For self-expanding value he uses the term verwertenden. It is in the full Hegelian tradition. Hegel believed that the self-developing Idea expressed itself in nature and society, dictating the conditions and limits of men’s activity. When explained briefly, Hegel seems to be talking nonsense. In reality this last and greatest of bourgeois philosophers stood like Moses on Pisgah, with the ultimate secret of human knowledge spread before him. Marx’s work was to stand Hegel’s principle on its feet. He placed the dictation in the hands of the mode of production and its expression in the concept of value. This is capitalist society he called the self-developing value, verselbstandigung, a term lifted bodily from Hegel. The prefix ver in Hegel always means a transformation at the root, something that transcends, itself from its own inherent (and thereby contradictory) nature.
The transformation may appear to be the work of something else. Hegel and Marx spent their lives proving that it was not. The very terms, self-developing idea, self-developing value, self-expanding capital repudiate the importance Carter gives to his quotation where the initiative or prime movement is definitely given to the capitalists. Marx is here building his structure on subterranean foundations the analysis resting on his philosophy of history, his estimate of the origin, development and destiny of man. The contradiction is in nature itself, between man, conscious nature, and means of production, appropriated nature. But whereas in previous societies, owing to the low technological level, e.g. a man and a hoe, the contradiction was narrow and little capable of development, now, owing to the complete severance of the man of labor from the means of labor, the contradiction is so sharp that the development is rapid and powerful. Owing to the length of the working-day (physics) and the physiological limitations of man (chemistry and biology), value could not expand itself indefinitely by prolonging one factor the working-day (absolute surplus-value), whereupon it broke that limitation by expanding itself through the only way now open to it, by increasing the other factor, the quantity of the accumulated labor, the machinery, that functioned within the working-day (relative surplus-value). The two active factors in production which we see here Marx calls moments, another Hegelian term. The chapter where Marx establishes the development of relative surplus-value he significantly entitles The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value. The word he uses for concept is Begriff, which Marx being who he is, could be more modernly and precisely translated by perhaps the famous word in philosophy, the Hegelian term, “The Notion”. Of this notion Hegel says:
“The Nature, the peculiar inner Being, the veritably eternal and substantial element in the multiplicity and contingency of the phenomenal and passing outward, is the Notion of the Thing.”[10]
It sounds outlandish. In reality it is very simple. Hegel says that in the theoretical analysis of anything, which for him means a study of it in its self-development and inevitable self-transformation, do not do what Carter does constantly, check off a list of items, in other words “the multiplicity and contingency of the phenomenal”, the ever-changing outward historical forms. He says: seek its notion, that inner relation from which all external developments must flow until this inner contradiction is abolished. Marx reduces his analysis of capitalist production to an ever-wonderful miracle of notional simplicity, stripped of all contingency: less and less of the day’s labor going to the worker, more and more going to the other moment, or active factor, the machinery. This is the mark of capitalist production and when Carter quotes Marx to show that I confuse all types of society, I realise with deep concern the gulf that separates us, not on Russia, but on historical materialism and Capital. For although debate on Russia is understandable, it is a miserable business when you have to stop to explain that this sharp relation within the working-day has nothing to do with, e.g., feudalism. That rapidly developing relation and its laws form for Marx the “inner nature” of capital, and the consequences were analysed by Marx with a logical direction, a mastery of his material and a vivid concreteness, equalled nowhere except in the arrogance and obtuseness with which it is ignored. The self-expanding value expands itself according to its “notion”, accumulated labor devouring living labor. Marx was supremely confident that he had found here the notion of the “strict process of production”, the abstract logical relation around whose development all future historical society would revolve (as it did not revolve in the past) until the abolition of the capitalist system of production. For the word abolition, aufhebung, Marx went again to Hegel, to show quite clearly what he had in mind. Aufhebung is second in Hegelian importance only to Begriff. Aufhebung does not mean mere non-existence, or abolition as you abolish a hot dog or wipe some chalk off a board. As Hegel explains at length,[11] it means for him transcendence, raising of one moment or active factor from its subordinate position in the dialectical contradiction to its rightful and pre-destined place, superseding the opposite moment with which it is interpenetrated, i.e. inseparably united, in this case raising, labor, the basis of all value, to a dominant position over the other moment, the mass of accumulated labor. Thereby self-developing humanity takes the place formerly held by self-developing value. The real history of humanity will begin.
And where are the capitalists in all this? Nowhere. Just nowhere. Capital and labor are the moments. The capitalists are not moments, i.e. determining active factors in production. They do not determine. They are determined. They see that the work is well done. They pocket as much of the proceeds as they can. They are, as Marx wearisomely repeats, merely the agents of capital, the embodiment in will and consciousness of capital. [12] They obey its inner nature. Thus all capitalist activities are in reality (on the historical scale of course and complicated by the class struggle etc.) strictly limited. It is easy for us to see politically, that capitalist man cannot abolish war, and we laugh at all their peace conferences and pacts and leagues and charters. It is the same when a capitalist (or a capitalist class) invests capital here or does not do it there. He is merely obeying the laws of self-expanding value and nowhere so much as in relation of means of production to means of consumption. If he does not, he is fired, i.e. he loses his capital. In abstract logic, production for the sake of production is an absurdity. So far Rosa was right. But in dialectical logic, it is the greatest good sense in that it conforms to the laws of self-expanding value which rule the world.
J.R. Johnson (C.L.R. James): Production for the Sake of Production (April 1943)
J.R. Johnson (C.L.R. James): Production for the Sake of Production (April 1943)
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