[Marxism] 21st century social classes in imperialist countries...

[johnaimani]

<<Message: 17
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:05:23 -0500
From: "Anthony Boynton" <anthony.boynton at gmail.com>
Subject: [Marxism] 21st century social classes in imperialist
countries, compared to 19th century social classes in England. How
houses became capital.


A house is capital in the 21st century political economy of the USA.>>

They most certainly can be.  Even, as Comrade Boynton implicists, for their owner-operators.  They are capital just as any interest bearing bank or savings account.  just as much as Treasury bills that are part of one's 401K; as are the stocks and bonds that make up the bulk of this latter.  One's retirement is predicated upon this fact.  The fact is, as Comrade Boynton seems to want to demonstrate is that capitalism permeates mostly all of the members of its society even its working classes who spit and bleed out the surplus-value which is the source, and only source, of valorization process by which T-Bills pay interest, stocks issue dividends and housing increases in value.  

Anyone who owns these instruments owns capital.

Boynton also correctly points out the existence of a social rent (rent being defined as a persistent deviation of price from value) as the mechanism by which housing dips into the existing social value pool (defined as the annually added new value (nee surplus labor aka surplus-value cum profit)) and, even sips from the value-pool-to-be (future labor) through the instrument of debt.

Anyone who owns a house owns capital (provided, of course, the continuation of the social rent attached to housing).  Which, as with all rents, is by no means eternal.  Marx wrote of this as regards the rent existing because of the monopoly of land containing a waterfall and its ability therefore to deliver a product of lesser value being able to command an identical market-price as compared with that which was produced using the energy provided by a steam engine (and thus having a higher price-of-production):

    "...if the use of steam should offer overwhelming advantages not offered by the use of water-power, despite the fact that coal has value and the water-power has     not, and if these advantages more than compensated for the expense, then, the water-power would not be used and could not produce any surplus-profit, and         therefore could not produce any rent."  Capital.  Vol 3.  Chap XXXIX.  P646 (Int'l Pub.  NY.  1967.)  
    http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch38.htm

And so we see with the falling prices of housing and, thus, negative (or at least lessening) equities, accruing to those unfortunates so much so in the news today.

That being said, ownership of a house, and petty property in financial instruments does not make one a 'capitalist'.  An independent worker, for example, possesses the means of production by with to make his own living and thereby appropriates the product of his own labor:

    
"Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers' own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others."[1]



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[1]   Marx.  "Capital.  Vol 1."  Chap XXXIII.

 

 



Labor that includes both, what for the wage-worker would be both 'necessary' labor (recreating his own wage) and 'surplus-labor' (what the capitalist tries to turn into his own profit).  This worker may be using the same set of tools that, in the case of the wage-worker, is provided by the capitalist, and which is therefore capital, and is the foundation of the capitalist's claim to the fruits of the worker's surplus-labor.  The existence of workers with their own tools does not, similarly to the ownership of housing or debt and/or equity instruments, make that worker a 'capitalist'.  Capital is a social relation.  A social relationship between the have's and the have-nots.  The owners of the means of production and the owners of nought but the hides of their backs.  To be a capitalist is to have the ability to determine who works, for how long, towards what purpose and under what conditions.  Ownership of a house, and petty property in financial instruments, are unable to, pardon the apt expression, leverage that.

Class is, and can only be, in this era of (Comrade Boynton's rightly pointing out) mish-mashing and interpenetration of class characteristics, determined by the preponderance of the evidence.  The ability to command wage-labor is the sine qua non for entry-level membership into the capitalist classes (NB).  Any, dare I say the word, 'profit' accruing to the working-classes holders of such property and instruments, below that level is nought but crumbs from the table of a bread baked by labor yet sliced (and hence the droppings) and apportioned by the real bourgeoisie; the real capitalists, the ruling class.