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question:请将“2 State-mediated class differentiation as a basis for capitalist private property One is class differentiation, a process that Lenin, including in Development of Capitalism in Russia (Lenin, 1899), analysed in greater details than Marx and other classical Marxists. This is a process where under the rule of equal exchange of commodities, some commodity producers gradually lose their property because other commodity producers produce more efficiently. Class differentiation of commodity producers results in the formation of capitalists and proto-capitalists, but also independent non-exploiting producers and semi-proletarians (the latter two groups constitute what I call small-scale producers).2 Small-scale producers are adversely impacted by the capitalist class in at least three different but connected ways. Firstly, when they work as wage labourers for a part of the year, they are exploited like full-time wage labourers. Secondly, they are dispossessed of their property by the capitalist class and its state through primitive accumulation. Thirdly, they do not receive the full price of the products of their labour from the capitalist class and its state, so they are exploited in the commodity market; they may also pay a high price for the things they need (inputs; insurance, bank-loans, etc.). Apart from being impacted by the capitalist class, small-scale producers are also exploited by the landlords/money-lenders (on the basis of appropriation of ground rent and usurious interest). Exploitation of small-scale producers by elements of the ruling class cannot happen without the support of the state: this fact Lenin under-emphasized. It is the state that codifies the rules of the commodity exchange. The state also codifies and defends the rights of the propertied classes (e.g. moneylenders and merchants) to alienate direct producers from their property when, for example, the latter fail to pay back their loan. Small-scale producers often go into debt because the cost of the means of production and subsistence produced by capitalists is too high. The terms of trade between small-scale commodity production and large-scale commodity production being against the former can be countered by the state, and yet the state allows small-scale producers to incur a loss and go into a debt.3 They lose their property until they become property-less (pauperization is followed by proletarianization).4 Capitalist private property is based on the state-mediated negation of small-scale private property based in own labour or family labour. The market-based process of class-differentiation can involve violence as well: if an independent producer (e.g. a peasant) owes a loan to a moneylender or to a bank and if they do not surrender their assets in return for the loan because they wish to protect their livelihood, then violence is used against the independent producers. An important question to ask: why can the state not socialize the debt of small-scale producers (all those who are not net buyers of other people’s labour power)? After all, the state routinely forgives billions of dollars that big businesses owe to state-owned banks or otherwise makes available to the big business free money. This is important to ask in order to understand where the state’s necessary bias lies and to see that commodity exchange based on private property is partly a political (state-mediated) process.5 State’s taxes on subsistence goods (indirect taxes in general) — an extra- economic intervention — can contribute to the expropriation of small-scale producers, including peasants (Cleaver, 2019: 82). Indeed, tax on workers and small-scale producers is an indirect form of ‘exploitation’ by the state, a state which fails to look after the common interests of these classes. To understand the relation between the state and small-scale producers, one might ask: why does the state not exempt them from taxation (while it gives billions of dollars of tax exemption to the big business)? It is also important to note that state’s defence of commodity relations on the basis of equality and freedom produces unfreedom and inequality in the sphere of property relations which the state defends; unfreedom because those who have private property in labour but not in means of production and have become the net sellers of labour power are not free not to sell that property to the capitalist class; inequality because those who are owners of private property in labour and owners of the products of their labour (i.e. small-scale producers), when unable to pay their bills, lose their property; some of them come to have more property than others, and some of them become net buyers of labour power, and others become net sellers of labour power (Lenin, 1899: chapter 2). 3 State-assisted extra-economic ‘production’ of capitalist private property The second process in which small-scale producers lose their property giving rise to the emergence of capitalist property rights holders is what Marx calls primitive accumulation, which involves the state (this is the subject of my detailed theoretical study in the sequel to this book). The state typically enables the forcible separation of direct producers from their private property and from access to communal property and contributes to the emergence of private property in its capitalist form. The state thus produces an important condition for capitalism, that is, ‘the owner of money [finds] labour-power in the market as a commodity’ (Marx, 1887: 119). This means that ‘instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which his [or her] labour is incorporated’, a person ‘must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in his [or her] living self’ (ibid.). The state must reproduce, and it does reproduce, a significant section of people as sellers of labour power, that is, as wage workers, and not as people who can sell goods and services that they produce by using their labour power. In modern times, one can observe a ‘property circuit’ (somewhat similar to capital circuit and labour circuit I have mentioned earlier). It can be represented as P-S-C. The state takes property from small-scale producers (P) through a combination market mechanisms and extra-market mechanisms. The market mechanisms include two. One is that the systemic neglect of rural areas and the rural periphery of city-regions by the state, especially, in the South, drives down the price of land, allowing the state (and/or capitalists) to buy it cheap. This is akin to a massive gentrification process. Another is that rural impoverishment due to the systemic neglect by the state and exploitation by different property-owning strata can induce some small-scale producers to sell their land ‘voluntarily’. In any case, after obtaining the property, the state holds it as state property (S) temporarily as a bank holds money. And then state property is turned over to capitalists at a cheaper rate, and thus it becomes capitalist private property (C). Of course, sometimes, P-S-C can be shortened to P-C, when capitalists directly buy/obtain property from small-scale producers, with the help of the state (including its police and judiciary). The transition from P to C takes time, in part because of small-scale produc- ers/owners’ opposition to alienation/dispossession of their property as such or alienation/ dispossession for a given compensation. The more the time, the greater the loss of potential profit for capitalists, including from speculation on the property following alienation. State coercion is needed to shorten the transition time. One reason why many small-scale producers are reluctant to part with their property is that while capitalists (and their state) wish to get the land at a cheaper rate, small-scale producers wish to get a higher price — higher relative to current market conditions and higher relative to what the price of the property would be in the near future due to speculative rise in the price. Another reason is that after losing their property, they are not sure that they can obtain decent and secure employment in the capitalist enterprises that might be established (as an alternative to the current self-employment on their own property). Whether property is transferred, and at what price, partly depends on the balance of power between small-scale owners on the one hand and the state/capitalists on the other. Capital does not always get what it wants, but it generally does, thanks to the role of the state. Following the coercive dispossession from their property (and/or alienation from property through market mechanisms), the direct producers are now turned into new class subjects (workers for capitalists). The state then subjects them to a series of processes: statistical investigation and classification (they are classified on the basis of occupation, location, income, and so on), a degree of economic consolation (e.g. policies aimed at poverty alleviation or poor relief), and ideological, including religious indoctrination. They are also subjected to physical coercion, criminalization,6 and disciplinary action. It is indeed not enough that the state forcibly separates direct producers from their means of production (and subsistence such as homestead or cottages) and creates a proletariat. Marx says that following ‘the forcible creation of a class of outlawed proletarians’, it was the ‘bloody discipline that turned them into wage-labourers’ (Marx, 1887: 528). They were subjected to ‘disgraceful action of the State which employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour’ (ibid.). The newly created class of workers must be made to be accustomed to working for the capitalists and must be used to working for long hours. Being forced to choose between starving and working for a wage, and thus being compelled to choose the latter, people begin to agree to — that is, give consent to — living like wage workers. This indicates that coercion, both economic and extra-economic, creates consent. Of course, notions of equality, freedom, and the like contribute to the consent-process as did notion of(colonial- style) paternalism, especially, in the South.7 The process of primitive accumulation (or alienation from small-scale pro-ducers’ property), which is state-aided, creates two things: (a) the wage-labour class, a class of people which lives as long as it can sell its only commodity (labour power), and (b) owner of private property in its capitalist form. As we have already seen, the capitalist form of private property is different from other forms in that ‘determined by big industry and universal competition’, it is ‘pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property’ (Marx and Engels, 1845). Marx’s ‘any influence’, of course, exaggerates the separation between the state and capitalist private property a bit.”翻译为中文
answer:2 国家介导的阶级分化作为资本主义私有财产的基础 一种是阶级分化,这是一个过程,列宁在《俄国资本主义发展史》(列宁,1899)等作品中比马克思和其他经典的马克思主义者更详细地分析了这一过程。这是一个在商品平等交换规则下,一些商品生产者逐渐失去其财产,因为其他商品生产者更高效地生产。商品生产者的阶级分化导致资本家和原始资本家的形成,但也导致独立的非剥削生产者和半无产者(后两组构成了我所说的小规模生产者)的形成。小规模生产者至少以三种不同但相互连接的方式受到资本家阶级的负面影响。首先,当他们在一年的部分时间作为雇佣劳动者工作时,他们像全职雇佣劳动者一样被剥削。其次,他们通过原始积累被资本家阶级及其国家剥夺了财产。第三,他们没有从资本家阶级及其国家那里获得其劳动产品的全部价格,因此他们在商品市场上被剥削;他们也可能为他们需要的东西(原料;保险、银行贷款等)支付高价。除了受到资本家阶级的影响,小规模生产者还被地主/放债人(基于土地租金和高利贷的占有)剥削。 小规模生产者受统治阶级元素剥削,离不开国家的支持:这一事实列宁未能充分强调。是国家编制商品交换的规则。国家还编纂并捍卫有产阶级(例如放债人和商人)的权利,当直接生产者例如未能偿还贷款时,剥夺他们的财产。小规模生产者经常因为资本家生产的生产资料和生存资料成本过高而负债。小规模商品生产与大规模商品生产之间的贸易条件不利于前者,国家可以对抗这一点,但国家却允许小规模生产者蒙受损失并负债。他们失去财产直到变成无产者(贫困化后是无产阶级化)。资本主义私有财产建立在以国家介导否定基于自己劳动或家庭劳动的小规模私有财产之上。基于市场的阶级分化过程也可能涉及暴力:如果一个独立生产者(如农民)欠放债人或银行贷款,如果他们因为希望保护自己的生计而不交出财产作为贷款的回报,那么就会对独立生产者使用暴力。 一个重要问题是:为什么国家不能为小规模生产者(所有非净买入他人劳动力的人)社会化债务?毕竟,国家经常免除大企业欠国有银行的数十亿美元债务,或者以其他方式为大企业提供免费的资金。这个问题的提出很重要,以了解国家的必要偏见在哪里,以及看到基于私有财产的商品交换部分是一个政治(国家介导的)过程。 国家对生存商品征税(一般是间接税)——一种额外经济干预——可能导致小规模生产者,包括农民的财产被剥夺(Cleaver, 2019: 82)。事实上,对工人和小规模生产者征税是国家的一种间接形式的“剥削”,这个国家未能照顾到这些阶级的共同利益。为了理解国家与小规模生产者之间的关系,人们可能会问:为什么国家不免除他们的税收(同时给予大企业数十亿美元的税收减免)? 同样重要的是要注意,国家基于平等和自由的商品关系防御,在国家捍卫的财产关系领域产生了不自由和不平等;不自由,因为那些拥有劳动力私有财产而不是生产资料的私有财产,变成了劳动力的净卖者,他们没有不将这种财产出售给资本家阶级的自由;不平等,因为那些是劳动力私有财产的所有者和他们劳动产品(即小规模生产者)的所有者,当无法支付账单时,失去了他们的财产;有些人拥有的财产比其他人多,有些人变成了劳动力的净买家,而其他人变成了劳动力的净卖家(列宁,1899:第2章)。 3 国家协助的额外经济“生产”资本主义私有财产 小规模生产者失去财产,从而出现了资本主义产权持有者的第二个过程,是马克思所称的原始积累,其中涉及到国家(这是我在本书续集中的详细理论研究的主题)。国家通常使直接生产者被强制与其私有财产和公共财产的使用权分离,并促成了资本主义形式的私有财产的出现。国家因此创造了资本主义的一个重要条件,即“金钱的所有者在市场上找到劳动力作为一种商品”(马克思,1887:119)。这意味着一个人“不是处于能够出售包含了他[或她]的劳动的商品的位置,而是必须被迫将那种只存在于他[或她]的活生生的自我中的劳动力作为商品出售”(同上)。国家必须再生产,并且确实在再生产一个重要部分的人作为劳动力的卖者,即作为工资工人,而不是作为可以出售他们利用其劳动力生产的商品和服务的人。 在现代,可以观察到一个“财产循环”(与我之前提到的资本循环和劳动循环有些相似)。可以表示为P-S-C。国家通过市场机制和非市场机制从小规模生产者(P)那里拿走财产。市场机制包括两种。一种是国家对农村地区和城市-农村边缘地区的系统性忽视,尤其是在南方,导致土地价格下降,使国家(和/或资本家)能够廉价购买。这类似于大规模的绅士化过程。另一种是由于国家的系统性忽视和不同拥有财产阶层的剥削导致的农村贫困,可能促使一些小规模生产者“自愿”出售他们的土地。无论如何,获得财产后,国家暂时将其作为国有财产持有,就像银行持有钱一样。然后,以更便宜的价格将国有财产转让给资本家,从而成为资本家的私有财产(C)。当然,有时,P-S-C可以缩短为P-C,当资本家在国家(包括其警察和司法)的帮助下直接从小规模生产者那里买得/获得财产时。 从P到C的转变需要时间,部分是因为小规模生产者/所有者反对其财产被剥夺/失去,或因为给定的补偿而被剥夺/失去。时间越长,资本家的潜在利润损失越大,包括由于剥夺后对财产的投机。需要国家强制力来缩短过渡时间。许多小规模生产者不愿意放弃他们的财产的一个原因是,虽然资本家(及其国家)希望以更便宜的价格获得土地,小规模生产者希望获得更高的价格——高于当前市场条件,以及由于投机导致的价格在不久的将来的上涨。另一个原因是,失去财产后,他们不确定能否在可能建立的资本主义企业中获得体面和安全的就业(作为当前在自己财产上的自雇的替代)。财产是否转移,以及以什么价格转移,部分取决于小规模所有者与国家/资本家之间的力量平衡。资本并不总是得到它想要的,但它通常会,多亏了国家的作用。 在通过强制剥夺其财产(和/或通过市场机制与财产脱离)之后,直接生产者现在转变为新的阶级主体(为资本家工作的工人)。然后,国家将他们置于一系列过程之下:统计调查和分类(他们根据职业、位置、收入等被分类)、一定程度的经济安慰(例如,旨在缓解贫困或救济穷人的政策)、和意识形态,包括宗教灌输。他们也受到物理强制、刑事化、和纪律行动的影响。正如马克思所说,仅仅强制将直接生产者与其生产资料(和生活资料,如住宅或小屋)分离并创造出无产阶级是不够的。马克思说,在“通过暴力创造一群被放逐的无产者”之后,是“残酷的纪律将他们变成了雇佣劳动者”(马克思,1887:528)。他们受到了“国家的可耻行动,该国家利用警察加速通过增加劳动剥削程度来积累资本”的影响。新创造的工人阶级必须习惯为资本家工作,并习惯长时间工作。 被迫在挨饿和为工资工作之间做出选择,因而被迫选择后者,人们开始同意——即,对作为雇佣劳动者的生活表示同意。这表明,经济和非经济的强制都创造了同意。当然,平等、自由等观念也对同意的过程有所贡献,就像殖民地风格的家长制观念在南方特别如此。原始积累的过程(或从小规模生产者财产中剥离),这是国家支持的,创造了两件事:(a)工资劳动阶级,一个只要能卖出其唯一商品(劳动力)就能生存的阶级,(b)资本主义形式的私有财产拥有者。正如我们已经看到的,资本主义形式的私有财产与其他形式不同,因为“由大工业和普遍竞争决定”,它是“纯粹的私有财产,已经摆脱了所有公共机构的外表,也把国家从对财产发展的任何影响中排除出去”(马克思和恩格斯,1845)。马克思的“任何影响”,当然,对国家与资本主义私有财产之间的分离有所夸张。
question:请将“While the state has to ensure separation of small-scale producers from their means of production and subsistence on a significant scale, this separation is not necessarily a once-and-for-all process. Note that not all small-scale owners must be dispossessed and become wage workers for capitalism (to begin) to work. This means that there are always small-scale owners who may need to be dispossessed because capital needs their wage-labour and/or their means of production (farm land, water bodies, forested land, mining land, and so on). So, the state must continuously be involved in the act of separating small-scale owners from their property on behalf of capital as per its need. The state must also continuously stop workers from having direct — non-market — access to means of subsistence (and not just to means of production). This act is made possible in many ways. For one thing, even if the state has enough food under its control, it would not make it available to the poor for free, on the ground that, for example, such an action would promote idleness and create labour shortage. For another, there are laws against begging and vagabondage.8 The world produces enough food, and yet close to a billion people go without food. Food riots represent people’s demand to have direct (affordable) access to food.9 Similarly, when people squat on vacant urban land and empty buildings as in Brazil where there is a powerful landless rural workers movement, they are demanding access to land and shelter. The state ensures that people do not have direct access to what they need, so not surprisingly, the state heavily suppresses people’s action. Such suppression is not a happenstance. It is the essence of the state: it is to keep a significant number of direct producers separated from means of production and subsistence forcing them to work for a wage. So such a separation cannot happen without another separation: people being separated from state’s coercive apparatuses and powers. Political suppression of people’s demand for direct access to means of subsistence is a condition for capitalist mode of production. Partly because of struggle from below in different forms, there came to exist state provision of means of subsistence (e.g. public housing, healthcare and education, subsidized nutrition programme), and state-directed/-owned pro-ductive enterprises, including in ex-‘communist’ countries or in post-colonial societies. These state-provided means of subsistence or state-controlled means of production (state’s enterprises) are partly or wholly in the form of non-commodities (or property which is not capitalist in form proper). They form the social commons akin to communal means of subsistence in pre-capitalist societies and contributed to partial ‘de-proletarianization’.10 They therefore offer opportunities for primitive accumulation in contemporary times via their privatization and transfer to the hands of the capitalist class. This Marx did not quite encounter. Such a modern form of primitive accumulation ensures that a class of property-less direct producers, separated from means of production and subsistence, continues to exist, and this ensures uninterrupted sale and purchase of labour power as a commodity. As mentioned earlier, an entire population does not have to lose its property for capitalism to exist. Indeed, sometimes, a limited amount of means of pro-duction and subsistence in the hands of workers might help contribute to the cost of their reproduction and thus reduce the wages that capitalists have to pay. Also sometimes, when capitalism fails to address the problem of unemployment, the state encourages petty business, even by giving small loans to workers and small-scale producers, including women.11 Consider micro-credit policies and state assistance to micro-enterprises. Thus, a ‘reverse primitive accumulation’ can happen with the support of the state: this can take the form of poor people given some land taken from large-scale owners or small government loans to set up small businesses. The foregoing discussion shows that the absolutely fundamental purpose of the capitalist state, as a class-state, is to defend the capitalist form of private property (not necessarily private property as such) on the basis of threat and actual use of the means of violence. As mentioned earlier, the social relations of production between classes (and intra-capitalist relations) are codified in the form of state laws, producing what are strictly called property relations or juridical relations. The right to charge an interest and rent and the right to appropriate surplus value are juridically defended by the state, in the overall interest of the capitalist property owners. Of course, all this does not mean that the state cannot and does not go against the short-term or long-term interests of individual members of the capitalist class or indeed against certain shortterm economic interests of the class as a whole in order to preserve its class rule. As Engels says, ‘rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class’ (in Marx and Engels, 1975: 399-400). Whether the owner of labour power or of any other commodity, everyone is a commodity owner and seller. In addition, all are regarded as equal before the law irrespective of what capital each owns: whether they own land as private property or whether they are poor people who own nothing but their labour power. Indeed, ‘[a]s the rule of law, the bourgeois state treats its citizens as free and equal owners of private property . . . one only acquires property by endowment, inheritance, exchange, or purchase’ (Heinrich, 2004: 204-5).12 So state’s neutrality — as the realm of extra-economic coercion — is not an illusion. Rather, it is precisely by means of this neutrality that ‘the state secures the foundations of capitalist relations of domination and exploitation’ (p. 205). The defence of property of everyone in a neutral manner implies that ‘those who possess no relevant property beyond their own labour-power must sell their labour-power . . . and submit to capital’ (ibid.). 4 Capitalism, theft, and anti-theft laws The entire capitalist mode of production itself is based on stealing and ‘theft’ (note that this theft does not include appropriation of surplus value on the basis of law of value supported by the state). Consider the following examples that Marx himself provides. Capital steals people: ‘Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men’ (slaves) (Marx, 1887: 534). The genesis of capitalism is itself based on ‘colossal scale thefts of state lands’ (p. 512). Laws exist which serve as ‘the instrument of the theft of the people’s land’ (p. 513). Capital engages in ‘the systematic robbery of the Communal lands helped especially, next to the theft of the State domains’ (ibid.). In pursuit of cheap labour, it is engaged in ‘childstealing’ (p. 537). Capital ‘steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight’ (p. 179). There are ‘ “small thefts” of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as “petty pilfer- ings of minutes” ’ (p. 167). In other words, capital steals people’s life (e.g. slave labour) and people’s wealth (small-scale property). Capital also steals people’s labour (‘extra’ surplus labour) in the sense, for example, that people’s need to enjoy a meal is not respected (haggling over meal times). This happens with — and cannot happen without — the full support of the state. Yet it is the same state that uses force against stealing by poor workers (or small-scale producers), stopping them from obtaining direct access to the necessaries of life. Economically deprived and poor, common people do engage in theft. For example, there were ‘[t]he whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15 th to the end of the 18th century’ (Marx, 1887: 514). The capitalist state has many laws against theft.13 Anti-theft laws represent the state’s way of stopping people from having direct (= extra-economic) access to means of subsistence (and production). These laws make no distinction between the forms of property being stolen: a person stealing food or such necessaries from a capitalist is not distinguished from a person stealing from a slightly better-off person who is not a capitalist or a landlord.14 While the state takes action against stealing (or robbing) on the part of common people, consider how it is that the state is fully in support of the capitalist, who has ‘bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period’ and who ‘insists upon his rights’, and who therefore ‘has no intention of being robbed’ (Marx, 1887: 137) by workers (workers can rob when they work less than the usual working day or when they work with less than normal intensity or when they waste any resource). The capitalist has ‘a penal code of his own’ (ibid.), a penal code to stop any such robbery, a penal code that, ultimately, cannot exist without the state’s support. 5 Summary, and theoretical and political implications The state is a necessary precondition for value relations and for capitalist property relations. The state makes sure that commodity exchange happens on the basis of the principle of ‘the equivalent for the equivalent’. And, it takes steps to stop the violation of the law of commodity exchange. In certain cases, it itself enforces — or tolerates — unequal exchange as well (in the interest of a hegemonic fraction of the capitalist class, or when the long-term interest of capitalist society is at stake), including at the global scale. In fact, by using extra- economic coercion against small-scale producers and by supporting commodity relations that subject small-scale producers to class differentiation, the state supports the creation of the two basic classes: a class which owns/sells labour power as a commodity and a class that is the (net) buyer of this commodity and that owns the means of production in their commodity form. To the extent that small-scale property owners do remain (they are a substantial presence in rural areas of the South and urban areas of the North), the state fails to meet their needs. They are exploited by both capitalists and all those property owners who appropriate rent and interest, a process that the state also defends.”翻译为中文
answer:2 国家必须在重大规模上确保小规模生产者与他们的生产和生存手段分离,但这种分离不一定是一劳永逸的过程。请注意,并不是所有小规模所有者都必须被剥夺并成为工资工人,资本主义才能(开始)运作。这意味着,总会有一些可能需要被剥夺的小规模所有者,因为资本需要他们的工资劳动和/或他们的生产手段(农田、水体、森林土地、矿产土地等)。所以,根据资本的需要,国家必须持续代表资本将小规模所有者与他们的财产分离。国家还必须持续阻止工人直接——非市场——获取生存手段(不仅限于生产手段)。这一行为通过许多方式成为可能。例如,即使国家掌控了足够的食物,也不会免费提供给穷人,理由是,例如,这样的行动会促进懒惰并导致劳动力短缺。另外,还有反对乞讨和流浪的法律。 世界上生产的食物足够,但接近十亿人无饭可吃。食物暴动代表人们要求直接(负担得起的)获取食物的需求。同样,当人们像巴西那样在空置的城市土地和空置建筑上搭建棚户时,他们是在要求获取土地和住所的权利。国家确保人们无法直接获取他们所需的东西,因此不足为奇的是,国家严厉镇压人们的行动。这种镇压不是偶然发生的。它是国家的本质所在:使大量直接生产者与生产和生存手段分离,强迫他们为工资工作。因此,这种分离不可能发生而不伴随另一种分离:人们与国家的强制机构和权力分离。政治上压制人们对生存手段直接获取的需求是资本主义生产方式的条件。 部分是因为来自下层的不同形式的斗争,出现了国家提供生存手段(例如公共住房、医疗保健和教育、补贴营养计划),以及国家指导/拥有的生产企业,包括在前“共产主义”国家或后殖民社会。这些国家提供的生存手段或国家控制的生产手段(国家企业)部分或全部以非商品形式存在(或不完全是资本主义形式的产权)。它们形成了类似于前资本主义社会中的公共生存手段的社会公共财,有助于部分“去无产阶级化”。因此,它们为当代通过私有化和转移到资本家手中的原始积累提供了机会。这是马克思没有完全遭遇的。这种现代形式的原始积累确保了一类与生产和生存手段分离的无产者的持续存在,这确保了劳动力作为商品的不间断买卖。 正如前面提到的,整个人口并不需要失去其财产,资本主义才能存在。实际上,有时,工人手中拥有有限量的生产和生存手段可能有助于降低资本家必须支付的工资,从而有助于他们繁殖的成本。同时,当资本主义未能解决失业问题时,国家鼓励小本生意,甚至通过向工人和小规模生产者,包括妇女提供小额贷款。考虑微信贷政策和对微型企业的国家援助。因此,在国家的支持下可以发生“逆向原始积累”:这可以采取将一些土地从大规模所有者手中给予穷人或向建立小企业的人提供小额政府贷款的形式。 前述讨论表明,作为阶级国家的资本主义国家的绝对基本目的是基于威胁和实际使用暴力手段来捍卫资本主义形式的私有财产(不一定是私有财产本身)。如前所述,阶级之间的生产关系(以及资本家内部关系)以国家法律的形式编纂,产生了严格称为产权关系或法律关系。收取利息和租金的权利以及占有剩余价值的权利由国家在资本家产权所有者的整体利益中司法上予以捍卫。当然,这并不意味着国家不能也不会违背资本家阶级个别成员的短期或长期利益,或确实违背阶级作为一个整体的某些短期经济利益,以便维护其阶级统治。正如恩格斯所说,“很少有法律典范是一个阶级统治的直率、无保留、不掺杂的表达”(在马克思和恩格斯,1975:399-400)。 无论是劳动力所有者还是任何其他商品的所有者,每个人都是商品所有者和卖家。此外,所有人都在法律面前平等,无论他们拥有何种资本:无论他们拥有土地作为私人财产,还是贫穷的人除了自己的劳动力外一无所有。实际上,“作为法治,资产阶级国家将其公民视为私有财产自由和平等的所有者……一个人只能通过赠予、继承、交换或购买获得财产”(Heinrich,2004:204-5)。因此国家的中立性——作为额外经济强制的领域——并非幻觉。正是通过这种中立性,“国家确保资本主义统治和剥削关系的基础”(第205页)。以中立的方式捍卫每个人的财产意味着“那些除了自己的劳动力外没有相关财产的人必须出售他们的劳动力……并屈服于资本”(同上)。 4 资本主义、盗窃和反盗窃法律 整个资本主义生产方式本身建立在盗窃和“窃取”之上(注意这种盗窃不包括基于国家支持的价值法则的剩余价值占有)。考虑马克思本人提供的以下例子。 资本窃取人:“最具特征的莫过于他们的偷窃人的系统”(奴隶)(马克思,1887:534)。资本主义的起源本身就基于“国家土地的大规模盗窃”(第512页)。存在作为“窃取人民土地的工具”的法律(第513页)。资本参与了“系统性地抢劫公共土地,尤其是接下来的国家领域的盗窃,对此帮助尤其大”(同上)。在追求廉价劳动力的过程中,它参与了“偷窃儿童”(第537页)。资本“偷窃了呼吸新鲜空气和阳光所需的时间”(第179页)。工厂检查员还将资本从劳动者的膳食和休息时间中的“小偷窃”称为“偷窃分钟”(第167页)。 换句话说,资本窃取了人们的生命(例如奴隶劳动)和人们的财富(小规模财产)。资本还以这样一种意义上窃取了人们的劳动(“额外”的剩余劳动),例如,人们享受一顿饭的需求不被尊重(为用餐时间讨价还价)。这一切发生在——并且没有——国家的全力支持下。然而,同样的国家却对穷困工人(或小规模生产者)的盗窃行为动用武力,阻止他们直接获取生活必需品。经济上被剥夺和贫穷的普通人确实会参与盗窃。例如,有“15世纪后期到18世纪末,随着对人民的强制剥夺,伴随着一系列盗窃、暴行和人民的苦难”(马克思,1887:514)。资本主义国家有许多反盗窃法律。 反盗窃法律代表着国家阻止人们直接(= 非经济)获取生存手段(和生产手段)的方式。这些法律不区分被盗的财产形式:从资本家那里偷取食物或类似必需品的人,与从不是资本家或地主的稍微富裕的人那里偷取的人没有区别。虽然国家采取行动反对普通人的偷窃(或抢劫)行为,但考虑到国家是如何全力支持资本家的,他“购买了一定期限的劳动力使用权”,坚持他的权利,因此“无意被抢劫”(马克思,1887:137)工人(工人可以通过减少通常的工作日或以低于正常强度工作或浪费任何资源来抢劫)。资本家有“他自己的刑法典”(同上),一个阻止任何此类抢劫的刑法典,最终,这个刑法典离不开国家的支持。 5 总结及理论和政治含义 国家是价值关系和资本主义财产关系的必要前提条件。国家确保商品交换基于“等价物换等价物”的原则进行。并且,国家采取措施阻止商品交换法则的违反。在某些情况下,它本身也强制执行——或容忍——不平等交换(以支持资本主义阶级的霸权分支的利益,或当资本主义社会的长远利益受到威胁时),包括在全球范围内。实际上,通过对小规模生产者使用额外经济强制,支持使小规模生产者受到阶级分化的商品关系,国家支持了两个基本阶级的创造:作为商品出售/拥有劳动力的阶级和购买这种商品并拥有以商品形式的生产资料的阶级(净买家)。在小规模财产所有者仍然存在的程度上(他们在南方的农村地区和北方的城市地区占有相当的存在),国家未能满足他们的需求。他们被资本家和所有占有租金和利息的财产所有者剥削,这个过程也被国家捍卫。
question:请将“For capitalism to exist and to continue to exist, the state must separate (and continue to separate) direct producers from the means of production and sub-sistence. And it must ensure that the separated means of production are turned into capital. It must make sure that capitalists as the new ruling class can, like the older ruling classes, appropriate unpaid surplus labour from direct producers. Capitalists do this even while paying the full value of the commodity they purchase (i.e. labour power). The money with which labour power is bought is actually the surplus value that has already been appropriated from workers. That means that the outer limit of the state intervention is this: it must do no more than making sure that commodities are exchanged at value (wages must cover at least the value of labour power) and that there are enough people with a reasonable amount of health and education to work for the capitalists for a wage. In terms of freedom, the situation is better in capitalism than in pre-capitalist societies which lack the kind of equality and freedom that nominally exist under capitalism. Yet one cannot fetishize freedom in the sphere of capitalist exchange that the state protects. But this is exactly what most people do: prompted by the surface appearances of free exchange, they fetishize the idea that there is freedom and equality and that there is respect for private property (private property is sacrosanct), even if millions of small-scale producers lose their property through commodity exchange every year in major capitalist countries. In fact, the Heritage Foundation (2020) speaks for many when it equates economic freedom to freedom from government regulation, which means freedom to buy and sell without government intervention. Ultimately, this freedom to buy and sell is the freedom of large-scale businesses to (a) buy labour power from its owners (the working class), (b) to buy commodities (e.g. raw materials) from small-scale producers, and (c) to sell commodities to small-scale producers and wage workers (e.g. means of production to the former, and means of subsistence to both), in a way that affects these classes adversely. The state protects this specific economic freedom, the freedom of capitalists that exists at the expense of the masses. It is important to note that the ideas about the state and capitalist property presented here go against several prevailing views within Marxism. For example, Fred Block (2019) rejects Marxism’s emphasis on the property-based definition of capitalism. He rejects the Marxist idea that ‘the key factor in understanding any given society is the nature of the property system’, the question of who controls property (p. 1167). He suggests that one must ‘avoid characterizing any particular society as being capitalist’ (p. 1173), that is, a society ‘defined as a regime of private property in which producers seek to profit in competitive markets’ (p. 1167). The property-based view of capitalism cannot explain ‘the huge differences in income inequality’ among capitalist countries. The factors that explain all these differences ‘lie outside of the system of property and production’ (ibid.). He rejects therefore Marxism’s view that ‘[w]ithout transforming that core relationship by ending private ownership of the means of production, reforms that were won today would be reversed tomorrow’ (p. 1167). Block advocates for ‘the Polanyian view of socialism’ which ‘is not tied to property, but rather to the ability of the citizenry, through democratic means, to exercise sovereignty over the market’ (p. 1173). Block assumes that there is no internal relation between capitalist class relation and the legal and political system (i.e. the state), so the latter can be used to meet the needs of the masses. In the post-modernist Marxist view, ‘the ownership of property (whether in means of production or more generally) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the wielding of power and vice versa’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 119). In this view, communism, which, in Marxism, requires that exploitative private property be abolished, is also a class society because the society as a whole will appropriate and distribute surplus labour from individuals. From the Analytical Marxism camp, Wright is also sceptical of revolutions against capitalist property relations. Echoing the post-modernist view, he says that ‘Anticapitalist revolutions attempt to eliminate the distinctively capitalist form of exploitation’, by putting the means of production in the hands of the state (nationalization), but nationalization would not necessarily affect non- capitalistic exploitation, that is, exploitation based on unequal ownership of such assets as skills/credentials, and nationalization may in fact increase bureaucratic control over people’s lives (Wright, 1989: 20). All these views neglect the fact that Marx and Engels (1871) draw our attention to the ‘economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopolizer of the means of labour; that is, the sources of life lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence’. In addition, for Marxism, ‘1917’ (the Russian revolution) actually vindicates the Marxist claim that while nationalization of property is the first necessary step, it is not sufficient at all for socialism to be built. Indeed, [i]n order to become social, private property must as inevitably pass through the state stage as the caterpillar in order to become a butterfly must pass through the pupal stage. But the pupa is not a butterfly. Myriads of pupae perish without ever becoming butterflies. State property becomes the property of ‘the whole people’ only to the degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith the necessity of the state. (Trotsky, 1991: 201-2) State property itself is not socialism. Marxism knows it. State property is necessary but not sufficient. State property is to be ‘converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to be state property’. And the higher the postrevolution state ‘rises above the people, and the more fiercely it opposes itself as the guardian of property to the people as its squanderer, the more obviously does it testify against the socialist character of this state property’ (ibid.). In any case, it is important to reiterate the importance of private property which is closely connected to the state. Property has to be seen as a process and not just a thing. The expansion of wealth or property in capitalism is constituted by a set of state-mediated processes. The first is the commodity production (site of primary exploitation), which operates in relation to and alongside four other processes. One is the realm of commodity exchange and financiali- zation, the site of secondary exploitation, that is, exploitation in the market for consumer goods, in the rental and mortgage market and in the sphere of money-lending, including by the loan sharks as well as big banks. The second is class differentiation (and the tendency towards proletarianization) among commodity producers. This results in the transfer of non-capitalist private property to capitalist private property (or the transfer of private property from weaker capitalists to stronger capitalists more or less on the basis of law of value). The third is ongoing primitive accumulation or dispossession of non-capitalist producers, which also results in the transfer of private property to the capitalist class. Finally, commodity production in its advanced stage tends to develop into imperialism which results in transfer of value and wealth from poorer nations to the richer nations (Das, 2020a). As we have seen, there are at least two main sources of capitalist private property. One form of capitalist private property is from non-capitalist sources: this is when the state takes away the private property of non-capitalist owners and lands it in the hands of the pro-capitalists or capitalists. The other form of capitalist private property, the dominant form in the modern society, is based on capitalist accumulation (as Marx discusses in chapter 25 of Capital volume 1 in great details): this is when surplus value appropriated by capitalists from property-less direct producers (proletarians and semi-proletarians) is reinvested by capitalists to make their business bigger. Thus, the second form of capitalist private property is the form that surplus value takes when the private property of ordinary men and women — private property in labour power — is put to use by the capitalist class. Here as well, the state’s contribution is enormous, including in terms of not only maintaining the already-existing capitalist property but also maintaining and protecting the capitalist right to exploit and to reinvest in order to expand the existing private property (discussed in a later section). Indeed, while the fundamental purpose of the capitalist state is to defend private property in its capitalist form, merely creating and protecting private property as a thing — existing mines, land, plantations, factories, service sector enterprise, banks, capitalist form of knowledge (and intellectual property), and so on — is not enough. Private property seen as a relation and a process, and not a thing, represents the process of materialization of exploitation and accumulation. Capital is value in motion. Money has to be constantly made from private property based on exploitation of labour, and that money must be converted into private property, and the state must ensure this. Therefore, the state’s economic interventions emanate from the state’s fundamental politicalpurpose — the protection of capitalist private property and its augmentation, against any threat from direct producers who must be subjugated. The economic intervention, beyond creation and augmentation of private property through primitive accumulation and class differentiation, takes the form of its contribution to the process of production of value and surplus value, which we will now discuss in Chapter 7. 7 The state, and capitalist production, exploitation accumulation, and crisis In the preface to the first German edition of Capital volume 1, Karl Marx says: ‘It is the ultimate aim of this work [Capital volume 1], to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society’ (Marx, 1887: 7). There are economic laws that explain the ‘spontaneous expansion of capital’ (ibid.: 163) or ‘the successive phases of its normal development’ (ibid.: 7), and then there is state power, including ‘legal enactments’ and legislations or acts (ibid.). The economic laws of capitalism are modified by the laws and actions of state. The actual degree and importance of the modification is a conjunctural matter.”翻译为中文
answer:为了资本主义的存在和持续存在,国家必须将直接生产者与生产和生存手段分离(并继续分离)。并且它必须确保分离的生产手段转化为资本。它必须确保资本家作为新的统治阶级可以像旧的统治阶级一样,从直接生产者那里占有未支付的剩余劳动。资本家在支付他们购买的商品(即劳动力)的全价值的同时这样做。用来购买劳动力的金钱实际上是已经从工人那里占有的剩余价值。这意味着国家干预的最外层限制是:它必须仅确保商品按价值交换(工资至少要覆盖劳动力的价值),并且有足够多具有合理健康和教育水平的人为资本家工作以换取工资。 在自由方面,资本主义社会的情况比缺乏资本主义下名义上存在的平等和自由的前资本主义社会更好。然而,人们不能在国家保护的资本主义交换领域中对自由进行拜物教化。但这正是大多数人所做的:在自由交换的表面现象的驱使下,他们拜物化了存在自由和平等的观念,以及对私有财产的尊重(私有财产是神圣不可侵犯的),即使每年在主要资本主义国家有数以百万计的小规模生产者通过商品交换失去他们的财产。事实上,遗产基金会(2020)代表了许多人的观点,它将经济自由等同于免于政府监管的自由,这意味着在没有政府干预的情况下买卖的自由。最终,买卖的自由是大型企业的自由,即(a)从其所有者(工人阶级)那里购买劳动力,(b)向小规模生产者购买商品(例如原材料),(c)向小规模生产者和工资工人出售商品(例如对前者生产手段,对两者生存手段),以对这些阶级产生不利影响的方式。国家保护这种特定的经济自由,即以大众为代价存在的资本家的自由。 值得注意的是,在这里提出的关于国家和资本主义财产的观念,与马克思主义内部的几种流行观点相悖。例如,弗雷德·布洛克(2019)拒绝了马克思主义对以财产为基础定义资本主义的强调。他拒绝了马克思的观点,即“理解任何特定社会的关键因素是财产制度的性质”,财产的控制问题(第1167页)。他建议“避免将任何特定社会定性为资本主义社会”(第1173页),即“以私有财产制度定义的社会,生产者在竞争市场中寻求利润”(第1167页)。以财产为基础的资本主义观点无法解释资本主义国家之间巨大的收入不平等差异。解释所有这些差异的因素“位于财产和生产体系之外”(同上)。因此,他拒绝了马克思主义的观点,“如果不通过结束生产手段的私有所有制来转变核心关系,那么今天赢得的改革明天就会被逆转”(第1167页)。布洛克主张“波兰尼式的社会主义观”,“它不是与财产挂钩,而是与公民通过民主手段对市场行使主权的能力挂钩”(第1173页)。布洛克假设资本家阶级关系与法律和政治系统(即国家)之间没有内在关系,因此后者可以用来满足大众的需求。 在后现代主义马克思主义观点中,“财产所有权(无论是生产手段还是更广泛的)既非行使权力的必要条件,也非充分条件,反之亦然”(Resnick和Wolff,2006:119)。在这个观点中,共产主义,它在马克思主义中要求废除剥削性私有财产,也是一个阶级社会,因为社会整体将从个体那里占有并分配剩余劳动。 从分析马克思主义阵营来看,赖特对反对资本主义财产关系的革命也持怀疑态度。呼应后现代主义观点,他说,“反资本主义革命试图消除资本主义特有的剥削形式”,通过将生产手段置于国家手中(国有化),但国有化不一定会影响非资本主义剥削,即基于不平等拥有技能/资格等资产的剥削,并且国有化实际上可能增加对人们生活的官僚控制(Wright,1989:20)。 所有这些观点都忽略了马克思和恩格斯(1871)提醒我们注意的事实:“劳动者经济上受到劳动手段的垄断者,即生命来源的垄断者的支配,是所有形式的奴役、所有社会苦难、精神堕落和政治依赖的根源”。此外,对于马克思主义来说,“1917”(俄国革命)实际上证实了马克思主义的主张,即虽然国有化财产是第一必要步骤,但它根本不足以建立社会主义。事实上, “为了成为社会化的,私有财产必然经历国家阶段,就如同蝴蝶要成为蝴蝶必须经过蛹阶段一样。但蛹不是蝴蝶。大量的蛹未能变成蝴蝶。国有财产只有在社会特权和分化消失,从而国家的必要性随之消失的程度上,才成为‘全民的财产’。 (托洛茨基,1991: 201-2) 国有财产本身不是社会主义。马克思主义知道这一点。国有财产是必要的但不充分的。国有财产应当在“转化为社会主义财产的同时,不再是国有财产”。而且,革命后的国家“越是超越人民,越是作为财产的守护者与人民作为其浪费者对立起来,越是明显地证明了这种国有财产的社会主义性质的缺失”(同上)。 无论如何,强调与国家密切相关的私有财产的重要性很重要。财产应被视为一个过程,而不仅仅是一种物品。资本主义的财富或财产扩张由一系列国家介导的过程构成。首先是商品生产(初级剥削的场所),它与其他四个过程相关并并行存在。一个是商品交换和金融化领域,即二级剥削的场所,也就是消费品市场、租赁和抵押市场以及货币借贷领域(包括放高利贷的人以及大银行)的剥削。第二个是商品生产者之间的阶级分化(以及趋向无产阶级化)。这导致非资本主义私有财产转移到资本主义私有财产(或从较弱的资本家转移到更强的资本家手中,或多或少基于价值法则)。第三个是持续的原始积累或对非资本主义生产者的剥夺,这也导致私有财产转移到资本家阶级手中。最后,商品生产在其高级阶段倾向于发展为帝国主义,导致价值和财富从较贫穷的国家转移到较富裕的国家(Das, 2020a)。 正如我们所见,资本主义私有财产至少有两个主要来源。一种形式的资本主义私有财产来自非资本主义来源:这是当国家夺走非资本主义所有者的私有财产,并使其落入亲资本主义者或资本家手中的情况。资本主义私有财产的另一种形式,即在现代社会中占主导地位的形式,是基于资本主义积累(正如马克思在《资本论》第一卷第25章中详细讨论的):这是资本家从无产者(无产者和半无产者)那里占有的剩余价值被资本家重新投资以扩大其业务时的情况。因此,资本主义私有财产的第二种形式是剩余价值在普通男女的私有财产——劳动力的私有财产——被资本家阶级利用时呈现的形式。在这里,国家的贡献也是巨大的,包括在维护已经存在的资本主义财产以及维护和保护资本家剥削权利和为了扩大现有私有财产而再投资的权利方面(在后面的部分中讨论)。 确实,尽管资本主义国家的根本目的是捍卫资本主义形式的私有财产,但仅仅创造和保护作为一种物品的私有财产——现有的矿山、土地、种植园、工厂、服务部门企业、银行、资本主义形式的知识(和知识产权)等——是不够的。将私有财产视为一种关系和过程,而非一种物品,代表了剥削和积累的物质化过程。资本是运动中的价值。必须不断地通过劳动剥削基础上的私有财产创造金钱,而且这些金钱必须转化为私有财产,国家必须确保这一点。因此,国家的经济干预源自国家的根本政治目的——保护资本主义私有财产及其增长,对抗任何来自必须被征服的直接生产者的威胁。经济干预,除了通过原始积累和阶级分化创造和增加私有财产外,还表现为其对生产价值和剩余价值的过程的贡献,这将在第7章中讨论。 7 国家与资本主义生产、剥削、积累和危机 在《资本论》第一卷第一版德文版的序言中,卡尔·马克思说:“这项工作的最终目的[《资本论》第一卷],是揭示现代社会的经济运动法则”(马克思,1887:7)。有经济法则解释了“资本的自发扩张”(同上:163)或“其正常发展的连续阶段”(同上:7),然后是国家权力,包括“法律制定”和立法或法案(同上)。资本主义的经济法则受到国家的法律和行动的修正。实际的修正程度和重要性是一种特定情境的问题。
question:请将“Following the completion of the sale and purchase of commodities, including labour power, the process of capitalist production (labour process) begins under the laws of motion of capital. It is a process in which the capitalist (or its agent) brings the means of production and the worker together to produce a use-value for sale: under capitalism, ‘[t]he labour-process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his [or her] property’ (Marx, 1887: 131). The workplace, the space of labour process, the hidden abode of production, is a sphere of certain rights of the exploiting class. These rights are defended by the state. Therefore, the sphere of production, including the workplace, reveals important attributes of the state. As in the last two chapters, I partly rely on Capital 1 to show how the logic of capitalist social relations and production create a space, and produce an imperative, for the state to act, whether or not the state does act in a given situation or whether it acts satisfactorily or not from the standpoint of capitalists. In society, fresh wealth (new wealth) cannot be produced merely on the basis of primitive accumulation or even class differentiation (the topics discussed earlier). Fresh wealth cannot also be produced merely on the basis of commodity circulation: surplus value (fresh wealth) cannot be produced inside circulation, although it cannot be produced outside of commodity circulation. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, itself creates no value. On the basis of circulation and creation of capitalist property from pre-capitalist or non-capitalist (small-scale owners’) property, fresh wealth is ultimately produced inside the hidden abode of production, and it is here that the state plays an important role. The capitalist state is an economically powerful agent. In fact, the part of total social capital that is spent by the state keeps rising, including under neoliberalism.1 Using its economic power (including the power to create money), the state produces those conditions for capitalism which the profit- driven individual capitalists will not generally produce and may indeed destroy. As argued before, capital is value in motion, so it is not enough for the state to merely defend capitalist property rights. Therefore, the state must take steps to promote capitalist accumulation in the long-term interests of the capitalist class and especially its economically and politically hegemonic fraction. The state behaves like a machine of social reproduction, from the standpoint of the social capital. And ‘[l]ike any other machine, it requires maintenance, amortization, new parts, and a continuous supply of fuel and energy’. So ‘the social capital . . . must set aside a considerable portion of the value it realizes in order to continuously finance state activity’ (Smith, 2018: 234): [L]ike unproductive capital in the sphere of circulation, the state carries out a range of tasks that are indispensable to maintaining the institutional framework of the valorization process. In this sense, it contributes ‘indirectly’ to the production of social surplus-value. (ibid.) By appropriating more surplus labour, the state reduces the overhead costs for social capital. To describe the nature of capitalism, Marx (1887) begins with the formula, M-C-M, which means ‘the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital’ (p. 104). But given that no one would exchange M for M (100 for 100), Marx says that ‘[t]he exact form of this process [of circulation of commodities] is therefore M-C-M', where M' = M + D M = ‘the original sum advanced, plus an increment’ (ibid.: 106). ‘This increment or excess over the original value’ is called surplus value. ‘It is this movement that converts it into capital’ (ibid.). M-C-M' is actually M-C-P-C'-M', which can be further expanded to M-C (MP+LP)-P-C'-M'. The state is connected to each phase ofthe circuit (Figure 7.1). The capital circuit in its expanded form can serve as a method of systematic presentation as well as a method of analysis of the role of the state. In Sections 1—4, I discuss how the state is connected to the successive phases of the capital circuit. I discuss the state’s role in relation to accumulation in Section 5 (which is connected to the previous section); here I closely follow Marx’s discussion in Chapter 25 in Capital volume 1. In Section 6, I turn to the state’s role in relation to tendencies and counter-tendencies towards economic crisis. In the last section, I summarize the discussion and reflect on the implications of my discussion for the concepts of state capitalism and socialism. 1 The state and the ‘M-C(MP+. . .’ phase of the capital circuit (the sphere of money and means of production) The state makes liquid investible resources (M) available to capitalists (and espe-cially to the big business), often at below-market rates, through various policies (e.g. low-interest loans, quantitative easing, loan waivers or forgiveness and various bailout packages). Some of these policies represent simple plundering of the state treasury. Liberalization of financial markets allows domestic businesses access foreign capital. Often the money received from the state (including by cheap credits) is used by capital to simply speculate rather than to invest to produce goods and services that people need, and in this case the state’s connection to capital circuit is its connection to a shorter version of the circuit: the state helps capitalists increase their profit in the form of interest in the sphere of financialization, so M-C-P-C'-M' is shortened to M-M' (meaning money can simply be made from money, with assistance from the state). For the production process, capitalists need actual commodities, including means of production (raw materials, land, energy, software, machines, the built environment or social and physical infrastructure, and so on). Means of production can exist in a collective form (publicly owned airport or railroads or mines) or in the form of privately owned assets. The state makes commodities available to the capitalist class in the form of cheap raw materials and cheap land, water bodies (lakes), and forests, which have been obtained from people via ongoing primitive accumulation (often the latter process happens in areas inhabited by poverty-stricken indigenous communities). Land is a crucial means of production. It is necessary for locating any enterprise. It is directly necessary in land-based production (e.g. farming, forestry, fishing, eco-tourism, and the like). Capitalists’ access to minerals for extractive industries requires their access to land. If all the land is owned by numerous private owners (including small-scale producers/owners), then assembling a big chunk of land for large-scale enterprises (e.g. laying out major railroads and railways, large-scale factories, and so on) would be a problem, so the state comes to own the land too. As mentioned earlier, the state uses its power to take control over privately owned land by paying a low price — lower than what the price would be when the land is fully developed and an enterprise begins to operate — and then makes this property available to capitalists at a rate suitable to them and sometimes for free. In part because a capitalist wishes to buy as cheap as possible and small-scale owners wish to get a better price, coercion by the state may be necessary to transcend their reluctance to part with their property. Where the state owns forested land or water resources, it also makes these available to private capitalists as and when they need. The state may not always resort to primitive accumulation in the interest of capitalists or the big business. The state can try to make sure that small-scale commodity producers, including small-scale capitalists, produce commodities — as potential raw materials — for sale to the big business at a price suitable to the latter. The state can promote contract farming too (see Shrimali, 2021). The state can weaken its own erstwhile role in trading whereby the state would buy products from small-scale producers as a remunerative price. The state thus makes the small-scale producers depend entirely on private trading capital through which raw materials reach the production process. As discussed earlier, it is the state that creates, or contributes to the production of, the geographically built environment that connects commodity owners located in different places and countries. A hierarchy of market centres (e.g. metros, smaller cities and towns, rural markets) is created including through urban and regional planning by the state that is behind the urbanization and ruralization of capitalist production and exchange. Means of transportation and communication are laid out by the state or with state’s assistance. The state is involved in what David Harvey (1985) calls the production of space. The built environment or the produced space, which includes the means of transportation and communication, can often appear partly or wholly as a form of commodity for which common people have to pay in order to use them. The cost of geographical movement of a commodity is a part of the cost of production, so the state is under pressure to make it available. The value of commodities is thus reduced. The state ‘engages in productive activities particularly with respect to investments in public goods and collective physical infrastructures such as roads, ports and harbours, water and sewage provision’ (Harvey, 2018: 16).2 It helps capital annihilate obstacles to social and geographical mobility.3 The state-aided built environment can increase the rate of profit in the private sector producing heavy goods, and the like, and thus increase its national competitiveness (Mandel, 2008/1968: 502).4 Marx (1973: 531) comments on the role of the state in the production of the physical infrastructure (public works) in Grundrisse: there may be a need for the development of railways, and so on, but specific capitalists may not invest because ‘the direct advantage arising from them for production may be too small for the investment to appear as anything but sunk capital’. So capital shifts the burden on to the shoulders of the state; or, where the state traditionally still takes up a position superior to capital, it still possesses the authority and the will to force the society of capitalists to put a part of their revenue, not of their capital, into such generally useful works, which appear at the same time as general conditions of production, and hence not as particular conditions for one capitalist or another. As science becomes a productive force, the state socializes the cost of science. The state creates conditions for intellectual labour that is more directly connected to production: natural sciences and engineering as well as management (the ‘science’ of organization of capitalist enterprises taught in business schools).5 If the state is involved in technological change, this can reduce the value of labour power by shortening the time taken to produce means of subsistence.”翻译为中文
answer:在完成商品,包括劳动力的买卖后,资本主义生产(劳动)过程在资本运动规律下开始。这是一个过程,资本家(或其代理人)将生产资料和工人聚集在一起生产用于销售的使用价值:在资本主义下,“劳动过程是资本家购买的、已变成他[或她]的财产的事物之间的过程”(马克思,1887:131)。工作场所,劳动过程的空间,生产的隐蔽处,是剥削阶级某些权利的领域。这些权利由国家捍卫。因此,包括工作场所在内的生产领域揭示了国家的重要属性。正如在最后两章中一样,我部分依赖《资本论》第1卷来展示资本主义社会关系和生产逻辑是如何创造一个空间,并产生国家行动的必要性,无论国家在给定情况下是否采取行动,或者它的行动是否令资本家满意。 在社会中,新的财富(新财富)不能仅仅基于原始积累或甚至阶级分化(前面讨论的主题)来生产。新财富也不能仅基于商品流通来生产:剩余价值(新财富)不能在流通内部产生,尽管它不能在商品流通之外产生。流通本身或商品交换并不创造价值。在流通和创造资本主义财产的基础上,从前资本主义或非资本主义(小规模所有者)财产中,新财富最终在生产的隐藏处内部产生,而在这里国家扮演着重要角色。 资本主义国家是一个经济强大的代理人。事实上,国家支出的社会资本部分不断上升,包括在新自由主义下。国家利用其经济权力(包括创造货币的权力),为资本主义创造那些利润驱动的个体资本家通常不会生产甚至可能破坏的条件。 正如之前所论述的,资本是运动中的价值,因此国家仅仅捍卫资本主义财产权是不够的。因此,国家必须采取措施,从长远来看促进资本主义积累,符合资本家阶级特别是其经济和政治上占主导地位的部分的利益。国家表现得像社会资本的社会再生产机器。正如“任何其他机器一样,它需要维护、折旧、新部件,以及持续的燃料和能源供应”。因此“社会资本... 必须拿出它实现的价值中的相当一部分,以便持续资助国家活动”(史密斯,2018:234): “就像流通领域中的非生产性资本一样,国家执行一系列对维持增值过程的制度框架不可或缺的任务。从这个意义上说,它‘间接’地为社会剩余价值的生产做出了贡献。” 通过占有更多的剩余劳动,国家降低了社会资本的间接成本。 为了描述资本主义的性质,马克思(1887)从公式M-C-M'开始,表示“将金钱转化为商品,然后再将商品变回金钱;或者买进以便卖出。以后者方式流通的金钱因此转化为,成为资本,并且已经潜在地成为资本”(第104页)。但鉴于没有人会将M换M(100美元换100美元),马克思说“[这个流通的]确切形式因此是M-C-M'”,其中M' = M + ΔM = “预支的原始总和,加上一个增量”(同上:106)。这个“增量或超过原始价值的部分”被称为剩余价值。“正是这种运动将其转变为资本”。 M-C-M'实际上是M-C(MP+LP)-P-C'-M',可以进一步展开为M-C(MP+LP)-P-C'-M'。国家与资本循环的每个阶段都有联系(图7.1)。资本循环的扩展形式可以作为系统呈现的方法,也可以作为分析国家角色的方法。 在第1-4节中,我讨论了国家与资本循环的连续阶段之间的联系。我在第5节(与前一节相关)讨论了国家与积累的关系;在这里我紧密跟随马克思在《资本论》第1卷第25章的讨论。在第6节,我转向国家与经济危机的趋势和反趋势的关系。在最后一节中,我总结了讨论,并反思了我的讨论对国家资本主义和社会主义概念的影响。 1 国家与资本循环的‘M-C(MP+...’阶段(货币和生产资料的领域) 国家通过各种政策(例如低利率贷款、量化宽松、贷款豁免或宽恕和各种纾困计划)向资本家(尤其是大企业)提供流动可投资资源(M),通常低于市场利率。这些政策中的一些代表了对国家财库的简单掠夺。金融市场的自由化使国内企业能够获得外国资本。通常从国家获得的资金(包括通过廉价信贷)被资本用于简单的投机而不是投资于生产人们需要的商品和服务,在这种情况下,国家与资本循环的联系是其与更短版本的循环的联系:国家帮助资本家以金融化领域的利息形式增加其利润,因此M-C-P-C'-M'简化为M-M'(意味着在国家的帮助下,金钱简单地从金钱中产生)。 对于生产过程,资本家需要实际的商品,包括生产资料(原材料、土地、能源、软件、机器、建成环境或社会和物理基础设施等)。生产资料可以以集体形式存在(公共拥有的机场或铁路或矿山)或以私人拥有的资产形式存在。 国家以廉价原材料和廉价土地、水体(湖泊)和森林的形式向资本家阶级提供商品,这些是通过持续的原始积累从人们那里获得的(后者过程通常发生在贫困的原住民社区居住的地区)。土地是关键的生产资料。对于任何企业的定位来说,它是必要的。在以土地为基础的生产中(例如农业、林业、渔业、生态旅游等)直接必要。资本家获得矿产资源以用于开采行业需要他们获得土地的途径。如果所有土地都由众多私人所有者(包括小规模生产者/所有者)拥有,那么为大型企业(例如铺设主要铁路和铁路、大型工厂等)组装一大块土地将是一个问题,因此国家也要拥有土地。正如前面提到的,国家利用其权力以低于土地完全开发和企业开始运营时的价格——低价控制私人拥有的土地——然后以适合资本家的价格,有时免费将这些财产提供给资本家。部分是因为资本家希望尽可能廉价购买而小规模所有者希望获得更好的价格,可能需要国家的强制手段来克服他们不愿放弃财产的犹豫。当国家拥有森林土地或水资源时,它也会根据需要将这些资源提供给私人资本家。 国家可能不总是为了资本家或大企业的利益而诉诸原始积累。国家可以试图确保小规模商品生产者,包括小规模资本家,生产商品——作为潜在原材料——以适合后者的价格出售给大企业。国家也可以促进契约农业(参见Shrimali,2021)。国家可以削弱自己在贸易中曾经的角色,国家会以有利的价格从小规模生产者那里购买产品。国家因此使小规模生产者完全依赖私人贸易资本,通过这种方式原材料到达生产过程。 正如之前讨论的,国家创造或促进了连接不同地方和国家的商品所有者的地理环境建设。通过国家的城市和区域规划,包括资本主义生产和交易的城市化和乡村化背后,创造了市场中心等级制度(例如大都市、较小城市和城镇、农村市场)。国家或在国家的协助下铺设了交通和通讯手段。国家参与了大卫·哈维(1985)所称的空间生产。建成环境或生产的空间,包括交通和通讯手段,常常部分或全部作为商品出现,普通人为使用它们而付费。商品地理移动的成本是生产成本的一部分,因此国家承受着使其提供的压力。因此商品的价值得以降低。国家“特别是在公共物品和集体物理基础设施(如道路、港口和码头、供水和排污)的投资方面从事生产活动”(哈维,2018:16)。它帮助资本消除了社会和地理流动性的障碍。国家协助建设的环境可以提高私营部门生产重型商品的利润率,从而提高其国家竞争力(曼德尔,2008/1968:502)。马克思(1973:531)在《Grundrisse》中评论了国家在物理基础设施(公共工程)生产中的角色:可能需要发展铁路等,但具体的资本家可能不投资,因为“对生产的直接优势可能太小,以至于投资似乎不过是沉没资本”。因此资本将负担转嫁给国家;或者,如果国家在传统上仍然占据着高于资本的位置,它仍然拥有权威和意愿强迫资本家社会投入他们的部分收入,而不是他们的资本,进入这种普遍有用的工程,这些工程同时出现作为生产的一般条件,因而不是作为这个或那个资本家的特殊条件。 随着科学成为生产力,国家使科学成本社会化。国家为与生产更直接相关的智力劳动创造条件:自然科学和工程学以及管理(在商学院教授的资本企业组织的“科学”)。如果国家参与技术变革,这可以通过缩短生产生存手段所需的时间来降低劳动力价值。