By JOSÉ MANUEL DE SACADURA ROCHA*

Considerations on the new configurations of the organic composition of capital

The greatest movement of capital is toward accumulation; this is what moves it. The regime of capital can be grasped through its development as a whole, but its scientific understanding requires that we reconstruct the internal connections between what approaches the concrete and the categories that can only articulate them in their abstract form. Thus, the elementary forms of the concrete articulated with the abstract categories reveal how and why the capitalist mode of production is what it is and cannot help but be and do so.

The radical nature of the movement of the capitalist regime demands that we deepen our studies and perspectives regarding this radical nature of the historical present, which was already anticipated in the thinking of the founders of historical materialist dialectics. It is obviously not a question of eliminating the specter of human actions motivated against inhumanity and the denial of life, but of reinforcing them, by their agents, in the face of and beyond the concrete needs and possibilities of their dynamics at the base of this regime. We are pursuing an example for this.

Accumulation is a process of value expansion that only occurs in accordance with the “difference” between capitals: paradoxically, while part of the stock of real assets increases, another part decreases – in production and services in general, the mass of the workforce does not grow with the increase in machinery and equipment, on the contrary, it decreases: what increases is underemployment, precariousness and unemployment. At the same time that technological progress continually “devalues” the workforce and the existing stock of productive capital, the real economy crumbles and fictitious and speculative financial assets increase.

It follows that real and financial assets do not rise infinitely at the same time and to the same degree.[I]: the “difference” between fixed capital (machinery and equipment) and variable capital (labor) dictates the variation in the organic composition of this capital, always to the detriment of the labor force, and, therefore, to the detriment of wages and profit rates, because investment in technologies is always increasing while the surplus value provided by salaried labor decreases.[ii]

If financial assets grow with wages, they also grow as a result of the impoverishment of the working class, which cannot consume (hence credit), and the lack of interest in the real economy, with the risk of a decrease in profit rates, which the trading of speculative securities favors. However, without wages, there is no way to consistently honor the credit traded in these securities, which generates bubbles of “false expectation of liquidity.”

The bourgeois economy tends not to consider the workforce as a real asset, that is, one that is capable of producing material wealth.[iii] It cannot do so because it would have to consider the worker's work as a generator of wealth. Thus, contrary to what is generally considered, profit is generated by the worker's unpaid surplus labor, appropriated by the capitalist as surplus value, regardless of untimely variations in market prices.

Hence, if we are to think about the rate of profit, we must divide the total surplus value by the total capital involved in the production of the establishment. Since the bourgeois economy does not work with the category of surplus value, it does not think about its profit rate in this way, and does not realize, but knows, that it tends to be subject to a constant fall.

Every time the capitalist invests part of the surplus value in machines and equipment, the fixed capital share increases; due to competition, capitalists try in every way to reduce labor costs, variable capital, and they achieve this by investing in real technological assets and infrastructure. However, in doing so, they dispense with the labor force that generates real profit (surplus value); therefore, while the value of fixed capital increases continuously, the mass of surplus value constantly decreases: this is why we say that only a part of real assets increases, while the other part decreases.

Thus, the rate of profit, the surplus value in relation to total capital, continually tends to decrease: this contradiction, easily observed throughout the entire process of development of capitalism, is part of the elementary categories of capital, or general laws, which, however, Marx defined as tendential.

This movement carries out the contradictory (dialectical) dynamics of the general movement of capitalist mercantilism, and confirms the nature of the capital regime that subordinates the elementary forms of labor. Social movements and workers' struggles occur within this reality and, at the same time as they expose, they deepen the fissures in capitalism.

But then: (a) the spectrum of the left must speak of the categories that make up the theoretical thought of historical materialism and materialist dialectics; (b) it cannot neglect the apparatuses or devices of domination of power and symbolic hegemony; (c) consider in the “historical struggles” the moment of the global development of capital in each case; (d) fundamentally, it must recognize, based on careful diagnosis, the fractions of the working class and other wage earners or former wage earners and excluded, to whom it wishes to direct its discourse.

One thing is the employee, union member, associate – this layer of the working class is integrated into the workforce and suffers from the uncertainty of their employment at every moment; quite another is the unemployed, the precarious, those who were forced out of work by the increase in fixed assets for the functioning of capital. Large contingents of workers are in superfluous, tedious and dehumanizing jobs, others are unemployed, precarious and impoverished. There are those who swell the masses of those who have never been captured by labor in capitalist production.

There are therefore many who, due to their lack of work and the time available to work, can dedicate themselves to collective, recreational and cultural activities: they are all those who invent their daily existence in relation to the negation of capital and gradually reinvent capitalism. The progressive leftist camp needs to communicate adequately with all of them, with more or less theoretical categories, aiming to deepen the contradictions of capitalism and overcome it.

*José Manuel de Sacadura Rocha He has a PhD in Education, Art and Cultural History from Mackenzie University. Author, among other books, of Legal sociology: foundations and borders (GEN/Forensics) [https://amzn.to/491S8Fh]

Notes

[I] For comparison, see BELLUZZO & CAIXETA (2024): “In fully invested capitalism in all its forms, the contradiction is sheltered in the very relations between the forms of possession of wealth. In the movement of accumulation, throughout the process of value expansion, the stocks of real and financial assets are expanded, at the same time that technological progress continually “devalues” the labor force and the existing stock of productive capital.” (BELLUZZO, Luiz Gonzaga; CAIXETA, Nathan. Financialization and the confusions of history. Jornal GGN, 03/06/2024. Available at: https://jornalggn.com.br/economia/financeirizacao-e-as-confusoes-da-historia-por-belluzzo-caixeta/).

[ii] MARX, Carl. The capital. book III, section III, chaps. XIII, XIV, XV.

[iii] For accounting purposes, a real asset is one where: (a) it is probable that future economic benefits associated with the item will flow to the entity; and (b) the cost of the item can be measured reliably.

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