Restoration of meanings. What is money? part 5

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

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Consideration of the concept of "profit" or "surplus product" is one of the key points in understanding most of the processes that occur in the real economy. It does not matter at all whether this economy is feudal, capitalist or communist. But it is necessary to consider this issue not from the point of view of money, but from the point of view of actually produced products that can be consumed by humans.

A person who lives in a natural environment and leads a natural way of life, in a normal state, can provide himself with all the products that he needs to ensure his life. Moreover, under normal conditions a man is able to provide everything necessary not only for himself, but also for his wife and offspring. I think that this fact does not require a separate proof, since the proof is the very existence of mankind. If a person was not able to provide himself and his offspring with everything necessary, then humanity would have become extinct as a species long ago.

In order to provide himself and his family with everything necessary, a person will have to spend some time. If we consider the lifestyle of hunters and gatherers, then there is research on this topic from which it follows that in order to provide everything necessary, members of such a community should, on average, spend from three to five hours a day. Here you need to understand that they were engaged in hunting or gathering not every day, but periodically. After you have hunted a large game, the same bison, for the next few days you do not have to go hunting. Likewise, for the day of picking mushrooms, berries or other fruits in the forest, they can be harvested for several days in advance. But in order to be able to live only by hunting and gathering, this particular tribe must have sufficiently large hunting grounds and territories on which they can collect the necessary resources. The most illustrative example of the life of such a community is the North American Indians before they were savagely exterminated by the Anglo-Saxons in the process of seizing the territory of North America and creating the United States on these greens.

The transition to sedentary farming leads to the fact that the time that the peasant must spend on the production of food and other things he needs, increases, since now it is no longer possible to simply come and take the grown crop. First, it is necessary to cultivate the land and plant the seeds, then, as the crop grows, the fields will need more or less maintenance. For the cultivation of the land and subsequent care, special labor tools will be required, as well as draft animals, which also require care and resources for their maintenance. All this will add up to additional labor and time costs. At the same time, such a way of life allows, on the one hand, to significantly increase the population density, and on the other, it simplifies the control over this population, since the presence of fields on which crops are grown creates the dependence of the peasant on his territory on which the crop planted by him grows. which hunters, gatherers and other nomadic peoples do not have. Accordingly, the threat of losing the field with the entire future harvest will be a factor that will force the peasant to give part of this harvest in order to get the rest.

What opportunity does a cretyan have to protect himself from raids and extortions?

1. To go further, to more remote places, where it will be too far to go for tribute.

2. Agree to give some part as payment for the fact that they will not touch you, and maybe even protect you from outside raids.

3. To form a community for joint protection from raids and extortions, or for the joint recruitment of an armed squad, which will defend the community for less money than is taken during the raids.

The first option cannot be used constantly, because sooner or later there will simply be no free land to go to. Therefore, sooner or later, it will still be necessary to choose either the second option or the third. According to the information that came down to us, for some time both the second and the third methods of solving the problem were used, which in fact quite easily flow into one another, and in both directions, since their own squad, which was jointly formed by the peasant community to protect over time, it may well turn into a local feudal lord, who understands that there is no force on the territory he controls that is capable of providing him with real resistance. Likewise, organized groups of "robbers" who initially plundered other tribes during raids may eventually begin to protect those who regularly pay tribute to them from raids by other robbers.

For some time, there may be a variant when a separate squad, which is engaged only in military service, is not created, and healthy men of this community carry out the defense of their own people together, taking up arms during the attack. But here it should be understood that in order to have a good command of weapons and be able to defeat the enemy in battle, appropriate skills are needed, which are developed and then constantly maintained in the course of regular training. Therefore, a professional warrior who spends a fairly large part of his time precisely on military training and improving his combat skills will always have an advantage over those who take up arms from time to time when the need arises. Therefore, sooner or later, the community will still have to make at least part of its squad professional, that is, to provide them with the opportunity most of the time to be engaged in precisely developing skills in using weapons, supplying them with food and other resources they need.

The main thing in the second and third options is that the peasant is now forced to produce a surplus product in addition to his own provision, which will go as a tribute either to the feudal lord or to his own squad.

What is a well-to-do peasant family? This is a family where everything is in abundance, and some food is also in abundance, that is, more than this family itself can consume. Accordingly, when either a feudal lord appears in our scheme, or expenses for his own squad, and then some other communal needs (construction of a temple, maintenance of a hospital and a school, etc.), then everything will rest on production efficiency and then, how much product a given family is able to produce in excess of what it needs itself. If the amount given to the side is less than the family needs, it still continues to be prosperous, although now it has to work much more.

In the scheme that Karl Marx builds in his work "Capital", he speaks of a necessary product and a surplus product, from which "surplus value" is then derived, which ultimately turns into profit.

But here Karl Marx makes a mistake, which for some reason his followers do not notice, stubbornly repeating it further in their works. This happens deliberately or through thoughtlessness, this is a separate issue that we will consider later. At the moment, I personally came to the conclusion that depending on which group this “follower” belongs to, both options are possible. That is, some people consciously transmit this error further, while others simply take Karl Marx's reasoning on faith without independent comprehension and analysis.

When someone produces a product by selling their labor to an employer, then in principle they make no profit. In general, his main task is to produce a surplus product, that is, more product than he needs to meet his basic needs (at least he must ensure his survival). But whether this surplus product turns into profit or not, as well as what the size of this profit will be, depends only on what will be done with this surplus product. If it is successfully sold for money in such a way that the total total cost of producing a unit of the product, that is, the cost of production together with the costs of selling it, including transportation, advertising, salaries to sellers (own cost), will be less than that received when the sale of a unit of goods the amount of money (use value), then only then profit is formed. If, for some reason, the goods were sold cheaper than their own cost, then in this case, not a profit, but a loss is generated.

In other words, profit is generated only in the process of a successful purchase and sale of goods. If the seller succeeds in convincing the buyer to buy the product at a price that is favorable to the seller, then he makes a profit. If it was not possible, for example, due to a too high set price for the goods, which, among other things, may be associated with too high production costs, due to which the intrinsic value of the goods turns out to be high, then there will be no profit, although the goods themselves have already been produced. At the same time, a competent seller or manufacturer at some point may decide to sell the existing product below its own cost of the product in order to minimize losses that occur if this product is not sold at all.

Likewise, we will not generate profits if we do not sell the manufactured products at all, but distribute them in some other way.

That is, if we say that under communism we will not have monetary relations, and therefore there will be no profit, then we cannot talk about any “surplus value”. But this does not mean that in this case we should not say that we will not have a "surplus", more precisely, a surplus product. If each person produces only the product that he needs to meet his own needs, then we will not be able to meet the needs of society, the development of the economy, the renewal of the means of production, etc. expenses that will inevitably arise from us.

The ability to dispose of products and resources, especially the surplus of resources produced, is precisely what gives real power. With a surplus of food, you can hire servants who no longer need to make their own food. They will get them from you. You can build yourself a luxurious palace, since you have the opportunity to force some people to work on the construction site instead of producing food. You will feed them and provide with everything they need at the expense of the excess food you have. And in order to strengthen your power and protect your property, due to the surplus you have, you can hire an armed detachment for yourself, and with a large surplus, even a whole army.

And in general, in all cases when a person gets the opportunity to dispose of this or that resource or product, he receives a certain amount of real power. Even the system administrator, who controls the distribution of the Internet in an organization, receives a certain power over the employees of this organization, due to which he can derive one or another benefit for himself. And the more significant is the resource that a person controls, the more power over other people he can get through this.

Since this work is not a study of what power is and what forms it can take, I will not dwell on this topic in detail now. In this case, when I say that a person who has a real opportunity to dispose of one or another necessary resource can force other people to do something in their own interests, including to share something valuable with him, what they are possess, provide some service that they should not have provided him, or even do something that goes against their own interests.

In fact, in any model of the economy, be it slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist or communist, the main question will always be who and how determines the “necessary” amount of product that the worker receives, as well as who and how disposes of the remaining surplus. manufactured product. Only the way in which surplus data is collected, recorded and redistributed is somewhat changing.

All obtained product is the property of the clan or community and is distributed among all members of the community. The surplus, which remains after the provision of all members of the community, is managed by the head of the clan or the elders of the community. In especially important cases, a decision can be made by a general meeting of either all members of the community, or representatives from each family that is part of this community.

Under the communal-clan system, money as such is not yet needed, since there is no purchase and sale of food within the community itself. One or another exchange of goods is possible only between communities (tribes), but it makes sense to carry it out in kind.

In general, the entire produced product is confiscated by the slave owner, since the slaves are on the full material support of the slave owner. At the same time, the slave owner himself determines the rate of consumption of slaves, that is, the amount of products necessary to provide them. Between the slave owner and the slaves, in the general case, there is no need for any commodity-money relationship. At the same time, the slave owner is responsible for his slave as for property, including in many slave systems, it was the slave owner who was responsible for providing the slaves with living conditions and maintenance. Since the slave was considered as the property of the slave owner, the slaves could be used as collateral in obtaining loans. But it is difficult to get a loan for slaves who will be in poor condition.

Thus, under a slave system, the surplus of resources produced is mainly controlled by the slave-owning class.

Under the slave system, there is no internal formal hierarchy of subordination, which appears under the feudal system, therefore there is no transfer of part of the surplus from the lower level of the hierarchy to the upper one. But such institutions as the state and the army are already emerging, with the help of which the slave owners jointly solve the corresponding tasks of internal management, defense and suppression of dissent. Therefore, part of the surplus in the form of taxes is collected and transferred to those who are responsible for organizing the activities of state institutions and the army. It is interesting that in Rome most of the taxes and payments were collected in kind, and not in money, as K. Marx mentions in "Capital". It turns out that the circulation of money was not yet comprehensive enough to use money in the tax system.

The transition from the complete withdrawal of products produced by slaves to the removal of only part of the product under the guise of various taxes, duties and taxes. At the same time, formally, the subjects of the feudal lord are not his slaves and are on self-sufficiency. That is, the feudal lord is not directly responsible for their standard of living. But the feudal lord remains duty-bound to protect the territory given to him for feeding, both from an external enemy and from internal riots and disorders. Also, in most feudal systems, it was the feudal lord who had the right to resolve disputes and administer justice on his territory. In cases where there was a multilevel feudal hierarchy, the subordinate feudal lords were also obliged to pay taxes, fees and taxes in favor of the superior feudal lord.

In fact, in the feudal system, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the system was built in such a way as to withdraw the maximum surplus from the subjects, leaving them at their disposal only the minimum of products and resources necessary for survival. After that, part of the seized surplus was given to a higher level as payment for the right to feed from the territory given to the feudal lord.

If the feudal lord leaves the population a little more of the product produced than is necessary for survival, then he becomes a "good master" or "just king." If less food is left than is required for survival, then sooner or later the population revolts.

Under the feudal system, the feudal class controls the bulk of the surplus produced. At the same time, within the class of feudal lords there is an internal hierarchy and the redistribution of the seized surplus resources from lower levels to higher ones.

As we have already found out above, it is under the feudal system that money in the form of metal coins begins to be actively used in the tax system. And since each feudal lord actually has his own tax system, each feudal lord begins to issue his own coins to ensure it, on which he depicts his own attributes.

Continuation