300
PARTISAN REVIEW
the production of exchange values into a production for use.
13
The
production of "use-values" today, that is, production carried on
according to the demands of crisis and war, without apparent
regard for profitability, still serves only the production of profits,
or rather is intended to serve such purposes. It is a sort of "invest·
ment," an advance of capital for future returns. The apparent
loss, it is hoped, will be compensated for at a later date; just as
many enterprisers in former times, provided they had sufficient
reserves, sold below production cost in order to sell above "value"
at another time. The barter system, too, has changed nothing in
the capitalist manner of exchange; less labor is still bartered for
more labor.
u.
These changes in market relations do not indicate the begin–
ning of a consciously regulated social system so long as the class
relations behind the market relations continue to determine pro–
duction and distribution.
Class r.elations are market relations be–
tween capital
and
labor.
This market is nowhere disturbed and no
one seems to have any intention of ending it. The market on which
labor power is sold and bought is the
only market that determines
production.
The fact that labor is no longer "free" in the sense
that it was "free" in liberal capitalism, the fact that it can now be
drafted whenever the state thinks it necessary, that it can be
ordered from place to place just as the government sees fit, that
it can no longer choose its employment at will, all these and other
restrictions do not invalidate the fact that labor is also still "free"
from all productive property, that its power to produce is still a
commodity bought by governments at a price.
The
whole
of the capitalist market-except the market-rela–
tions between capital and labor-may disappear without affecting
the capitalist form of production at all. The market-relation
between capital and labor is the only capitalist relation
per se.
Short of its abolition the historically qeveloped form of production
for human exploitation that has been called capitalism cannot
disappear.
11
Manya Gordon in her book
Workers Before and After Lenin
(p. 180) quotes
Premier Molotov as saying in 1932: "It is necessary to oppose vehemently all thoie
who believe that socialism means production for use."
"According to the U. S. Department of Commerce
Economic Review of Foreign
Countries in 1939 and 1940,
Germany's balance of trade, even under war conditions,
has become more favorable than it was before the war. The· Reich was enabled to
reduce its clearing indebtedness in many countries.
