Fifty Key Sociologists by Scott John

Author:Scott, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2006-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

In such formulations Marx saw ‘commodity fetishism’ and proletarian destiny wrestling for the worker’s soul. Nevertheless, whatever refinement or sense of mission the workers might achieve, their condition was defined by a lack of sufficient means, so they had to sell their labour power.

The capitalist, on the other hand, had a different sort of problem. He had purchased the labour power of the worker but now he needed to bring it together with tools, raw materials and market opportunities. The capitalist could claim surplus value only if he could sell the product of labour for more than it cost him to acquire it. This was the problematic of the ‘realization’ of surplus value, which hence did not solely concern the different ways of extracting extra labour from the worker.

A century and a half after Marx developed his analysis of class its primacy is not difficult to challenge. Gender and ethnicity have always been very important in the allocation of life chances and they have recently become very important in stimulating movements for historical transformation. Workers themselves aspire to bourgeois goals. But class cleavages remain very marked – and often overlap with those based on sex and race – whether we look at access to education, life expectancy, social morality or political behaviour. Workers have often disappointed the sort of political hopes entertained by Marx, while doing so in a collective idiom that seems to reflect class situation and outlook.

The strength of Marx’s account is its stress both on the totality of social relations and on their conditioning by history. Marx was interested in capitalists as well as workers and preoccupied with identifying the inner workings of the capitalist system. In Karl Marx’s account of capitalism, those who control investment have to follow the dictates of the accumulation process and the working out of the law of value. The particular aims and idiosyncrasies of the individual capitalist have to be pursued within a structural context set by his (or her) ability to realize surplus value. In a famous passage Marx declares: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’ For Marx the actions of the capitalist ‘are a mere function of capital’ and from this standpoint ‘even his own private consumption counts as a robbery committed against the accumulation of his capital’. Evidently, in this account, the capitalist is powerfully constrained by context, by the need to extract and realize and reinvest surplus value in the circuit of accumulation. In an earlier passage Marx had given an account of the constraint of competition operating on the capitalist. This constraint prevents him from buying labour power too expensively just as it prevents him from selling goods too cheaply. But this should not be understood as enabling the capitalist simply to raise prices, or lower wages, in a crude imperative to maximize the rate of exploitation.

Thus the competitive context obliges the capitalist to reckon with the impact of innovation in the productive process. The capitalist making the innovation may find it advantageous to

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