Keywords capitalist monetary labor theory of value?
China library classification number A8 1 1 document identification number a?
So far, the global economic crisis that began on Wall Street in 2008 has lasted for eight years, although the capitalist world generally claims that the American economy, the source of the crisis, has obviously recovered. However, according to Marxist political economy, this recovery is conditional or limited. Because the crisis is inherently determined by capitalist economic relations, once the contradictions within capitalism have historically developed to a certain state, they will inevitably break out. If there is recovery, it is also the result of external transfer or internal delay. This paper attempts to explain the reasons for the recovery of this economic crisis from the basic operating principle of capitalism. ?
The logical starting point of Marxist political economy-labor theory of value?
Marx lived in an era of unrestricted development of capitalist commodity economy. In the commodity economy, because commodity trading has become a dominant thing and phenomenon in economic activities, Marx believes that "the wealth of society dominated by capitalist mode of production is manifested as' huge accumulation of commodities', and individual commodities are manifested as the essential form of this wealth. Therefore, our research begins with the analysis of commodities. That is, the capitalist production process is developed and universal commodity production, and commodity is the cell form of capitalist economic relations. Therefore, Marx believes that the study of capitalist economic relations should start with commodities. Commodity is a product in transaction, which depends on the intrinsic value of commodity and determines whether the product can be exchanged fairly and reasonably in the market to achieve the satisfaction of buyers and sellers. How to define the intrinsic value of commodities is the basic point of political economy founded by Marx. ?
First of all, Marx divided the economic nature of commodities into two levels: use value and value. If the product does not enter the trade circulation, it only has a specific use value, which is the natural attribute of the commodity; Once in circulation, it needs abstract exchange value to determine the nature of its exchange, which involves the exchange between people and produces the social attributes of goods. Use value involves the specific material attributes of products, while economics focuses on abstract value, that is, the inherent attributes of goods. In Marx's view, different commodities can be exchanged for equal value because they have inherent attributes that can be agreed. The intrinsic attributes of different commodities are abstracted by Marx as the value of unified commodities. Once economics only considers value and abandons specific different use values, the qualitative differences between commodities will be cancelled and the quantitative differences will be retained. This is Marx's analysis of the duality of goods. ②?
The next task is to determine the value of goods. According to the above analysis, the value of goods is the product of abstracting the specific use value, which must meet the communication requirements between different goods. Marx followed the concept of labor theory of value in classical economics, and defined value abstractly as "undifferentiated general human labor condensed in commodities" (3), which developed from the abstraction of commodities to the abstraction of labor, and the specific use value came from the specific labor of creating different products. Since then, human labor has also been divided into concrete labor and abstract labor. Concrete labor reflects the natural attribute of labor, while abstract labor reflects the social attribute of labor. This is Marx's analysis of the duality of labor. ?
Why did Marx choose labor theory of value instead of utility theory of value, or simply ignored the concept of economic value like equilibrium price theory as the starting point of his political economy construction? The reason is that the academic tradition accepted by Marx is very different from that of western economics. The understanding of the concept of value in western economics basically comes from the position of empiricism, ignoring the abstract essence behind it. Marx's academic thought comes from German classical philosophy and attaches importance to the abstract stipulation of the essence of things. According to Marx's social ontology, world history is a historical development process between man and nature, man and social stage. The bond between man and nature and between people is "practice". History develops in the process of practice, and the subject and object are also transformed and developed in the process of practice, thus creating world history. So Marx thought that labor created the world. In this case, the role of labor in economics is not only to create the use value of various commodities, but also to form abstract labor that determines the intrinsic abstract value of commodities. Through Marx's abstract method, concrete labor forms the use value of goods, and abstract labor forms the value of goods. Marx defined the value of commodities as abstract labor, which actually surpassed the superficial analysis of western economics satisfied with trading behavior and went deep into the analysis of social relations behind commodity trading. The commodity exchange between people embodies the exchange and possession between abstract labor, and also represents the possessive relationship between people to the world. ⑥?
Monetary and capitalist economic crisis analysis?
Since the establishment of commodity trading, it is necessary for both parties to clarify the intrinsic value of different commodities and reach an agreement on the exchange value. Then, there is no qualitative difference, only the exchange value of quantity, so an intermediary needs to be produced in the market to exercise its exchange function. The initial commodity exchange of human beings is barter, and the intermediary of exchange value has not been involved in commodity exchange. Barter exchange is restricted by many specific conditions in actual operation, and it is likely that a specific transaction cannot be reached because it cannot meet the use value of both parties, so it is the product of underdeveloped commodity economy. With the expansion of social division of labor and the development of commodity economy, people increasingly need a universal equivalent to act as the intermediary of commodity trading, and money comes into being. Money is a universal equivalent with special commodity attributes, which includes both the use value created by concrete labor and the value created by abstract labor, so it just meets the economic requirements of the unification of commodity circulation means and value scale in commodity trading. It is precisely because of the appearance of money that the commodity economy bid farewell to the barter stage (W-W`) and the commodity exchange is transformed into the process of commodity-currency-commodity (W-G-W`). At this time, money only performs the function of circulation means, and the commodity economy at this time is still a pure commodity economy, and the purpose of commodity exchange is to obtain the commodity itself. ?
Originally, the purpose of commodity exchange is to exchange different use values, and the use of money is only a reasonable measure of the use value of different properties. However, with the appearance of money, it is easy to store and carry, which makes this special commodity bring new possibilities to the commodity economy-commodity trading can realize the separation of time and space between buying and selling, so the storage function of money gradually replaces the circulation function and is valued by traders. As far as the storage function of money is concerned, it is the function that money exits circulation and is stored in the form of social wealth. The reason why money owners want to withdraw money from the real commodity trading process is mainly to reserve the purchasing power of future commodities. The reason to reserve the purchasing power in the future is because the money holder's desire and purchasing power in the future are uncertain, and the function of separating money from buying and selling time and space just realizes the above desire of the money holder. Therefore, after the separation of time and space, commodity trading behavior splits from W-G-W' to W-G and G-W', which creates a new possibility that the purpose of commodity exchange is no longer to use value exchange. Commodity exchange can use the storage function of money to arrange future consumption, thus maximizing the purchasing power of money in the future. This new way of commodity trading was invented by the merchant class created by the third division of labor in society. In the eyes of businessmen, commodity trading should be G-W-G', that is, buying goods with money and then selling them at a price higher than their purchase price in another time and space, in order to gain profits and realize capital appreciation. Since then, commercial activities have their own active purpose-capital accumulation, which is no longer simply and passively serving social and economic reproduction.
It is precisely because businessmen invented capital accumulation that the purpose of economic activities changed from satisfying consumption to pursuing currency appreciation. The ultimate goal of exchange is no longer use value, but abstract value, and money is an abstract contract of specific goods. Therefore, the significance of storing money lies in possessing abstract labor, but the formula of possessing abstract labor created by oneself is W-G, while the formula of merchant class possessing abstract labor created by others through exchange is G-W-G'. From the perspective of social relations, capital accumulation is to occupy more other people's labor, so as to realize power control and free possession of the world, which is the ultimate goal of capitalist exploitation. ?
However, in order to realize the continuous accumulation of capital, the bourgeoisie must ensure that the circular chain of G-W-G' cannot be interrupted, and the whole capitalist economy needs production, distribution, exchange and consumption, so that the cycle will not be interrupted. Capital itself is not omnipotent, it also needs the cooperation of other factors to complete its own accumulation, so its own limitations are hidden inside capital, and the accumulation of capital needs a certain external environment to ensure its progress, and this external environment is just destroyed by unimpeded capital accumulation. It is the unlimited accumulation of capital that leads to the polarization between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie for investment in the future, not for consumption. The goods on the market are unsalable because they have no money to consume, which eventually leads to the imbalance between supply and demand, thus giving birth to the capitalist economic crisis. ?
Several ways for the bourgeoisie to solve the capitalist economic crisis.
The choice of the bourgeoisie to deal with the economic crisis is to find other new ways to ease or transfer domestic contradictions to the outside while maintaining the capitalist exploitation system. The contradiction of foreign transfer is mainly realized by launching foreign wars and establishing unreasonable international economic order to open up overseas markets, and the specific operation methods are not repeated here. This paper mainly focuses on various internal economic control measures taken by some major capitalist economies, with the aim of restoring the capital accumulation cycle destroyed by the economic crisis. ?
The appearance of capitalist economic crisis is insufficient liquidity, but its essence is not the scarcity of money, but the storage function of money exceeds its circulation function at this time, which leads to the precipitation of money in the hands of capital owners. For capitalists, creating new consumption desires will not release their liquidity on a large scale. In order to make the money stored by the capitalists invest in the capital accumulation cycle, the bourgeoisie mainly adopts the following means:
The first method is called high taxes and high welfare. Capitalist countries impose a high tax burden on currency storage in the field of secondary distribution, and invest in low-income people through high welfare, creating effective demand and consumption capacity for society that capitalism cannot create in the first distribution. This method is the welfare state model initiated by the British Beveridge Report after the Second World War. Its idea is to use the most direct external force to smooth out the uneven distribution of money, forcibly change money from storage to circulation, and reactivate the capital accumulation cycle. However, this method led to the capitalist's resistance to the national tax-the capitalist gradually transferred the enterprise from the high welfare area to the low welfare area with low labor cost. After all, capital can flow across borders, which has greatly promoted the process of economic globalization. ?
The second method is called borrowing and consumption. The core problem of the economic crisis is that the whole society has purchasing power with purchasing intention (some of them are in the hands of capitalists, but not in specific fields, and the following "purchasing power" is "purchasing power with purchasing intention"), which is lower than the total price of goods produced by the whole society. Therefore, in order to achieve the equivalence between the two, one way is to let consumers spend money they don't have, or the state can lend them money to spend, that is, lend it to future people. Because of inflation, the future money will be "valuable" less than the present money, so the difference of this money can make up for the difference between purchasing power and total price. Credit card overdraft consumption in Europe and America is the concrete embodiment of this way. Its essence is to overdraw workers' future labor income to digest today's surplus products, so as to realize the transformation from concrete labor owned by capitalists to abstract labor. However, this method is limited, which will lead to the accumulation of debts at different levels, and even lead to the repayment of old debts by borrowing new debts, eventually forming a debt crisis. ?
The third method is called rolling investment. Rolling investment is to let capitalists put the accumulated money into circulation to make up for the difference between purchasing power and total price. As long as capitalists always put their money into investment areas instead of storage, there will be no economic crisis. This is a fundamental solution. But the maintenance of capitalist society depends on the cycle of investment-income, not one-time consumption. However, the individual investment of capitalists is also very difficult. In order to provide investment channels for surplus capital, modern financial system came into being. The modern financial system can look for projects that can be invested extensively, invest the idle storage currency owned by capitalists in various ways quickly, and the income from investment can also be reinvested quickly to form rolling investment. Money has been circulating, so there is no difference between purchasing power and total price. All kinds of bill transactions and venture capital are under the pressure of this kind of capital investment. Of course, this is not to say that the emergence of these models is due to the fear of economic crisis. They are just the instinct of capital to seek self-appreciation and the direction of avoiding economic crisis is the same. ?
However, for any investment, there are both rewards and risks, and any investment may fail. Once the investment fails, it will cause the crisis of modern financial system. The most typical example is the financial crisis that began on Wall Street in the United States in 2008, resulting in a global economic recession that has not yet emerged from the Great Depression. The best way to avoid risks in investment is to invest in new science and technology and use new productivity to open up new economic growth points. The rapid growth of global capitalism in the past 200 years has also been accompanied by three industrial revolutions, but whether it is possible to develop new productive forces and find new economic growth points at present is not something that the bourgeoisie can wishful thinking. ?
The fourth method is called monetary easing. The implementation methods of monetary easing include reducing deposit and loan interest rates, bank reserve ratio and quantitative easing. The key point is not the money stored by capitalists because of uncertain investment prospects, but to inject new liquidity into the market and solve the problem of difficult transformation from concrete labor to abstract labor. However, the new liquidity brought by this method is most likely to lead to the inflation of credit monetary means, because it dilutes the purchasing power of the original currency, so it also has obvious side effects. ?
Summary and prospect?
With the gradual penetration of the Internet into human economic life and the progress of modern transportation technology, the space and time interval between people are becoming less and less important, and global integration is getting closer to reality. Under this background of productive forces, economic globalization has become an inevitable choice for the further development of capitalist economy. The transnational flow of capital makes the global factors of production and labor force uniformly allocated. Although on the surface, capital can control more resources, on the other hand, it also means that capital is getting closer and closer to the ultimate boundary it can expand. Once one day, the expansion of global capital is unrestricted, including all kinds of production factors in the world, which means that there is no possibility of future capital expanding outward, and the capitalist economy will become a unique system at this time. Since it is a capitalist system, the contradictions accumulated in this last and only economy must also be the general crisis of capitalism described by Marx, which is inherent in capitalism and cannot be eliminated at all. Once this contradiction breaks out, there is no room for the capitalist economy to maneuver and transfer contradictions; Internally, whether borrowing money or expanding investment, it is hoped that the unpredictable labor income in the future will mobilize the current capital accumulation cycle, but the future is unknown. In short, at the end of space and time, the capitalist economy will inevitably encounter the interruption of the capital accumulation cycle and the contradictions that it cannot solve. As Keynes said, "In the long run, we will all die".