In response to Doug Henwood's point that the use of surplus-value
is important to the issue, Gil Skillman agrees:
>, and of course he's right. And Marx would have agreed, up to the
>point of insisting that in a *capitalist* society, the realization of
>surplus value via interest presupposes the prior extraction of labor
>by industrial capitalists--since interest under capitalism, to Marx,
>is a subtraction from the total surplus value extracted by industrial
>capitalists.
>
Of course, Marx would have used his own vocabulary more rigorously.
Instead of "realization of surplus via interest" he might have used
the phrase "redistribution of surplus-value to money-capital owners."
Or something like that: realization of surplus(value) usually refers
to the sale of the surplus-product, its conversion into money. But
Gil is right that Marx would have stressed the fact that (at least in
his theory) the exploitation of wage-labor (or the subordinate
classes in other modes of production) was the source of profit.
It wasn't sufficient to simply lend money in order to get a share
of the surplus-value. (One can't simply be a rentier and loan to
the mythical "credit market island.")
>Which is a surprise to capitalists who lend to labor-owned firms, to
>name just one counter-example.
It is interesting that bankers do not like to loan to labor-owned
firms and that this causes all sorts of problems for such firms.
But sometimes bankers do this kind of thing and they do receive
interest. But this is hardly a counter-example to Marx's theory
since these worker-owned firms exist within the societal conditions
that define capitalism and allow capitalists to extract surplus-
value.
A worker-owned firm has to compete with capitalist firms in
the same product markets. The capitalists can utilize the
services of the reserve army of labor to keep their labor costs
down. Also, being workers, the owners of the worker-managed
firm are not rich. They may have direct access to their means
of production, but they have to deal with the capitalist market
to get access to means of subsistence (consumer goods). Thus, one
might say that they are semi-proletarianized. They also
do not have enough assets to diversify their wealth, so they
are in a much worse risk position than their capitalist
competitors. They are dependent on capitalist bankers for
credit, and of course those bankers push them to emulate
capitalist practices (while charging them high interest
rates). There's a lot of evidence indicating
that worker-owned are more efficient than capitalist ones
in the short run, but in the long run, the capitalist environment
tends to drive them to liquidate. An exception is Mondragon,
which has developed a non-capitalist environment that has
so far fostered worker ownership. Even that has its limits,
since it's dependent on the capitalist world market.
The bottom line: capitalist bankers are able to get interest
out of workers' co-operatives because those firms are stuck in
a capitalist environment (defined as the separation of the
direct producers from the ownership of the means of production
and subsistence, working in a commodity-producing system).
The co-op is pushed to "exploit itself" to pay this above-
market interest rate.
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine BITNET: jndf@lmuacad INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (off); 310/202-6546 (hm); FAX: 310/338-1950
