Capitalism & Competition 1.O

 

INTRODUCTION

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for 1 profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, a price system, private property and the recognition of property rights, voluntary exchange and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or production ability in capital and financial markets-whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

Economists, historians, political economists and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, state capitalism and welfare capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition and state-sanctioned social policies. The degree of competition in markets and the role of intervention and regulation as well as the scope of state ownership vary across different models of capitalism. The extent to which different markets are free and the rules defining private property are matters of politics and policy. Most of the existing capitalist economies are mixed economies that combine elements of free markets with state intervention and in some cases economic planning

Market economies have existed under many forms of government and in many different times, places and cultures. Modern capitalist societies developed in Western Europe in a process that led to the Industrial Revolution. Capitalist systems with varying degrees of direct government intervention have since become dominant in the Western world and continue to spread. Economic growth is a characteristic tendency of capitalist economies.

CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION

One feature of this  approach taken by Marx (1867, 1990) and Marxism, from which we retain the necessity of exploitation, under stood as a relationship of free and legal exchange of objectively asymmetrical magnitudes, to all stages of capitalism. In opposition to that approach, neoclassical economics considered exploitation to be a problem of compensation for a factor of production at below its marginal productivity (Pigou 1920; Flatau 2001). A liberal theory of exploitation can be found in Steiner (1984), who conceives of exploitation as situations in which a third party (i.e. the state) limits an actor's exercise of liberty, making it impossible for this or other actors to be able to buy or sell a good for the value that another party was willing to offer. Among other limitations, not that of the actor's freedom but of these perspectives, is that they only give an account of individual, contingent situations; another more significant limitation is that according to these approaches the exploiter could be, for example, a worker who in the face of the capitalist asserts her techniques in order to demand a wage increase. In that view, the unionized worker would exploit the capitalist. Other significant approaches arise from reformulations of the Marxist theory of exploitation which criticize and abandon the labor theory of value, an idea shared here. In sociology this is the case for analytical Marxism (Cohen 1979; Roemer 1989; Elster 1985) and some institutionalist authors (Hodgson 1980) and the Sraffians in political economy (Garegnani 1979). However, none of these perspectives sufficiently incorporates the exploitation of knowledge. The explicit idea that the surplus value the exploiter appropriates (the capitalist exploiter in particular) could have some relationship with the knowledge carried and put to use by the exploited, is not adequately discussed. However, in various investigations into the relationship between knowledge and capitalism time and again we have empirically found diverse manners by which companies successful in the accumulation of capital legally take control of those vital knowledges without paying their value for them (Zukerfeld 2010; 2012; 2016). In these cases, labor does not lose those knowledges, it continues possessing them, but capital has copied them and can then dispense with the bearer that the workers represent.

Having made these superficial references to the literature, we can now move on to defining capitalist exploitation and its three varieties. Some features of capitalist exploitation are intrinsic to all forms of exploitation and have already been discussed. Meanwhile, others will appear here for the first time. Capitalist exploitation refers to reactions between human subjects that can be defined by the following characteristics:

1. They occur in the framework of capitalist productive processes.

2. They generate exchanges that are objectively asymmetrical in terms of the economic value exchanged between two types of actors, E (exploiters) and E (exploited).

3. The E actors acquire an objective surplus value in economic terms in relation to, and at the expense of, the e actors.

4. The E actors contribute their energies and different types of knowledge to the productive process, and receive a compensation approximately equal to (not less than) the value of the expended energies, but not all (or nothing) of the value of the translated knowledges. Thus, the essence of capitalist exploitation is the unremunerated knowledge of the E actors.

5. The E actors, in subjective terms:

 5.1 Set in motion the productive processes with the aim of:

    5.1.1 Producing commodities.

    5.1.2 Obtaining an economic profit from the sale of these commodities.

 5.2 Have a wide-ranging vision of the productive process.

6. The e actors, in subjective terms:

 6.1 Consent, to a greater or lesser degree, to the specific exchange they participate in.

 6.2 May represent to themselves the exchanged values as equivalent or otherwise.

  6.3 Have a fragmentary, limited, view of the productive process in which they are incorporated.

7. In terms of inter subjective knowledge:

 7.1 Regarding normative knowledge, the productive processes and exchanges within them take place within the framework of the law.

 7.2 With respect to axiological knowledge, exploitation takes place framed by ideologies.

There are three types of capitalist exploitation:

Exploitation through alienation	Exploitation through reproduction	Exploitation through other factors
The energies and the knowledge of the exploited are translated by objectification in the product of labor whose ownership is in the hands of the capitalist.	exploited are translated by codification (with a possible transitory passage through subjectivity) (in) to different forms of information whose ownership is in the hands of the capitalist.	The knowledge administered by the exploiters, generally digital information, are translated to the subjectivity or inter subjectivity of the exploited.
The capitalist obtains labor time (energy + knowledge). This time can be inside or outside the productive unit, but the capitalist appropriates the fruits of the labor time.	The capitalist acquires ownership of certain forms of knowledge (produced over longer or shorter time spans, within or outside of the working day).	The capitalist obtains human attention time in order to inoculate certain knowledge(generally outside of the working day).
The capitalist pays, usually in monetary terms, for the cost of the energies necessary for the reproduction of the worker.	The capitalist pays in monetary or, more commonly, in non-monetary terms (such as recognition knowledge).	The capitalist pays in non-monetary terms (with access to contents or software, whose monetary cost is lower than that of attention).
The commodity (or its intermediary products) that arises from the productive process (a good or service) is alienated and erodes with consumption, meaning that the identical repetition of the productive process requires the subject be exploited through alienation again.	The knowledge (subjective or codified as information) are not alienated (they do not erode with use), so the exploited subject they have been extracted from is not generally necessary for the repetition of the same productive process.	Accumulation of attention, and is consumed with its productive use. This means that the identical repetition of the  productive process requires the be exploited through attention again.

 

however this is one side of coin!

keep awaiting for our next part on this blog which will come soon!

Credits:

Sahil Lukman Tadvi

MIS - 112011048 

Metallurgy

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