Demarty writes as a textbook rape apologist: “If rape is to include everything from violently penetrating a victim using direct physical coercion to (as Assange allegedly did) unprotected penetration without explicit consent in the immediate context of a previous sexual encounter, then it is a concept that is getting too bloated for its own good. Put another way, it has the effect of cheapening rape as a whole. (Indeed, some anti-rape campaigners smell a rat in all this.)”

And a lot more anti-rape campaigners don’t. Women Against Rape (the ‘anti-rape campaigners’ cited) are alone in their curious position of claiming to be feminists and that the two Swedish women should be regarded with suspicion. WAR was based on the work of Selma James, who argued that domestic labour produced surplus value. Is this the position of the CPGB? Various organisations developed from this unusual analysis, including WAR (currently popular on the left), the English Collective of Prostitutes (ditto), Wages for Housework and Global Women’s Strike.

The observant reader will immediately identify the almost total lack of any critique of the material reality of women’s lives; rather an acceptance of the worst aspects of gender inequality is promoted with the optimistic aspiration that an economic solution will present itself. But women currently dependent on these activities do not find them in any way satisfactory. Even well-paid cleaners find the job soul-destroying; 85% of women in the sex industry want to leave, but can’t. The idea of a global women’s strike is ludicrously idealistic - strike against whom? What employer? Hungry children who need nappies changed?

More representative of current thinking is Rape Crisis. Paul Demarty would have been well advised to give the Rape Crisis website’s ‘Myths’ section a quick look before he wrote this piece. One of the myths it mentions is that “The woman did not get hurt or fight back. It could not have been rape”, to which it responds: “The fact that there is no visible evidence of violence does not mean that a woman has not been raped.” There is a long and ignoble history of reactionary ideas about sexual violence, including the quaint notion that women should be prepared to risk further physical injury or death in order to demonstrate the validity of a fundamentally unreliable allegation. We have been advised that by getting into bed with a man, we have agreed to any sexual activity that may occur to him even if we are asleep at the time, with no regard to safer sex practices. George Galloway regards this as “a game”. Paul seems to agree.

The women in the Assange case have been pilloried from the outset. As I have pointed out in a previous letter, the origin of the smears against them is Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett in Counterpunch. That’s the same Israel Shamir described by Paul as having “crackpot theories” and, more seriously, by Tony Greenstein (among others) as an anti-Semite and a fascist.

There was no suggestion of fair trials at that stage; rather there was the unedifying spectacle of representatives of left organisations falling over each other in their haste to defend their hero against the feminazi conspiracy. The comparisons with the recent case of Ched Evans are striking and disturbing. The unthinking misogynist vilification of his victim and corresponding blinkered belief in Evans’ innocence by those who idolise him is, basically, no different to the attitude of Assange supporters. We expect this level of reactionary sexism from the more politically backward terraces, where aggressive ‘masculinity’ is idealised. But the more sophisticated layers of the workers’ movement should give this nonsense no airtime.

Paul believes the ideal of the fair trial is unjustifiably denied to Assange in Sweden. Here, I agree - Sweden has a low rate of conviction for rape, only slightly better than Britain. Although around 23% of women in Britain suffer sexual violence, it is rarely acknowledged. Rape Crisis again: “Only 15% of serious sexual offences against people 16 and over are reported to the police and, of the rape offences that are reported, fewer than 6% result in an offender being convicted of this offence.” So 6% of 15% - which is about 1% of all serious sexual offences - result in conviction. That compares with something like 3% of rape reports being false (including mistaken identity and mentally ill complainants). Simple arithmetic demonstrates that a woman who says she was assaulted is probably telling the truth, while a man who denies being the perpetrator is probably lying even if he has been found not guilty.

But we are constantly told, as the Leveson inquiry found, that we should focus on the negligible numbers of malicious false reports, while ignoring the reality that about one in four women are subjected to sexual violence. One of the main reasons for the reluctance of women to report and of juries to convict is the media’s perpetuation of rape myths. Paul Demarty’s article is just one more example.

Mythology
Mythology

Battle bus

The plight of the Counihan-Sanchez family has got extensive coverage in The Irish Post and Irish world. Basically, a family of seven is facing eviction onto the streets because Anthony, the father, inherited nine acres of land in Galway and Brent council decided in January this year that this ‘capital asset’ rendered them ineligible for housing benefit. They were issued with an eviction notice for August 13, which was halted by court action.

But worse was to come for the Counihans. Rose McIntosh, the Brent housing advice officer, sent an email to Isabel detailing the advice she gave her at a meeting on September 3. It seriously proposes that Isabel and her family move to the field that they inherited in Ireland and live in a caravan. She said, though this is not in the email, that Anthony should not give up his job, as they were hard to get these days, but they could commute (from Peterswell in Galway to London).

Isabel pointed out that they did not have a caravan, there was no sanitation on the site and she could not drive, and asked how they would get the children to school, how she would care for Vinny, her four-year-old autistic child. Furthermore, in January they had offered to give the land to Brent, but the council said that would be illegal because they would be “dispersing assets to gain a means-tested benefit”. Now the council says they can sell the land, so what happened to the legal advice from January?

Isabel was traumatised and suicidal after the interview with Rose McIntosh. She rallied and will speak at the demonstration for the NHS to Brent town hall on September 15 and also at the demonstration down Kilburn High Road on October 6. She and her family are not going to hell or to Connaught, and the Counihan Battle Bus Campaign will never let that happen.

Battle bus
Battle bus