[lbo-talk] Marx on competition

[Michael Pugliese]

The Grundrisse
NOTEBOOK IV
mid-December 1857 - 22 January 1858
[Circulation Process of Capital]
>...But apart from the fact that this necessity of evening-up already
presupposes the unevenness, the disharmony and hence the contradiction
-- in a general crisis of overproduction the contradiction is not
between the different kinds of productive capital, but between
industrial and loanable capital -- between capital as directly
involved in the production process and capital as money existing
(relatively) outside of it. Finally: proportionate production (this is
already in Ricardo also, etc.) only when it is capital's tendency to
distribute itself in correct proportions, but equally its necessary
tendency -- since it strives limitlessly for surplus labour, surplus
productivity, surplus consumption etc. -- to drive beyond the
proportion. (In competition this inner tendency of capital appears as
a compulsion exercised over it by alien capital, which drives it
forward beyond the correct proportion with a constant march, march!
Free competition, as Mr Wakefield  correctly sniffs out in his
commentary on Smith, has never yet been developed by the economists,
no matter how much they prattle about it, and [no matter] how much it
is the basis of the entirety of bourgeois production, production
resting on capital. It has been understood only negatively: i.e. as
negation of monopolies, the guild system, legal regulations etc. As
negation of feudal production. But it also has to be something for
itself, after all, since a mere 0 is an empty negation, abstraction,
from a barrier which immediately arises again e.g. in the form of
monopoly, natural monopolies etc. Conceptually, competition is nothing
other than the inner nature of capital, its essential character,
appearing in and realized as the reciprocal interaction of many
capitals with one another, the inner tendency as external necessity.)
(Capital exists and can only exist as many capitals, and its
self-determination therefore appears as their reciprocal interaction
with one another.) Capital is just as much the constant positing as
the suspension of proportionate production. The existing proportion
always has to be suspended by the creation of surplus values and the
increase of productive forces. But this demand, that production should
be expanded simultaneously and at once in the same proportion, makes
external demands upon capital which in no way arise out of it itself;
at the same time, the departure from the given proportion in one
branch of production drives all of them out of it, and in unequal
proportions. So far (for we have not yet reached the aspect of capital
in which it is circulating capital, and still have circulation on one
side and capital 'on the other, or production as its presupposition,
or ground from which it arises), even from the standpoint of
production alone, circulation contains the relation to consumption and
production -- in other words, surplus labour as counter value
[Gegenwert], and differentiation of labour in an ever richer form.

On 5/14/05, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> There's a passage in which Marx describes competition as the force
> that commands individual capitalists to "March! March!" Anyone know
> where it is?
> 
> Doug
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

-- 
Michael Pugliese