11 Material Value
11.1 Stuff Matters
Roberts
As G Carchedi and I have shown in our book, 21st century capitalism, the products of mental labour are just as material as things objectively outside our minds. Ideas can be turned into material use and commodified for capital. Indeed, as Marx argued, it is not that these key materials would cease to exist, they would still be there. It is when no human labour is applied to using them, then that would bring the world to an end.
All the talk about ‘intangibles’ now being the most important form of investment by capitalists, and that we can have ‘capitalism without capital’ is so much nonsense – or at least only has limited reality in the financialized world of the US and other G7 economies. The vast bulk of the world economy is still built on the production of things, ‘stuff’ that can be commodified from the labour of billions.
While materials consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the US and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries from whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at a breakneck rate. ‘Stuff matters’ for capital and the governments that represent capital.
There is a tendency for the value incorporated in commodities to fall as the productivity of labour rises (ie the average labour time taken to produce commodities falls). But there is always the risk that prices of raw materials will rise and so disrupt the profitability of capital, leading to crises of production and hits to the living standards of billions. Marx saw this as a key factor in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist production. “The more capitalist production is developed, bringing with it the greater means for a sudden and interrupted increase in the portion of constant capital, the greater is the relative overproduction of fixed capital and the more frequent the underproduction of plant and raw materials, and the more marked the previously described rise in their price and the corresponding reaction” ( Marx Capital Vol. 3) The rate of profit is thus inversely proportional to the value of raw materials.
How can the world get to ‘net zero’ when it needs so many raw material resources? These are controlled by a few giant companies and that this is the major obstacle to meeting net zero.