Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectic of Value and Knowledge, Guglielmo Carchedi

Haymarket Books 2012, 303 pages, £21.99 paperback

Introduction

Gugliemo Carchedi (GC) defends Marx’s value theory and his theory of crisis which sees the falling rate of profit as the key force driving capitalism into crisis.[1] He exposes the inadequacy of alternative explanations which dominate in academic Marxist circles. In particular he points to the class bias of these alternatives and shows they implicitly or explicitly view capitalism as rational and thus relegate class struggle against the system to voluntarism. The book contains a good detailed explanation of the crisis of 2007 but has a much broader scope than simply political economy.

Since capitalist political economy grows out of the social relations and processes within this society, GC starts by considering, in a general way, how relationships and processes lead to social phenomena and the contradictory nature of these phenomena. For him social phenomena are subject to continual change, and can only be understood dialectically. Capitalism is a system which is continually in a process of reproducing itself but also in the process of being superseded. The central contradiction, which colours all phenomena in the system, is the ownership relation, the fact that all property is in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the working class owns only its labour power. Class struggle is the force driving the tendency towards its supersession. It follows that capitalism is a system in disequilibrium with conflicting tendencies and counter tendencies. To understand this, an analysis using dialectical logic is necessary since the premises contain contradictions. Formal logic, which necessarily excludes contradictory premises and the dimension of time is inadequate. This is the general background to his treatment of political economy and crisis. It gives him the tools to refute those who claim key elements of Marx’s analysis, namely his labour theory of value and crisis theory, need to be rejected, or at least revised.

GC goes on to consider the production of knowledge and the production of consciousness. He points out that knowledge is material and the production of knowledge under capitalist relations is the production of value and surplus value just as in the case of production of goods which he calls objective production. This is dealt with in great detail and provides a comprehensive refutation of the popular myth that abstract knowledge, in the form of the “general intellect”[2] has today become a productive force marginalising the importance of material labour and undermining the labour theory of value. GC points out that knowledge produced under capitalist social relations, even science, is capitalist class knowledge. Its main purpose is to increase the exploitation of the working class in order to increase profit. Under capitalist social relations science is not class neutral. In this he opposes the views of Engels, Lenin and Gramsci. However, GC’s aim is to relate knowledge to class consciousness and consider how knowledge and consciousness produced under capitalist social relations could be used to create a new society in the period of transition. Certain types of knowledge, since they are produced under capitalist social relations, necessarily contain a contradictory element since they are socially produced by wage labour. These may be adapted and used by transitional society.

GC insists that Marx’s labour theory of value and his dialectical method provide the intellectual compass for the working class to create a new society. Fashionable contemporary theories, such as “neo-Ricardianism”,[3] “value form theory”[4] and especially “workerism”[5] only serve to disorient and disarm labour in its struggle for a higher form of society.

The book is logically structured in four chapters. The first deals with dialectical method and the ‘Marxist’ academics who argue Marx’s work is logically contradictory and requires revision. This is dealt with in the second chapter which leads on to a chapter on capitalist tendency to crisis and the 2007 crisis. The final chapter deals with knowledge and consciousness and touches on how knowledge produced under capitalism could be adapted for use in the period of transition to socialist society.

The book thus deals with key issues relevant to revolutionaries today. Although the issues are complex the book is clearly written and deserves to be widely read. We will look at some of these issues in greater detail below since many of them form the bulk of the current critique of Marxism.

Dialectics

The sub-title of the book indicates that GC sees his treatment of dialectics as derived from what is implicit in Marx’s work. He sees his work as completing analyses which Marx was unable to pursue. He argues that dialectics apply only to social relationships, processes and phenomena. This puts him in conflict with Engels, who attempted to base dialectics in nature and thereby prove that socialism was the inevitable outcome of a natural dialectical process. Though GC admits a similarity between Engels’ laws of dialectics and those he proposes he disagrees with Engels’ view that science is class neutral. Since scientific knowledge is produced by labour power under capitalist social relations it retains a capitalist content. He points to Taylorism and scientific management as examples of this. Engels’ view, he argues, leads to seeing the productive forces and developments like Taylorism as class neutral, and the idea that socialism could be built using capitalist productive forces.[6]

Phenomena in class society, GC argues, result from the interaction of social processes and social relations. They result from people pursuing their aims. Social phenomena, however, have a double dimension, their realised dimension and their potential dimension. A commodity, for example, has a use value which is realised by its production and a potential exchange value which can only be realised if it is sold. To move from potential to realised requires time, but what can be realised at a later time must however have been potentially present.

The social system of capitalism similarly has a realised dimension, its reproduction, and a potential dimension, its supersession. Its realised dimension expresses itself in the reproduction of the system and the accumulation of capital, and its potential supersession in its cyclical crises. The contradictory social content of capitalism can be seen in that its reproduction implies exploitation, inequality, egoism while its supersession implies cooperation, solidarity and equality. This is the contradictory social content of the capitalist ownership relation which ultimately determines other relationships in capitalism.

Because of their contradictory nature, social phenomena can only be understood by dialectical logic. GC proposes three rules of dialectical logic. Social phenomena are always both realised and potential, both determinant and determined and subject to constant change. Formal logic is only able to analyse realised phenomena that are not subject to change. It is unable to treat issues where the subject has a realised reality and a potential reality which is in contradiction to it, since in formal logic all contradictions are a mistake.

Once the basis of a dialectical approach to social phenomena is set out GC proceeds to review critics of Marx’s labour of value.

Defence of the Labour Theory of Value

Marx’s labour theory of value has been subject to sustained attacks since the publication of the third volume of Capital. It has been termed incoherent and logically inconsistent by both bourgeois economists and Marxist academics. The four main areas where it is alleged the theory fails are:

1. Abstract labour is not the only source of value
2. The abstract labour is not material
3. The falling rate of profit is incorrect
4. The transformation of values into prices is impossible.

If these critiques were proven correct, capitalism would not have a tendency towards crises, and its own supersession. GC argues that the primary reason these critiques are incorrect is that they are mainly based on formal logic and quantitative analyses of these issues.

The first critique asserts that machines create value. For Marx machines do not create value; the value contained in machines is transferred to the product by the work of living labour. This was an early criticism of Marx but has gained ground in recent years through the advent of programmed machines and the use of artificial intelligence. At the extreme, in a fully integrated economy, machines could, so the argument goes, create other machines without human labour. The implication is, of course, that labour’s struggle against capital is irrational while the system itself is rational and will overcome all its problems. GC points out that if machines could produce machines, what they would create would be use values, which could not be aggregated or exchanged as they lacked a common element. Distribution under capitalist social relations could not take place. It needs to be pointed out, however, that distribution could take place under communism since use values would simply be distributed free. The tendency to produce ever more sophisticated machines and replace living labour with them is actually a tendency towards the supersession of capitalism, since it leads to falling profitability of capital and crisis. It is also a tendency which lays the ground for communism.

The second critique claims abstract labour does not exist. Marx argues that human labour is concrete meaning it is specific, e.g. making steel or growing wheat, but is at the same time abstract, namely human labour in general. It is this second aspect which makes commodities exchangeable. Rates of exchange are determined by the quantity of abstract labour contained in the commodities. The second school of criticism[7] argues that concrete labour cannot be reduced to abstract labour and that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of abstract labour. Material existence does not, however, GC points out, require observability, e.g. electricity or gravity, whereas the effects can be observed. The effect of abstract labour can be observed in exchange and must, therefore, have been potentially present in production. Human labour is material and can be measured. It depends on the expenditure of energy which we get from food and drink and this can be measured in calories and the work performed measured in Joules. Abstract labour is the expenditure of undifferentiated human energy.

The general flaw of this criticism is that it does not approach the issue dialectically. Production and realisation of value and surplus value are collapsed into each other and time is eliminated. Dialectical understanding of the commodity sees it as crystalising both concrete labour determined in its use value, which is realised in production, and abstract labour which is potential and is only realised subsequently in exchange.

The third critique, that of the falling rate of profit, is an issue the ICT has written extensively on and we will only briefly review the issue here.[8] Marx argues that increases in productivity resulting from new means of production generally replace workers with machines. The organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital, rises and less value and surplus value is produced. This tends to cause the average rate of profit (ARP) for the capitalist system as a whole to fall. It has been argued that this is logically inconsistent and more productive means of production necessarily increase the rate of profit. This was formulated in a theorem by Okishio[9] and is still widely accepted as valid. GC is a supporter of the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s theory which holds that if inputs and outputs to production are valued over time and value and price form a single system, Marx’s analysis is not inconsistent. He shows through an example of a single commodity economy, the corn economy, how increases in productivity actually cause profit rates to fall when inputs and outputs are valued temporarily. The general refutation of Okishio is that is that his theorem excludes time by assuming simultaneous valuation of inputs and outputs and so relies on formal logic.

A further critique of the falling rate of profit analysis is that it is indeterminate. This is argued by the Monthly Review School and amounts simply to the argument that, while there is a tendency for average profits to fall, there is also a tendency for them to rise as a result of cheaper means of production and increased exploitation of workers etc. GC shows that the tendency for ARP to fall is a tendency precisely because it is held back by counter tendencies. It is therefore the dominant tendency. Reducing the cost of means of production occurs at the same time as reduction in labour and hence reduction in surplus value produced.[10] While lengthening the working day has finite limits and the reduction in the value of the means of production, if it even occurs, is marginal. The more the ARP falls the weaker the counter tendencies become. This critique fails because it is a critique relying on formal logic. It argues from a premise which contains contradictions, namely a tendency and a counter tendency, and concludes that the outcome is therefore indeterminate.

The fourth critique is that values cannot be transformed into prices which makes the whole labour theory of value inconsistent. This is a critique of Marx’s theory of distribution and supposedly showed that under his value system even simple reproduction could not occur. However, as GC shows, if inputs and outputs are valued temporarily in a single system, the inconsistency vanishes.[11]

Again this is a criticism using formal logic and assuming the system is in equilibrium. The critics fail to understand the dual nature of commodities and, by simultaneously valuing inputs and outputs, fail to allow for time.

Theories of Crises

If crises are a constant feature of capitalism a theory is needed to explain their inevitability. Crises spring from the production sphere of the economy where productive labour power is employed. Productive labour is labour which changes existing use values into new use values. In the central capitalist countries today an enormous amount of labour is unproductive and largely engaged in distributing surplus value produced in the productive sphere. Labour expended in commerce, banking finance, speculation, state repression are all examples of this, while sectors such as the military actually destroy value. Crises are caused by the falling rate of profit in the productive sector which, in turn, is caused by insufficient production of surplus value. This results from the process of capital accumulation itself. Increases in accumulation of capital lead to increased productivity. This means expulsion of workers from production and a consequent decrease in production of surplus value. Crises are, therefore, inherent in capitalist production relations and are unavoidable. The attempts of capital to increase surplus value produced by the working class lead to increased exploitation and a host of other attacks on the class. The class which is at the centre of capitalist production is also the class which faces deprivation and poverty as the inevitable outcome of the system's workings. The working class is therefore objectively revolutionary and has an objective interest in creating a higher system of production, namely communism.

This is also the position argued by GC. He examines alternative views of the causes of crises and shows how these explanations imply the system is rational and thus by implication the struggle against it is irrational. This amounts to the theoretical disarming of the working class. We will briefly review GC’s refutations of the main alternative explanations.

Although production and distribution are dependent on each other, production comes before distribution and determines distribution and so realisation of surplus value. Production is the determinant relationship and distribution is the determined relationship. This needs to be understood since the principal arguments against the falling rate of profit as the cause of the crisis are arguments based in the sphere of distribution.

The first argument which GC reviews is that the crisis has originated in the financial sphere due to high levels of debt, speculation, permissive monetary policy, deregulation and so on and so forth. In other words the crisis is caused by mistakes by the bourgeoisie in managing the system. The system is therefore seen as rational and the problems located in the stupidity of capitalists. Yet crises are a recurrent phenomenon. Why would the managers of the system repeatedly make these mistakes? Clearly there must be some structural reasons within the system which cause these mistakes but this explanation offers none, and is not worth considering further.

A more widely held explanation is that the crisis is caused by under-consumption. This view was first put forward by Rosa Luxemburg as an explanation of imperialism before the First World War. She argued that capitalism was unable to realise all the surplus value produced within the system itself and therefore needed extra capitalist markets for this. Imperialism was explained by the struggle for extra-capitalist markets. The exhaustion of the extra-capitalist markets would, she thought, lead to a terminal crisis of the system. Because of the enormous expansion of the capitalist system after World War Two without significant non-capitalist markets, this view has been abandoned by almost all its supporters.[12] However, the theory has metamorphosed from a shortage of non-capitalist markets to a shortage of capitalist markets. This amounts to the view that the working class wages are too low to allow them to buy all the commodities they produce. Lower wages, it is argued, cause the rate of profit to fall. Lower wages are a neo-liberal policy therefore neo-liberalism is to blame for the crisis.

GC shows clearly that lower wages cannot decrease the rate of profit even if all the commodities represented by the wage decrease remain unsold. If this is the case the rate of profit will remain unchanged. Under all other conditions a decrease in wages would raise the rate of profit. This indicates that the falling rate of profit is the determinant tendency and lower wages which tend to raise the rate of profit are a counter-tendency limiting its effect. Empirical evidence also goes against this argument. As Marx notes there is generally a rise in wages before a crisis.[13] GC produces figures which show that this was also true of the crisis which started in the mid-70s. In the seven year period leading up to 1973 there was an annual rise in wages of 2.5% in the US. Wages only began to stagnate after the start of the crisis in 1973.[14]

Generally, if the crisis could be avoided by higher wages, namely a lower rate of exploitation, higher wages could solve the crisis. If this were true the crisis would be due to poor distribution policies and could be avoided by more enlightened distribution! If the capitalist class was less stupid the system would, therefore, tend to move to prosperity and growth. The system would therefore be rational and the struggle to replace it irrational. A higher system of production would not be required. Class struggle would therefore be an act of will rather than a necessity based on the objective need for survival. This is the class content of this explanation.

An inverse of this explanation is the profit squeeze theory which holds that high wages are the explanation of the crisis. This is the view of the Monthly Review school. They argue that during recoveries wages increase until they become too high and profitability falls. The system is then pushed from growth to depression. If wages are then lowered sufficiently profits start increasing again. Falling profit rates are, in this view, caused by the high costs of labour power. As GC points out this theory assumes a constant quantity of new value, (wages and profits), and the problem is, once again, in distributing this quantity. However, the upward phase of the cycle when both wages and profits are increasing, can only be explained if the value produced is increasing. The theory cannot explain the tipping point where growth turns to depression. Marx, himself notes:

Nothing could be more absurd ... than to explain the fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the rate of wages.[15]

GC also points out that this theory has been empirically contradicted by studies of the relative weight of organic composition and wage share for the US capital from 1929 to 1998. These studies show that organic composition accounts for the entire variation in the profit rate with the exception of only a few years.[16]

This, like under-consumption, is a distribution explanation of crisis located in the sphere of consumption and is basically arguing that if distribution could be corrected the system would tend to growth. The system is therefore rational with all the same consequences for the class struggle which we saw above in the under-consumption theory.

An explanation of the crisis located in the sphere of production is that the crisis is caused by decreasing productivity levels. This is actually the view of many bourgeois commentators. It is, however, completely contradictory to Marxís view that the crisis is the outcome of decreased production of surplus value caused by increasing productivity which we have explained above. GC provided an empirical refutation of this by listing the massive increases in productivity of US labour since the end of the 1950s. If the output per worker per hour is set at 100 for 1992 output has increased from 51.3 in 1959, to 76.2 in 1975, to 80.6 in 1980, to 115.7 in 2000 to 135.9 in 2007.[17] In other words productivity has massively increased as the crisis has developed rather than decreased as the proponents of this theory would have us believe.

The Crisis of 2007

For GC the crisis of 2007 is to be found firmly in the productive sphere with its cause as the falling rate of profit. Financial crises are caused by the shortage of surplus value. The general development of crises is as follows:

As production of surplus value decreases due to decreasing employment in the productive sectors firms start closing down and working class purchasing power decreases. Some wage goods remain unsold. Equally capitalists’ purchasing power of the means of production decreases. Some investment goods remain unsold. To stimulate the sale of unsold commodities ... monetary authorities stimulate credit by increasing the quantity of money. Capital flows from the productive to the unproductive sectors. This makes possible artificial inflation of profits in these unproductive sectors. Debt and speculation start growing disproportionally compared to the production of value and surplus value incorporated in commodities ... The process snowballs ... as unemployment surges an increasing number of debtors default on their debts. This applies to both productive and financial sectors. But it is in the financial and speculative sectors that the crisis erupts at first because it is in these sectors that the bubble has increased most ... the collapse of the financial and speculative sectors reveals in a sudden and abrupt way, the continuously shrinking productive basis of the economy that had been concealed through increasing levels of debt.[18]

The shrinking of the productive sector in the US is illustrated by figures GC quotes. The goods producing sector shrank from 27.8% of US employment in 1979 to 16.6% in 2005 while employment in the services sector rose from 72.2% to 83.4%.[19]

Recovery and War

Can the system recover? It is generally true that the crisis itself creates the basis for a recovery. It does this by devaluing constant capital while also reducing wages, prices of commodities and wiping out debt. These things have not happened since 2007. The state has bailed out the unproductive sector, notably the banks, and parts of the productive sector, for example the car producers; it has reduced taxation and interest rates. Debts have not been reduced, in fact, total global debt has increased by over 40% since the 2007 crisis.[20] All this is quite insufficient to stimulate a new round of accumulation. On the contrary, it is more likely that we appear to heading for another global crash. Crises such as that of 2007 are unable to devalue sufficient capital to start a fresh round of accumulation. The other instrument of capital devaluation is generalised war. The clearest historical example is the ending of the crisis of the 1930s by the massive devaluation of capital achieved in WW2.

GC recognises the role of war in devaluing capital and increasing the rate of exploitation, though he does not characterise it as the only economic exit route from the crisis in the present cycle of accumulation. Socialist revolution is, of course, the other exit route from the crisis. GC is, however, completely correct when he writes:

The use of weapons in ... wars is a powerful method of destruction of capital in its commodity form and ... of the means of production and thus of capital as a social relation. .. (this) creates the basic condition for an economic upturn. At the same time wars make possible the cancellation of debt contracted with labour (for example inflation destroys the value of money and of state-bonds) and (makes possible) the extraction of extra surplus value (labourers either forced or instigated by patriotism accept higher intensity of exploitation, longer working hours etc.) ... The capitalist economy is determinant of wars in the sense that the capitalist economy is the condition for the existence of wars and wars are the condition of reproduction (or supersession) of the capitalist economy. ... The notion that wars are caused by extra-economic factors is simply wrong. ... After the war is over, a period of reconstruction follows. ... The two basic conditions for economic recovery, the destruction of capital and an increase in the rate of exploitation have been created.[21]

Knowledge and Consciousness

The crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist economy must manifest itself at the level of individual and social consciousness. This consciousness in turn must necessarily be a key force in the tendency to overturn capitalism and supersede it as a social system. The final section of the book considers the production of knowledge and consciousness and how knowledge developed under capitalist relations of production could be used in the transition from capitalism to socialist society.

Knowledge is produced by mental labour. Mental labour, as GC stresses, is not ultimately different from manual labour. Both entail expenditure of human energy. The human brain, we are told, consumes 20% of all the energy we derive from nourishment,[22] and the development of knowledge in the brain produces material changes in the nervous system and synaptic changes which can be measured.[23] Once the material nature of knowledge is established the material nature of mental work follows.

Productive labour, as mentioned above, transforms existing use-values into new use-values. Mental labour is labour transforming mental use values into new mental use values. Simple examples would be the development of computer analysis programmes from laws of structural or fluid mechanics to solve specific problems of engineering involving these disciplines. However, labour is always a combination of both intellectual and manual transformations the distinction between the two depends on which type of labour which is dominant. Manual labour consists of objective transformations of the world outside us; mental labour of transformations of our perception and knowledge of that world. Both are material.

As Marx notes in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.[24]

Mental production, under capitalist social relations, produces capitalist class knowledge. The capitalist class today own the means of production of knowledge such as libraries, schools, universities, research institutes, computers and so on, just as they did in the 1840s when Marx wrote the section quoted above. Discoveries, generally now made by teams of mental workers, are appropriated by capital and controlled by patents, by intellectual property or similar means. Production of knowledge is directed towards profit. Medical research, for example, is directed towards developing medicines to treat disease, not preventing disease, agricultural research is directed to developing plant types which capital can own and control, rather than relieving starvation.

GC identifies 3 types of knowledge produced within capitalism.

1. Knowledge used to control labour and increase exploitation. e.g. Management techniques, efficiency techniques such as Taylorism.
2. Knowledge used only by labour such as mutual help, solidarity, cooperation. Such knowledge is used in resistance to capitalism and prefigures a socialist form of knowledge to be used in a higher type of society.
3. Knowledge produced to be used by capital but which could also be used by labour. This is possible since knowledge is generally produced by collective mental workers selling their mental labour power. It is therefore produced under a web of contradictory social relationships. Although the knowledge is specifically designed for the capitalist class, it retains the imprint of its collective production. This makes it possible for labour to use this knowledge for resistance to capital. For example, the internet and mobile technology have been designed to exploit and dominate labour as never before, yet they can be used for resistance as in organisation of protest such as the Arab spring, the occupy movement or the recent Deliveroo strike.[25]

Consciousness is a type of social knowledge. GC describes how individuals, throughout their lives, undergo a process of internalisation of social phenomena. These are structured into a conceptual framework which is necessarily social and historical since it depends on previous observation and experience, experience which has an historical dimension. Knowledge becomes social when it is commonly shared by a class. Social knowledge is, therefore, a specific instance of the wider process of the struggle between the two fundamental classes. As the capitalist system oscillates between the movement to reproduce itself and movement to its supersession, which is expressed in crises, so does social consciousness.

It will be possible to use the types of knowledge developed by labour, identified as type 2 above, and that produced for capital, identified as type 3, in the transition to socialism. The third type of knowledge will, however, be radically changed. In this transition GC sees different type of science and labour arising, one whose objective is benefitting labour and mankind in general. Labour will be built on equality, cooperation, self-management and self-development, and both specialisation and division between mental and manual labour will be eroded. Production will be oriented to needs and environmental sustainability.

The book outlines the theoretical basis for a rupture of social consciousness from capitalist domination and the creation of a higher form of social production. Marx notes, in the quotation above, that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are only generally those of the ruling class. For a minority this is not the case. The process of development of the ideas, knowledge and consciousness of this minority is omitted by GC. He appears to give this task to intellectual representatives of the class such as himself rather than to an organised political force, namely a political party. This is an important omission in an otherwise important book.

CP

Notes

1. This is the position defended by the ICT and which has been defended by PCInt (Battaglia Comunista) since its foundation in the 1940s
2. This is supported by Paul Mason in his book Postcapitalism reviewed in Revolutionary Perspectives 07. leftcom.org. See also P Virno General Intellect. Quoted by G Carchedi.
3. GC quotes I Steedman Marx after Sraffa

4 . See C Arthur Value Labour and Negativity

1. ‘Operaismo’ in the original Italian. See Empire by Hardt and Negri

6 . This is clearly a criticism aimed at the Bolsheviks and Lenin who introduced one man management and Taylorism in 1918.

1. This is the criticism of the value form critics. See C Arthur Value Labour and Negativity.
2. We have dealt with the falling rate of profit in other publications. See Piketty Marx and Capitalism’s Dynamics in Revolutionary Perspectives 06. leftcom.org and ‘The tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its detractors’ in Revolutionary Perspectives 62 (Series Three) leftcom.org
3. See N Okishio Technical changes in the Rate of Profit.
4. Empirical evidence shows that when new means of production are installed, while parts of the new productive machinery may be reduced in value, the system as a whole contains more value and organic composition tends to increase. See fixed capital per worker and fixed capital per hour worked, G Carchedi Behind the Crisis p.153.
5. See G Carchedi op.cit. Chapter 2 5.3. This refutation is also developed by A Kliman in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, p .150.
6. The Internationalist Communist Current, to take one example, still supports this view.
7. See K Marx Capital Volume 2.
8. See G Carchedi op.cit. p.133.
9. See K Marx Capital Volume 3 (See G Carchedi op.cit. p.141).
10. Carchedi op. cit. p.150.
11. loc.cit. p.143.
12. loc. cit. p.149.
13. loc. cit. p.155.
14. See Financial Times 5 February15. It was $142tn in 2007 by 2014 it was $199tn and has undoubtedly risen since 2014
15. See op.cit. p.178.
16. See A Roberts The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being p. 219.
17. See G Carchedi op.cit. p.194.
18. K Marx The German Ideology p.64.
19. For more see our agitational broadsheet, Aurora No 39.

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