The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated through systemic forces, does not need to lead us to despair. Knowledge of these forces does not make us weaker; on the contrary, it makes us stronger, because the system reveals its Achilles heel by showing what it must do in order to survive: it must promote enclosures and it must pit producers, both waged and unwaged, against each other, thus creating the appearance of abundance, but instead reproducing scarcity.
Massimo De Angelis. The Beginning of History. (2007, p. 225-226, emphasis in original).
Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.
Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32), obviously plagiarizing one of the early chapters of the Communist Manifesto, in which I believe the phrase was about relations that become “antiquated before they can ossify.”
As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).
If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.
To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be obvious that…
Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 19).
Yep, still waiting on that nuanced, “neutral” (p.xxi) appraisal of Marxism that was promised in the book’s introduction.
…spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces communication design to a commodity, rather than to a specialized service.
NO!SPEC.
Commodities are here understood in their simplest sense, as undifferentiated goods such as wheat or oil, which are exchanged in a market according to supply and demand, such that their prices are generally determined without the consideration of qualitative differences in their production, e.g. wheat is wheat, no matter where or by what methods it is grown and harvested, and oil is oil, no matter where or by what methods it is extracted and refined; the key term in this definition of a commodity is ‘undifferentiated good,’ which is contrasted against the definition of communication design as ‘a specialized service.’ The seeming triviality of commodities, famously remarked upon by Marx, allows its use in this pejorative sense, as a sphere of production somehow less ‘valuable’ than that of communication design services.
It is surprisingly difficult to engage with this commonsensical understanding of commodities!
Marx is not only selling well, he has also been praised most recently by German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, who recently told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, ‘Certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad.’
Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing foreign wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.
Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 54).
We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other people’s labour it will appropriate.
Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 52).
[A]s the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality do differ, so must differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an inane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?
Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 39-40).
…how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of life, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood? The inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation’, but which out to be called Original Expropriation. We should find that this so-called Original Accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Means of Labour. Such an inquiry, however, lies beyond the pale of my present subject. The Separation between the Man of Labour and the Means of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.
Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 38-39).
