Economy, politics and ideology

(From Ercan Gündoğan, 2011, A Theory of Capitalist Society and Social Dialectics, Lap Lambert, p: 148-50)

A worker as a wage or salary owner has a contradictory relation with his/her boss, director, banker and rentier. He/she also confronts his/her rivals in terms of sexual, ethnical and national identities, parties and ideologies as well as unemployed workers. Dividing forces are more than uniting ones for their common cause. However, dividing forces of the class emerge as a result of market penetrations into different territories with different historical levels. Working class is ever-being divided with the changing labour markets. Poor workers always threat relatively better lived ones. If the workers worked in the same sectors with same wage levels, capitalists would divide them in terms of culture, religion, age, sex or other forms of identities and positions. Capitalism tends to create a common market with differentiated workers and consumers. Capitalist market has to be common but heterogeneous and differentiated for labour and consumer markets. Similarly, workers achieve a common market, but only in their differentiated sub-markets.

In addition to their internal divisions, the workers confront with the all sections of capitalists and ruling classes which appropriates and control different shares of the total social capital. State and the political-bureaucratic community shares and control the public form and share of total capital. Bankers, industrial capitalists and rentiers confront it in the different spheres of life for different purposes. Actually, wage or salary goes to interest, rent or profit when it is consumed. Surplus value the worker produces is not only shared by profit, interest and rent but also consumed for those relative capitals. For this reason, his/her labour is first divided into wage-salary and profit-interest-rent and then consumed for profit-interest and rent. Surplus value must equal wages and salaries. Now we can suggest a new law of capital: Total wages and salaries must equal the totality of profits, interests and rents as the latter totality can be obtained only by the consumption of wages and salaries. The consumptions made by profit, interest and rent owners are the same as the wage and salary owners’ consumption. A commodity which may be a goods, house, land or money can be bought only by a wage or salary. A capitalist, who may be an industrialist, banker or landowner, buys something using his/her personal wage or salary as if he/she is an employee of his/her capital. However, because of this employee wage and salary implies, there is a surplus-value, which cannot be or is wanted to be consumed by the capitalists. As Marx formulates, capitalist production cannot be only “simple reproduction”, but must be extended. For this reason, necessary labour in the form of wage and salary cannot be equal with surplus value. The latter one increase more than the former can.

It is the ever-rising amount of surplus value, which gives the capitalist society its unique characteristic. Surpluses need not be reinvested for more commodity production but can be used for any purposes such as public, political and ideological means. State, media, culture, civil society, art, propaganda, secret services, provocation, prestige projects are financed by a part of total surplus. Otherwise, surpluses are seen as open manifestation of economic power.

Industrialists, bankers and rentiers do not form such a conscious division of labour for the maintenance of their systems. They just know where their money has to go for additional money. Hence, an industrialist cannot be so forever as a rentier cannot be only so as different parts of surplus value is ever-changed.