[Marxism] A second quote from Marx and Engels on crises

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>> CB: How can production be "over" without it being "under" bought ? 
 
Hmmm "by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented" 
 
So, "more thorough exploitation of the old markets" "diminishes the means  
whereby crises are prevented". So more exploitation diminshes the means whereby  
crises might be prevented. Ergo, less exploitation is the means whereby 
crises  might be prevented. 
 
The working class says "Give us some more money and we will buy what's over  
in production. 
 
Sartesian says: 
 
Oh,no,no,no you see the problem is the falling rate of profit. We've got to  
raise the rate of profit back up. <<
 
 
Comment 
 
To attribute to an author a notion without providing the supporting  material 
makes it virtually impossible to verify an accusation. The "problem" of  
capitalism, the source of its crisis, this current crisis, is it's property  form. 
One of Marx contribution to "the science of society," is to show how  private 
property has a history, a genesis and a projected ending as a mode  - shape, 
of society production and reproduction. 
 
Capital is not a thing but a historically evolved social relations of  
production. This social relations, as history, is a material relations of  
re/production, where the commodity form is universalized in widening dimensions;  and 
labor itself appears on the market as a commodity, brought and sold as labor  
ability. And paid a value below the value this deployed labor creates. 
 
Here is why Capital 1 begins with unraveling what a commodity is and how  
products are transformed into commodities. What confuses the early student of  
Marx approach is his emphasis on private property and the commodity form  under 
the capitalist mode. Here is why he places emphasis on understanding the  
distinction between use value and exchange value as tension - a dynamic,  embodied 
in a commodity. Production for exchange value is the hall mark of the  
bourgeois mode of production, no matter how dire the need of the masses is for  
consumption of that, which is produced.  
 
The "secret" to Capital is that labor becomes a commodity and its purchase.  
As a commodity labor is purchased for an amount close to or below its own cost 
 of reproduction and then put to work to create value over and above what 
this  labor power cost the capitalist. Things become even more confusing and dire 
with  the existence of a mass of workers who cannot sell their labor power 
and  yet need to consume to live. Raising wages for those workers cannot solve 
the  problem inherent to capitalist production. 
 
Capital is a social relations of production. 
 
Production as the capitalist mode of production, buttress and reproduce the  
capitalist commodity form (capitalism own peculiar social relations, or 
capital  reproduces itself as itself). This appears as production with a possibility 
to  realize its exchange value, or the value not paid in wages - surplus 
value or  profits. Capitalist production is driven by "possibility" rather than 
what  society needs and crave at a given moment, because capital is private 
property  (individualism without individuality); and each private capital, 
expressed as  the morality and market ethics of individualism, and disregard for the  
individuality of the worker) seeks an expanded value without regard to the 
other  capitals or the limit of the wages - consuming capacity of the PAID 
masses. 
 
My children generation for a moment in the 1980's had the slogan "get  paid." 
They instinctually and intuitively understood that their ability to  consume 
under capitalism, (unless you are a holder of capital and thus acquire  some 
characteristic of capital's individualism) , meant "getting paid" or the  sell 
of their labor power as the means to consume. Plus mother would say, "I'm  
tired of having to go to work for y'all." :-). 
 
The reason that production is "over" the consuming capacity of PAID  labor is 
bound up with the commodity form of labor under the capitalist system;  as 
this labor is sold and purchased as labor power; as it is put to work and  paid 
in wages an amount below the value it creates. This value created over and  
above what the mass of workers are PAID is called surplus value and is  
appropriated by the capitalist. The total mass of workers EMPLOYED by  capital on 
earth and the wages they are paid, is never equal to or above the  total value 
they create - (contained in the commodities) as the shape  and curve of 
capitalist history. This is only one aspect of the crisis  immanent to bourgeois 
production, because the mass of laborer on earth are not  employed, yet needed 
commodities sit in warehouses for lack of purchasers. 
 
The simple everyday reason for modern overproduction is material over  
capacity of the productive forces in relationship to the consuming capacity of  the 
paid workers. The machinery of society is never run full throttle, with both  
feet on the peddle. The sum total of our modern productive forces can fill up  
the world market in 6 months if production capacity was unfettered and run 
24/7,  rather than its standing 75-80% utilization rate - currently 65%,. The  
bourgeoisie will not do this because he lives and breaths profits; his  
individualism informs him that the world masses and the world itself can die,  before 
he voluntarily surrenders "his right" to blindly produce and withhold  needed 
items from th starving masses. 
 
Why is this? Why cannot the "un-hired" workers acquire these needed  
commodities? 
 
To confuse momentary demands of a LAYER of the working class with the  
operations and shape of commodity production on the basis of the capitalist mode  of 
producing, is to miss Marx and Engels MEANING. The mass of un-hired workers  
is important and serve as a drag on the wages of the hired workers because 
wages  drift to the cost of reproduction of the working class as a class 
possessing  labor ability. Some believe the workers are paid an amount in wages 
determined  by the class struggle, without looking at what drives the "class 
struggle" and  reproduction cost of the workers as they are enslaved by the commodity 
form.  Class struggles are not the bottom line index - pivot, for wage rates. 
 
Anarchy of capitalist production is very important because this form as the  
shape of bourgeois production is bound up with bourgeois property RATHER  THAN 
the division of labor upon which sits any commodity production. For  
commodity production and commodity exchange to take place different people must  
produce different things, which can be exchanged and are exchanged on the basis  of 
the socially necessary labor time in them. No one would exchange a pack  of 
cigarettes for an automobile because of the different magnitudes of  labor in 
them.  This law of value is the intuitive and historically built  up awareness 
of the human species knowledge of labor and production, the  almighty law of 
value.
 
As important as this law of value is, it must be left to the side for a  
moment because bourgeois production shapes - contains and make  operational, the 
law of value in a specific way. One of those ways, and  perhaps its most 
important is the law called "anarchy of production." 
 
What drives this anarchy of production is capital itself; its morality as  
individualism; as a property relations and its institutional form operating  as 
private property and the resultant competition for commodity  purchasers.  
Anarchy of production consumes, houses and shapes  consumption. However, one can 
see its operations in everyday American life. For  instance, the purchase of 
an automobile or house, automatically means that other  commodities cannot be 
purchased because of the fixed character of wages.  Automotive producers would 
rather the consumer purchased an automobile versus a  new house. 
 
What cause overproduction, which for Marxists defines itself as "production  
over the capacity of the market to consume as buying - consumption," is the  
property form, which directly results in anarchy of production. What determines 
 the consumption capacity is wages. Wage rates or consuming capacity does not 
 cause crisis of overproduction, although wage rates are part of the problem 
of  capital in the workers eyes and life experience. Consumption capacity does 
not  cause the crisis of overproduction because consumption does not 
determine "how  much" of what is produced in the first place. Capital produces blindly 
and not  against a set plan that measures the total consuming capacity of the 
paid and  unpaid workers at a given moment. 
 
Anarchy of production reins supreme. 
 
Because the capacity of the market to consume is determined first and  
foremost by the wages paid to those working and credit extension and  secondly by 
choice of what commodities to purchase; one must look at how and why  the 
workers are paid the wages they receive. Then one must account for those  layers of 
the proletariat drifting in and out of productive laboring. 
 
Within this anarchy of production, as the material shape of bourgeois  
production is contained various other laws of capitalist production. For  instance 
the law system that emerges as the result of competition between  capital and 
its striving to reduce the cost and purchase of commodities deployed  by 
individual capitalist producers. Within this emergent law system (the law of  the 
anarchy of production) resides other factors. For instance the impact  of 
science and innovation in the production process; cost combined with the  decreasing 
value of commodities purchases between capitals as they deploy these  
commodities in the process of production. Improved production  machinery has an 
impact on the magnitude (amount) of commodities created;  wages paid to workers and 
the ability of paid labor to consume this mass of  commodities and this 
dynamic in turn express the general laws peculiar to  bourgeois production. Then 
there is the whipsawing impact on capital of its  decreasing utilization of 
labor as wages. 
 
There are many aspects of capitalist crisis but all of these aspects is  
riveted to and becomes manifest on the basis of bourgeois property itself. 
 
The cause of crisis is to be sought in the property relations or "the  
bourgeois property form" rather than a historical restricted consumption of the  
masses and as this restricted consumption appears under the bourgeois mode of  
production. 
 
 
WL. 

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