Simple Commodity Production Research Articles

Rethinking class, capitalism and exploitation from the perspective of family farming in Aotearoa/New Zealand

AbstractUsing empirical evidence and an exploration of literature on simple commodity and capitalist farm production, a theoretical argument is developed to show that, despite not employing labour, self‐employed family farmers (at least in New Zealand) are capitalist, not simple commodity, producers. This has major implications for not only class theorists from a Marxist perspective, with whom we are primarily concerned, but also poses questions for Weberian inspired stratification adherents preoccupied with occupation and lifestyle. Land ownership, together with the different way capital can be generated in broad‐acre livestock farming compared to other industrial settings, enables family farmers to generate profits and accumulate capital. This means that rather than being subsumed by capital, self‐employed owners of farm enterprises appropriate surplus value not by directly hiring labour to generate income from their large landholdings but indirectly by utilising the labour of other enterprises and by hiring bourgeois or petit‐bourgeois operators (purchasing equipment, technology and knowledge, and using the distribution, processing, marketing and other services supplied by other businesses). Buying and selling land also supports these capitalist enterprises. Although not expropriating surplus value directly to operate their enterprises, capitalised family producers have, as was pointed out in 1985 by David Goodman and Michael Redclift, achieved political legitimacy by distancing themselves at the ideological level from capitalism (despite embracing capitalism at the economic level). By disguising their class interests, such producers are adept at legitimating state policy in their interests.

СОЦІАЛЬНА СКЛАДОВА ВИРОБНИЦТВА У КОНТЕКСТІ ЕВОЛЮЦІЙНОЇ ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЇ ФІНАНСОВО-ЕКОНОМІЧНИХ ВІДНОСИН

The purpose of the article is to highlight the issue of the social component of production in the context of the evolution of financial and economic relations. The research methods are historical analysis, synthesis, chronology, analogy. Manufacturing is an integral part of human civilization. It arose in the early stages of the development of social formations and accompanies the progress of civilization to this day. But it is not possible without the appropriate financial and economic relations accompanying and supporting them. It is always necessary to compare the presence of financial and economic relations with production, carrying out a retrospective analysis of the cause with the determination of the appropriate time period for their occurrence. The beginning of such activity should be correlated with the period of the formation of simple commodity production, due to the development of human needs. As the productive forces of society developed, new human needs also appeared, which became the reasons for the complication of cooperation ties between economic entities and the expansion of their production capabilities. The effect became the cause, and the cause became the effect. Financial and economic relations developed in parallel with needs and production, which acted as a source of their implementation. The needs of society expanded significantly, dividing it into producers and consumers since the formation of simple commodity production. Their economic interests are significantly different, although any manufacturer is a consumer of goods of someone else's production now. The modern world is characterized by a variety of production and economic relations with the dominance of developed commodity production, although in some areas there is still natural and simple commodity production, which historically passed one into another, supplementing and expanding the previous one, with the subsequent evolution of financial and economic relations as a tool for ensuring the exchange of goods along development of human needs.

The reality of the law of value

In the wake of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism that Marx’s law of value runs contrary to empirical facts, Marxian economics has developed mainly in two different directions: one based on the simple commodity production and the other on the mathematical identity of value with prices of production (the transformation problem). The author agrees with neither, arguing that Marx intended to base the law of value on the production process of capital, as in Capital Volume 1, independently of Capital Volume 3. However, the notion of this process and the law of value have not been sufficiently explained in Volume 1. Marx presents the value of a commodity as socially necessary labour objectified in Chapter 1 on the commodity, and later applies this rule to capitalist commodity products in Chapter 7. Pointing out the defects of this method, this article relocates the presentation of the dual nature of labour to the Labour Process (Chapter 7, Section 1), and the proof of the substance of value or the law of value to the Valorization Process (Chapter 7, Section 2). The Labour Process plays a key role in Volume 1, but it contains a fatal flaw. Consequently, Section 2 ends up with insufficient explanation. By reconstructing the Labour Process and the Process of Creating Value and Surplus value, the author confirms the meaning and reality of the law of value in Chapter 7, Section 2.

Small-Scale Fishing and Sustainability. An Ethnographic Approach to the Case of Self-Employed Fishermen in the South-East of Spain

Small-scale fishermen, in contrast to industrial fishing boats, develop a sustainable relationship with their activity from three perspectives: social, economic, and environmental. From this hypothesis, we analyze the ethnographic material obtained in extensive fieldwork (in-depth interviews and participant observation) developed in the four main ports of the region of Murcia (Spain). From this field work the existence of two other types of fishermen (life-modes) besides small-scale fishermen is derived: small entrepreneurs and wage-earners. In different proportions, all three share the consequences of the various reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Despite the similarities, this paper shows different strategies, in each of the cases, that justify their permanence in their activity, taking into account the labor modality, as well as their relationship with the idea of sustainability. Conclusions show that because small-scale self-employed fishermen are involved much more than the two other life-modes in the totality of tasks related to their profession in that they own both the means and relations of production (simple commodity production), they are best placed to achieve social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

Transformation of the class structure in contemporary Japan

Japan had experienced a rapid increase in economic disparity since the early 1980s. This article attempts to quantitatively clarify the structure of economic disparity and its social consequences in contemporary Japan from the perspective of Marxian class theory. Based on the analysis of government statistics and questionnaire survey data, the following facts were revealed. First, the class categories based on Marxian class theory had strong explanatory power for income and social consciousness. Second, in Japanese society, there is an exploitation relationship in which the three classes located in the capitalist mode of production exploit the old middle class located in simple commodity production. Within the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class and the new middle class are the exploiting classes and the working class is the exploited class, however the central targets of exploitation are the underclass and female workers. Thirdly, the underclass is fundamentally different from the other classes in terms of income, life course, consciousness and living conditions. From the above, we can conclude that Japanese society today is a new class society that includes the underclass as an important element at the bottom of class structure.

On the labor theory of value as the basis for the analysis of economic inequality in the capitalist economy

In this paper, we review the labor theory of value as the basis for the analysis of economic inequality in a capitalist economy. According to the standard Marxian view, the system of labor values of individual commodities can serve as the center of gravity for long-term price fluctuations in a precapitalist economy with simple commodity-production, where no exploitative social relation emerges, while in a modern capitalist economy, the labor value system is replaced by prices of production associated with an equal positive rate of profits as the center of gravity, in which exploitative relation between the capitalist and the working classes is a generic and persistent feature of economic inequality. Some of the literature such as Michio Morishima criticized this view by showing that the labor values of individual commodities are no longer well-defined if a capitalist economy has joint production. Given these arguments, this paper firstly shows that the system of individual labor values can be still well-defined in a capitalist economy with joint production whenever the set of available production techniques is all-productive. Secondly, this paper shows that it is generally impossible to verify that labor-value pricing serves as the center of gravity for price fluctuations in precapitalist economies characterized by the full development of simple commodity-production.

The Labour Theory of Value, Simple Commodity Production and the Transformation Problem

This article revaluates contemporary criticism of Marx’s value theory. Key tenets of Marx’s value theory are widely rejected. The use of labour (abstract or otherwise) as a standard of value is deemed ‘mystical’ or ‘magical’. The logical-historical method is false. The notion of simple commodity production a mistake. The solution to the transformation of values into prices of production mathematically incorrect. The theory of surplus value is superfluous. Okshio’s theorem refutes Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This article shows that the assumptions necessary to sustain this critique amount to a rejection of human production in general and capitalist production in particular.

An Inclusive Treadmill? Expansion of Industrial Maize Farming and Simple‐Commodity Producers in Turkey

AbstractThe growth of industrial maize farming in Turkey during the first decade of this century points to the primacy of economic development over ecological concerns at a time when global nitrogen and phosphorus flows already exceeded safe limits. In this article we focus on the relations of production as the driver of an economic sector that not only has ecological but also social costs. Through a trend analysis of maize yields as our ecological indicator, we explain how relations of production influence industrial maize farming in this period and how different modes of production (e.g., simple‐commodity producers) participate in a corporate market. A “treadmill of production” perspective argues that simple commodity producers are excluded from industrial treadmills. Our findings indicate that provinces with predominantly simple commodity production experienced significant increases in maize yields and adapted to the industrial maize treadmill. However, there is a significant difference between simple‐commodity producers and large farms that widens over the decade. Our results suggest that simple‐commodity producers are included in ecologically harmful economic practices with significant obstacles. We call for a revision of the assumed relationship between the size of economic operations and their ecological impacts in the critical sociology literature and policy approaches.

Migration and Rural Differentiation: A Case Study of Two Selected Villages in Noakhali Region of Bangladesh

This article explores rural differentiation in two selected villages in the Noakhali region of southeastern Bangladesh. The findings are based on a resurvey of 120 households selected from Hasanpur and Purbalach villages. Using conditions of reproduction in assessing the nature of rural differentiation, this article argues that migration can and does support simple commodity production in certain contexts. However, given that migrants sell their landholdings in order to generate money for migration, this results in landlessness. Migration can also be representative of a distinct condition of reproduction in formation, whose sole aim is no longer restricted to providing the means to cling to the land but rather to escape its clutch.

Structural Heterogeneity in Capitalism: A View from the Marxist Abstract Labor Theory of Value

This text deals with the analysis of the phenomenon of heterogeneity in capitalist economies with the presence of sectors that are known, in different theoretical traditions, as “informal”, “marginality”, “popular economy”, etc. This is made with Marxist categories and from the “New Approach” paradigm (or the “Abstract Labor Theory of Value”). The node of the analysis is focused in the use of two notions: the coexistence of different “forms of production” in economies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, and the assimilation, in analytical terms, of these alternative non-capitalist forms of production to the Marxist category of Simple Commodity Economy. We analyze the role of simple commodity production in the basic operation of the capitalist economy, especially in the operation of the proletarianization and wage setting: we analyze the conditions of the coexistence of capitalist and petty commodity producers in a same market; and made some exploration on the articulation of the phenomenon of unemployment in an economy that includes both mentioned forms of production.

On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy by Jukka Grunow

Reviewed by: On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy by Jukka Grunow David Camfield Jukka Grunow, On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Beginning in the 1860s and continuing into the final decade of the century, the working-class movement revived in Europe and spread in areas of the continent and European settler-colonial territories in which it had not previously emerged. Although the crushing of the Paris Commune, repressive legislation in Germany, and other attacks by state authorities and employers dealt the movement setbacks, and the long Great Depression of the late-19th century worsened the lives of many of those it sought to organize, proletarian organizers succeeded in uniting a significant minority of their expanding class into new parties, unions, and a range of community-based workers' organizations. This movement was ideologically heterogeneous. However, by the time most of its parties came together to form the Socialist International in 1889 the school of thought dubbed Marxism by its principal exponents was increasingly influential. The foremost of these theorists was Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), whose eminence after the death of Karl Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels in 1895 led some to call him "the Pope of Marxism." Kautsky played an important role in creating and popularizing what came to be [End Page 303] called Marxism (a name he deliberately used, in emulation of Darwinism) and in engaging in a battle of ideas against other theories within the Social Democratic Party in Germany and beyond. In debates within the Socialist International between the closing years of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I, he was the leading figure of the orthodox "centre," pitted against the avowedly reformist "revisionists" and later also against the revolutionary "left." It is this contribution to shaping the ideological dimension of the working-class movement of his time that makes Kautsky significant; unlike Marx, there is no reason why people interested in social and political thought for our times would turn to Kautsky. That said, Kautsky's hand in creating the "Marxism – a system that must not be equated with Marx's thought, from which it differed in fundamental ways – that was diffused through the Socialist International and, indirectly, through the Communist International and its dissident offshoots is insufficiently appreciated (although the 21st century scholarship of Lars Lih has highlighted Kautsky's influence on Lenin). In this light, the reappearance of Jukka Grunow's study of Kautsky's thought is noteworthy. Originally published in 1986 as a dissertation in sociology, it has been republished by Brill in a slightly different form, with an introduction that discusses more recent scholarship, as a volume of its Historical Materialism series (edited by editors of the journal of the same name). The book is organized in two parts: "Kautsky's Marxism" (some seven-tenths of the main body of the text) and "Marx's Marxism." Part One is focused on Kautsky's theory of capitalism, including imperialism, although it also contains chapters on Kautsky's politics and Lenin's polemics against them in 1917–1918. Part Two is made up of four chapters that discuss aspects of Marx's thought in relation to that of John Locke, Adam Smith, and other political economists, in dialogue with a number of German Marxist writers of the 1970s and early 1980s, with only occasional references to Kautsky. Grunow argues that Kautsky's "interpretation of Marx's Capital fails to pay attention to the specific character of Marx's theory as a critique of political economy." (288) This lead Kautsky to offer a theory of capitalism that criticized it for "violating the right of the worker to the products of her or his own labour," (24) which Marx did not. Kautsky misread the first volume of Capital as a theoretical account of the historical evolution from one mode of production, simple commodity production, to another, capitalism, and of capitalism's "developmental laws." (289) Unlike Marx, Kautsky argued that "the basic contradiction...

The historical roots of differing rural gender orders in Norway and Sweden

Offering a systematic comparison of the history of the differing rural gender orders that have developed in Norway and Sweden since 1750, this article considers the complex interconnections between gender and capitalist relations. It begins by highlighting the contrasts between these two Scandinavian countries’ settlement patterns, agricultural structures and rural gender orders, in spite of the similarities in their environments, social-democratic policies and commitments to gender equality. Within a theoretical framework focused on the persistence of simple commodity production by farming families within capitalist economies, it considers the gender division of labour, commodity systems, and laws of succession and inheritance as they bear upon the positions of farm women in Norway and Sweden. Tracing the development of stratification in the countryside and the history of farmers’ political activism at the national level illuminates the salient differences between these two countries’ histories from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries. This comparison demonstrates that gender as well as the mobilization of rural citizens shaped the transition to capitalism and that, in turn, agricultural and settlement policies reshaped rural gender relations.

The Emergence of the Law of Value in a Dynamic Simple Commodity Economy

A dynamic computational model of a simple commodity economy is examined and a theory of the relationship between commodity values, market prices and the efficient division of social labour is developed. The main conclusions are: (i) the labour value of a commodity is an attractor for its market price; (ii) market prices are error signals that function to allocate the available social labour between sectors of production; and (iii) the tendency of prices to approach labour values is the monetary expression of the tendency of a simple commodity economy to allocate social labour efficiently. The model demonstrates that, in the special case of simple commodity production, Marx's law of value can naturally emerge from multiple local exchanges and operate ‘behind the backs’ of actors solely via money flows that place budget constraints on their local evaluations of commodity prices, which are otherwise subjective and unconstrained.

The Labor Theory of Value and Simple Commodity Production

Marx once characterized the economy of the North American colonies as one of simple commodity production. Historical research shows that simple commodity production there was a type of “moral economy” in which the labor theory of value fails to explain the market prices at which commodities exchange. This should not surprise; the “law of value” and the labor theory are theoretically suited to explain exchange ratios only in capitalism and in no other mode, historical or hypothetical. The first three chapters of Capital therefore explicate the labor theory in the context of a capitalist economy and not, as many interpreters of Marx have it, in the context of simple commodity production. Yet Marx elsewhere applies the “law of value” to precapitalist economies, including simple commodity production, thus engaging in an apparent contradiction. This inconsistency only disappears if he is read “dialectically” — with a heady dose of Hegelian teleology. This, however, comes at the considerable cost of substituting metaphysical for scientific explanation. The Analytical Marxists' aim of expunging Hegelian influences from historical materialism thus appears to be justified.

From rubber estate to simple commodity production: Agrarian struggles in the Northern Bolivian Amazon

From rubber estate to simple commodity production: Agrarian struggles in the Northern Bolivian Amazon

Class Structure in Contemporary Japan

:In postwar Japan, class study has developed as “class composition studies” primarily carried out by Ryuken Ohashi. These studies are based on polarization theory, which assumes that all classes will be divided into the capitalist class and the working class, and on unrealistic assumptions that regard the working class as a revolutionary force. And because of researchers’ specific political positions, class study has often been misunderstood. This has led to the decline of class study in Japan.It is now necessary to remove such theoretical and political biases and to reconstruct class study as a field of social science. On the basis of class theories from structuralist Marxism to analytical Marxism since the mid-1970s, we must theoretically establish a class structure scheme and class categories. These must be capable of responding to the feminist criticism of class theory, and testable through quantitative analysis.Given the above objective, in this article, we will first construct class categories that can be applied to empirical studies. Based on the articulation of the capitalist mode of production and simple commodity production, we will adopt a class structure scheme consisting of four classes: the capitalist class, new middle class, working class, and old middle class. We will also take into consideration occupational segregation by gender. Next we will outline changes in class structure, examining intergenerational class mobility and clarifying the fact that the barrier against intergenerational class mobility is becoming stronger in contemporary Japan. Finally, we will examine the relationship between class location and social consciousness, as well as clarify the fact that class location continues to be of primary importance in the formation of social consciousness.

Inside the black box: Dimensions of gender, generation and scale in the Australian rural restructuring process

Using a case study of the South Australian farm crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the article seeks to sympathetically engage with Whatmore's [Whatmore, 1991a; Farming Women: Gender, Work and Family Enterprise, Macmillan, London; Whatmore, 1991b. Journal of Rural Studies, 7(1/2), 71–76] feminist reconstruction of simple commodity production (SCP). It explores the extent to which Whatmore's reformulation of the SCP concept offers a scale- and agency-sensitive framework through which contemporary processes of agrarian change, including changing gender roles in many facets of rural and farming life, can be seen. Using Whatmore's adaptation of Connell's (Connell, 1987, Gender and Power: Society, The Person and Sexual Politics, Allen and Unwin, Sydney) ‘gender order’ and ‘gender regime’ to examine the survival strategies of Kangaroo Island farm families from 1984 to 1993, the article reveals that while Island farm women have played fundamental and diverse roles in the defence of the family farm and the farm family through their on- and off-farm and household labour, farm men's roles have changed little. Nevertheless, the article does find that the established gender order is undergoing gradual and uneven change as a familial ideology - where the maintenance of family living standards is considered more important than the preservation of the family's ties with the land - assumes importance in some young families' adjustment responses. In summary, the article finds that Whatmore's ‘domestic political economy’ provides an important advance in understanding how farm families, and individual farm women and men, negotiate global, national, regional and local pressures for economic and social change.

‘Archaic’ Relations of Production in Modern Agricultural Systems: The Example of Sharemilking in New Zealand

Sharecropping is neglected in the analysis of land use and rural change in modern western economies. Notwithstanding the Marxist classification of sharecropping as a form of wage labor, it is conceptualized in this paper as simple commodity production, based on the unity of household and enterprise. The organization of sharecropping is examined with the use of this conceptualization, although the review incorporates economic and other perspectives. Sharemilking in New Zealand is used to evaluate this framework at two scales, on representative dairy farms of average size and on large dairy farms owned by corporations. It is found to be a mutually beneficial relationship that promotes efficient production and high output. It also facilitates intergenerational transfer, provides a rung on the dairying ladder, and contributes to the reproduction of family-based dairying in New Zealand. Sharemilking is also the preferred means for recent corporate entrants to the industry to operate their large dairy farms. Currently, sharemilking is playing a role in the penetration of agriculture by capital.

Commodity production and price formation before capitalism: A value theoretic approach

This article uses a historically‐specific approach to simple commodity production in order to analyse its functioning in precapitalist conditions. Through the use of value theory, the mechanism of the formation of prices in these undeveloped market conditions is examined, and the alterations in the operation of the law of value brought about by changes in historical conditions of existence (pre‐capitalistlcapitalist) are investigated. The theoretical background is provided by Marx's theory of value and recent debates on the working of simple commodity production, while the historical context is set by the evolution of commodity production in England at the dawn of modern era.

Three Major Stages of Commodity-Market Economy

Abstract Classical economics described only two development stages and two corresponding forms of commodity production: One was "simple commodity production" or "small commodity production," and the other was "capitalist production." Capitalism was taken as the "highest form" of commodity production. Although this can explain the 19th century, it has been changed by development of the market in the 20th century. Nevertheless, the theory has been carried on. In particular, people continue to confuse the commodity or market economy, which is a mode of resource deployment, with capitalism, a social system. To date, the traditional concept of putting the commodity economy within the framework of the capitalist system has not been negated or replaced by a new theory.