Commodity FormClass Structure

1
Commodity Form/Class Structure

• Michael Ryan

Dodge City Community College
2
Marx on Class Inequality

• Class inequality is neither functional nor
  inevitable for Modernity.
• Functional for whom?
• Class inequality always involves winners and
  losers
• wealth, power and prestige for the capitalists
• poverty, misery and alienation for wage workers
• Social inequality is a consequence of the
  production and property relations of Modernity.

3

• Those who own and/or control the productive
  resources, or wealth, in a society exploit those
  who are property less to create more wealth
• Slave owners/slaves
• nobles/serfs
• What do slaves and serfs need to survive in
  everyday life?

4

• access to land, seeds and tools owned by masters
  and nobles
• Serfs perform unpaid labor on the private fields
  of Nobles
• Owners of capital
• industrial capital- Ford, GM, GE etc
• financial capital-Bank of America, Aetna
  insurance etc
• commercial capital-J C Penney etc
• M-C-M MgtM
• What do modern wage workers need to survive in
  everyday life?

5

• Wage workers need money to purchase the
  commodities and services they, and their
  families, need to survive from day to day.
• From where do they get this money?
• by treating their labor power as a commodity,
  their ability to work, and exchanging it for a
  wage
• by working in a factory or an office
• C-M-C

6

• In what senses do capitalists exploit wage
  laborers?
• First, wage workers are in a vulnerable position
  in everyday life in that, with minimal reserve
  resources, they must sell their labor power to
  secure the necessary money for survival.
• Capitalists normally have the resources to wait
  until they find workers willing to work for the
  wages they have to offer.
• depends upon business cycle

7

• Second, capitalists take advantage of the fact
  that labor power is a unique commodity
• The use of labor power in the labor process
  creates more value than is returned to the work
  force in the form of wages.
• Wage laborers perform surplus labor and produce
  surplus value, the source of profits and capital
  formation that is appropriated by the capitalists.

8

• Every commodity has
• a use value, or utility
• an exchange value, or price
• a sign exchange value, or status value
• But the use value of labor power creates more
  value than its cost, or exchange value.

9

• So, a nonworking property owning class exploits
  productive workers to produce, reproduce and
  expand their wealth
• the labor theory of value
• Adam Smiths critique of the unproductive
  contributions of land owning nobles
• Wealth and poverty are the twin products of
  capitalist production and property relations.

10

• But, the capitalist class has created a system
  that it cannot control
• developing according to the law of uneven
  development
• i.e., capital formation, crisis, depression,
  war, resumption of capital formation
• with winners and losers
• Yet, the capitalist class has created an economy
  of potential abundance where every need can be
  met
• a possibility that has been blocked by capitalist
  relations of property and production
• E.g., 48 million Americans lack health care

11

• The capitalist class is a revolutionary class
  nonetheless
• it has revolutionized the way we work across the
  globe as well as politics
• But its interests are no longer identical to the
  interests of society as a whole
• Hence, the revolutionary role of the working
  class-the Proletariat
• the class of consciousness
• the class whose interests are identical with the
  interests of society as a totality

12

• Analytical problems with Marx
• The working class has not remained immiserated
  and has enjoyed rising standards of living in the
  20th Century
• Why? Class struggle of a reformist sort
  through struggle for voting, economic and welfare
  rights
• The working class has not become a revolutionary
  agent of change
• Why? Reformist politics and the managerial
  revolution based on the separation of ownership
  and control of private property-corporate
  property

13

• The Professional Managerial Class has become an
  agent of mutation transforming industrial
  capitalism into the bureaucratic society of
  controlled consumption-modern capitalism/Modernity
  
• From the exploitation of labor power in the
  working day to the exploitation of consumption in
  private life
• With the domination of Capital over Wage Labor
  becoming more extensive