economic relations – Unity–Struggle–Unity

Relations of production

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:51:15 +0000

(see also, means of production)

Classes are made of complexes or networks of productive and property relations. The raw material of class analysis and its most basic building block is the productive or property relation itself. Each social class in a given mode of production is composed of clusters of productive relations, ranging from their relations to the means of production (the tools, land, and so on, with which all the crafts of human society are made) to the juridically enforced property relation of race.

To put it simply: modern English lacks the descriptive rigor to divide the actually existing economics from the ideologically-produced social elements produced by those economics. We conflate, in our everyday speech, these things together all the time. Is gender the ordered division of labor or is it the social expression of that division? Here we will take great care to separate out the actually-existing economic-labor elements of each productive relation from the ideological elements.

The major underlying productive relations that we will consider are:

gender,

disability,

age,

“race” and nation,

judicial slavery, and

private property.

Other relations of production common to this mode of production are:

commodity production,

money, and

capital.

Productive forces

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:47:07 +0000

The forces of production are the instruments of production, the people who operate those instruments and carry on the production of material values through experience and labor skill.

Private property

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:46:41 +0000

The economic relation whereby productive tools, land, and so forth (the “means of production”) are exclusively owned and controlled by individuals. The private property regime as constituted contemplates that individuals who control (legally or actually) that productive property also control its products. Those who control (“own”) private property under this system can “rent” it, or hire laborers, to put the property into motion such that it alters existing material into new, useful objects. Thus, the control (“ownership”) of a grove trees by a single property owner, where that owner hires woodcutters to chop down the grove and turn it into firewood, is an example of a private-property relation. The controller of the property also controls the resultant firewood, although we may also add that he is expected to pay the wood cutters something for their effort unless they serve him in a slave relation.

Petit-bourgeoisie

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:45:44 +0000

The class which is defined by ownership of the means of production that must work to maintain itself.

Nation

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:44:55 +0000

Nation is a political-economic category. A nation is a historically constituted, stable community that is formed on the basis of:

a common language,

a common territory,

a common economic life,

and a common culture.

Common language and common culture are social formations; a common territory and common economic life are both economic formations. When a community has all of these qualities, it should be recognized by Marxists as a nation, and capable and deserving and desirous of the right of self-determination.

Nations are formed “only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation.” Nations, like all historical phenomena, are subject to the law of change; they have history; they have beginnings, and they have endings.

Nations are, then, self-aware communities that share both economic and social relations, and to which individuals commonly feel strong attachments. Nationhood could not exist until the material basis for unifying large regions was developed: sufficiently advanced technology, the construction of roads, the advent of long-distance trade, and so forth. Stalin identifies the period of nation-forming to be the epoch of rising capitalism, the period beginning in approximately 1500 or 1600 and resulting, mostly through violence, of the welding of disparate groups into nations for the very purpose of exploitation and mobilization of a large-scale workforce by the growing capitalist powers.

The creation of nations is not a function that was confined to the unification of regions at the end of the feudal period through the welding together of those who already shared a common language. One of the latest of these creations can be seen in the Unification of Italy, which fused the peoples of Italy, who considered themselves to be of different ethnic groups and lacked any real identity as Italians, which occurred as late as 1871.

But nations were and have been themselves constituted by the violence of capitalism. Colonial transportation and imperialism have created, from disparate peoples, nations. Colonial oppression is a form of national oppression.

Money

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:44:36 +0000

Both a social relation and the universal commodity which is exchangeable for all other commodities. As a social relation, money is the power to command the labor of others. As the universal commodity, money is how exchange occurs under the capitalist mode of production. Money that is used to extract surplus value is capital.

Disability

Mazal — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:38:00 +0000

In its social sense, “ability” describes a person’s capacity for labor, relative to the social average. This social average makes up the general labor-power of society. Disability describes the individual’s deviation below that general labor-power. The degree of disability is the degree to which a disabled person will be excluded from the social process of production. Disability is not a natural category, but a social one, determined by the relations of production which exclude disabled persons from social reproduction and, thereby, from social life. That is to say: disability will be defined by any given mode of production only in contradistinction to the manner in which production functions. In a given social order, different attributes or conditions will be disabilities (or not) depending on whether they cause the person who exhibits them to fall below the general labor-power.

The ideological reflection of disability is found especially in medicine, but also throughout the ideological state machinery, and is ubiquitous in culture, where it finds its expression in ableism. Under capitalism, disability excludes the propertyless and poor from selling their labor-power, which leaves them destitute, beneath the proletariat, forming a “surplus” population that capitalists can subject to conditions of hyper-exploitation. Disabled persons are at a much higher risk to fall into debt bondage or otherwise be trafficked than the general population, and suffer ableist abuse both in the home and in public institutions. This is how disability structures class, particularly the laboring classes. However, there are also ideological ramifications for “disabled” persons of the dominant class, who might also suffer ableist abuse and even fall to the exploited classes as a result.

A person who suffers disability is therefore, under most circumstances, disabled against selling her labor-power, and is semi-proletarian. More precisely, a person who suffers such a degree of disability is a proletarian worker when she is able to work and is excluded from the proletariat when she is unable. Likewise, persons who suffer injury or illness and who are, for that reason, temporarily unable to work are, correctly speaking, also temporarily excluded from the proletariat, because their real productive relations have, however temporarily, changed to those of a non-proletarian class. A person, lastly, who is, under all circumstances, disabled from selling her labor-power is, therefore, excluded entirely from the proletariat.

But what about “disabled” capitalists, landlords, politicians, judges, military leaders, and so on? In the most precise sense (this may come as a shock) such persons are not and cannot be disabled. They are entirely free to participate in social life; indeed, some belong to those classes that dominate, structure, and order social life. And yet we cannot help but see a capitalist with mobility issues, a missing limb, chronic pain, a psychiatric illness, and so forth, as disabled. Why?

Because class-structure (real economic relations) is reflected in ideology. Disability has a real, structural existence, but it also has a real ideological existence. Therefore, in culture and institutions, persons of the dominant classes whose bodies fit what is, ideologically, the image of disability, will invariably be viewed and medically classified as disabled. We will see this process of reification, the disjoinder of the ideological products of labor-economic relationships into free-standing and inaccurately mapped categories, again. It is a recurring aspect of human class society.

Capital

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:26:01 +0000

(generally)
Anything which is used to procure or extract surplus value.

Capital is not a static definition, but rather constitutes an economic relation. Machinery that forms the instruments of production, such as industrial machinery and property that is a condition of production, such as farmland or the physical fabric of a factory, are both forms of capital (see means of production, the), money that is used to set labor in motion is all capital. Money used to buy food and so forth is not capital, unless that food is being used to pay laborers.

Capital is any material investment of any kind that results in the investor receiving more in return than they invest.

Marx gives us the equation M-C-M’, that is (money) is exchanged for -> (commodity) is exchanged for -> (money with increased value, i.e. initial money + surplus value).

Any money or object (including means of production) used to gain money prime (money increased) is in or performing the capital relation, whether it is in the form of liquid currency or not.

(metonymically)
A shorthand for capitalists and all of their agents. (Thus, “capital is the bastion of reaction”).

Bourgeoisie

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:25:16 +0000

One of the three primary classes of industrial capitalism. The bourgeoisie are identified by the following primary relations of production:

Members of this class own the means of production.
Members of this class do not perform labor for their own support.

Age

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 21:37:00 +0000

Children and elderly persons are both largely, but not entirely, excluded from productive labor. This was not the case as recently as the 20th century; thanks to labor organizing, children are, for the most part, no longer expected to til, suffer injury, and die premature deaths in factories, mines, and fields. But among the poor, especially among the oppressed peoples, many children still work from adolescence to help provide for their families. Lacking the capacity for self-defense and self-advocacy, abuse against children and elders is not only rampant, but really built into the structure of class society. However, we find among the dominant classes that elderly persons have no trouble holding onto their property in old age, and that children are prepared from infancy to carry forth the rule of the dominant classes; this even extends to the children of the constructive and destructive ideological laborers (the petit-bourgeois public intellectuals and the “pig” class), who often follow in their parents footsteps.

Age is thus a kind of actual disability-relation, and functions as disability above.