142b-III. Islam Politik, Ekonomi Syariah dan Imperialisme — Bagian III. Ekonomi Islam dalam Tilikan Teori Nilai Kerja (Lanjutan hlm 142a-III)

Islam Politik, Ekonomi Syariah

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Imperialisme

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Bagian III. Ekonomi Islam dalam Tilikan Teori Nilai Kerja

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Oleh HM Isbakh

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[Alinea-alinea terakhir tulisan sebelumnya hlm 142a-III — Red DK *]

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Karena bunga bank ditolak, maka sumber pendapatan dari para pekerja sektor perbankan menurut Siddiqi berasal dari komisi atau imbal jasa atas pekerjaan administratif mereka.

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“… the cost of bank administration should be met out of the revenue from commission and fees only, so that profit earned through advancing depositor’s money are not affected.” [Siddiqi, 1994, hal. 27]¹³

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Bagian ini akan kita tutup dengan memerhatikan bahwa meski ekonom Islam mengglorifikasi kekuatan dari larangan Riba, yang ditafsirkan secara sempit sebagai penghapusan bunga (bank), sistem ekonomi Islam itu sendiri tidak menolak penciptaan keuntungan (profit) kapitalisme.

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Dengan penerimaan terhadap profit tersebut, maka secara terselebung mereka menerima penambahan nilai kapital (atau dengan bahasa lain “diskon” nilai masa depan atas kapital). Dalam hal “kontribusi” ekonom Islam ini Siddiqi menegaskan dengan lantang:

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“Another contribution of some significance has been the affirmation that there is nothing un-Islamic about discounting future values e.g. future yield of capital goods, to their present values and that the expected rate of return on equity and not the rate of interest is the proper factor to discount with.” [Siddiqi, 1994, hal. 41]¹³

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Kritik Teori Nilai Kerja atas Larangan Riba (Bunga)

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[Berlanjut ke … simak/klik hlm 142b-III— Red DK]

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Serial Tulisan HM Isbakh:

Islam Politik, Ekonomi Syariah dan Imperialisme

(Empat Bagian/Bagian IV 3-Sub-Bagian)

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Bagian I. Islam Politik dan Imperialisme

 hlm 132a-I & hlm 132b-I 

Bagian II. Syariah Dipandang dari Perspektif Sejarah Material

 hlm 135a-II, hlm 135b-II & hlm 135c-II  

Bagian III. Ekonomi Islam dalam Tilikan Teori Nilai Kerja

 hlm 142a-III, hlm 142b-III & hlm 142c-III 

Sub-Bagian IVa. Asal-Usul dan Transformasi Islam Politik di Indonesia Dari Abad ke-13 Hingga Abad ke-19

 hlm 153a-IVa & hlm 153b-IVa  

Sub-Bagian IVb. Sastra Melayu: Islamisasi dan Ideologi

 hlm 159a-IVb

Sub-Bagian IVc. Perkembangan Politik Islam Indonesia Abad ke-20

 hlm 160a-IVc & hlm 160b-IVc

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Kritik Teori Nilai Kerja atas Larangan Riba (Bunga)

Dari uraian di atas tampak bahwa konsep riba yang diacu pada ekonomi Islam adalah suatu “tambahan” harga yang tidak wajar atas nilai komoditas. Dan berlaku di manakah tambahan harga tersebut?

Tambahan harga tersebut bukan terjadi pada wilayah produksi, melainkan pada wilayah sirkulasi (transaksi). Pada saat seseorang membeli jasa atau barang si penjual meningkatkan harga komoditas yang ia jual.

Kemudian secara khusus praktik riba pada uang yang dipinjamkan dikutuk (meski secara real dilakukan dengan cara tersamar sebagaimana ditunjukan di atas). Seruan ekonomi Islam menolak riba yang ditafsirkan sebagai menolak bunga tampak seolah-olah menohok ke jantung kapitalisme. Kemudian mereka menunjuk bunga adalah sumber kejahatan dalam kapitalisme, penyebab orang menimbun uang dan berspekulasi.

Akan tetapi melalui teori nilai kerja kita disadarkan bahwa eksploitasi berlangsung bukan saat pedagang menaikan harga jual dari harga beli barang, melainkan saat kapitalis memeras kerja buruhnya.

Nilai lebih yang diisap dari kerja buruh kemudian didistribusikan kepada kelas penindas dalam bentuk profit untuk kapitalis dan sewa (rent) kepada pemilik tanah.

Jadi kritik ekonomi Islam yang menolak bunga tanpa menolak sistem penciptaan nilai lebih merupakan kritik yang salah sasaran dan tidak berdampak pada ketidakadilan kapitalisme yang berlangsung.

Para bankir yang hidup dari bunga akan mudah berkelit, ketika bunga dihapus, dengan menetapkan biaya jasa yang tinggi atas upah mereka. Dan upah tersebut dapat berkali-kali lipat lebih tinggi dari pada buruh, meski jam kerja mereka tidak lebih panjang daripada jam kerja buruh.

Dan kapitalis industrial pun bersedia membayar dari sebagian porsi profit mereka, mengingat pentingnya jasa mereka dalam sirkulasi kapital.

Hal tersebut dimungkinkan sebab ekonomi Islam tidak memberikan batasan tertentu akan upah pekerja. Upah buruh adalah biaya hidup minimal. Bagaimana dengan “upah” bankir ketika bunga “dihapus”? Jangan-jangan kita akan terjebak dalam praktik bunga tersamar lagi dalam imbal jasa bankir yang selangit.

Kemudian pendekatan sejarah material atas teori nilai kerja juga memerlihatkan bahwa timbunan uang dan perbankan dengan sistem kredit dan bunganya merupakan tuntutan perkembangan kapitalisme.

Corak produksi kapitalisme modern tidak akan berlangsung tanpa adanya modal awal yang besar untuk mengorganisasi alat-alat produksi raksasa di pabrik-pabrik, untuk itu dana simpanan dalam bank merupakan tuntutan kapitalisme modern.

Pada awalnya timbunan uang yang besar tersebut umumnya berada dalam bank-bank negara Eropa yang diperolehnya melalui akumulasi primitif di era merkantilisme.

Dengan adanya tuntutan kapital minimal yang besar untuk menjalankan suatu industri, maka produksi dalam kapitalisme semakin tergantung pada kredit karena usaha tersebut nyaris mustahil dijalankan dari dana milik seseorang.

Kapital oleh karena itu timbunan uang dan bunga bukanlah produk kebejatan manusia, melainkan produk keniscayaan historis.

Dua tema utama yang akan dikritisi teori nilai kerja kepada ekonomi Islam ialah: pertama, memerlihatkan sumber eksploitasi manusia bukan dari penipuan atau kejahatan pedagang yang menerapkan riba, melainkan pada eksploitasi kerja buruh; kedua, memerlihatkan bahwa bunga dalam sistem kredit adalah salah satu syarat historis kapitalisme modern bukan penyimpangan moralitas pelaku ekonomi

1. Tambahan Atau Nilai Lebih Berasal dari Eksploitasi Terhadap Kerja Buruh

Pada bagian ini uraian teori nilai kerja dibagi dalam beberapa tahapan.

Pertama, menjelaskan bahwa dalam transaksi dagang dalam wilayah sirkulasi kapital merupakan pertukaran antar kesetaraan sehingga tidak ada riba yang dihasilkan dalam aktivitas perdagangan;

kedua menjelaskan asal usul nilai lebih atau profit industri berasal dari eksploitas tenaga kerja buruh oleh kapitalis;

ketiga menjelaskan bahwa profit-profit dalam sektor perdagangan dan keuangan berasal dari potongan profit industri.

Dengan kata lain profit seluruh sektor dalam kapitalisme berasal dari eksploitasi buruh yang bekerja dalam sektor industrial.

1.1. Pertukaran Antar Kesetaraan dalam Perdagangan

Teori nilai kerja memandang proses eksploitasi berlangsung pada saat proses produksi berlangsung bukan hanya pada saat komoditas pertukaran.

Meski dapat terjadi situasi di mana penjual menaikan harga, namun dalam asumsi umum baik penjual maupun pembeli mengetahui informasi mengenai nilai barang, maka pertukaran yang terjadi adalah pertukaran antar barang yang setara nilai.

Adapun sumber salah kaprah yang selama ini terjadi ialah, kita menganggap bahwa keuntungan dagang dihasilkan dalam wilayah sirkulasi atau dalam proses transaksi penjual dengan pembeli di pasar.

Persepsi bahwa dalam perdagangan pedagang membeli barang dengan murah dan menjual dengan mahal masih kuat terpatri dalam benak kebanyakan orang.

Akibatnya yang terjadi kesesatan berpikir bahwa aktivitas perdagangan adalah keuntungan. Bila pedagang menambahkan harga terhadap harga barang yang sebelumnya ia beli, rentenir menambahkan bunga atas uang awal yang pinjamkan, maka itulah Riba (dalam arti tambahan dari harga yang sebenarnya). Dan Riba ditemukan pada pasar.

“Buying in order to sell, or more accurately, buying in order to sell dearer, M – C – M’, appears certainly to be a form peculiar to one kind of capital alone, namely, merchant’s capital.

But industrial capital too is money, that is changed into commodities, and by the sale of these commodities, is re-converted into more money.

The events that take place outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between buying and selling, do not affect the form of this movement. Lastly, in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M – C – M’ appears abridged. We have its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M – M’, ‘en style lapidaire’ so to to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater than itself.

M – C – M’ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.” [Karl Marx, Capital I, hal. 155]¹³

Dalam kutipan di atas, Marx menunjukan bahwa dalam wilayah sirkulasi seolah-olah kapital dagang (merchant) dan kapital pembawa-bunga (interest-bearing) menciptakan uang yang lebih banyak.

Sirkuit kapital dari uang awal (M) menuju ke uang berikutnya yang lebih besar (M’), dilalui lewat jalan M – C – M’ untuk kapital dagang dan M – M’ untuk kapital pembawa-bunga.

Pedagang memulai bisnisnya dari modal M untuk membeli komoditas (C) dan kemudian menjual komoditasnya dengan harga yang lebih tinggai sehingga ia menghasilkan uang yang lebih banyak (M’> M). Sedangkan seorang rentenir memperoleh uang lebih banyak dengan cara meminjamkan uangnya (M) dalam periode tertentu kepada peminjam yang harus mengembalikan uang tersebut dalam jumlah yang lebih banyak (M’).

Salah persepsi di atas mengarahkan orang kepada pemikiran bahwa sumber dari Riba (proses penambahan M ke M’) terjadi pada aktivitas dagang atau peminjaman uang.

Akan tetapi para ekonom klasik seperti Adam Smith dan David Ricardo yang kemudian dipergunakan oleh Marx telah menunjukan bahwa proses penciptaan nilai lebih bukan terjadi pada wilayah sirkulasi komoditas saja melainkan pada wilayah baik sirkulasi maupun produksi.

Yang terjadi pada wilayah sirkulasi hanyalah suatu pertukaran antar kesetaraan.

Hal ini terjadi dalam pertukaran komoditas yang bukan merupakan tenaga kerja. Dan pada wilayah sirkulasi, penciptaan nilai bersumber hanya dari jual-beli komoditas khusus yang disebut tenaga kerja (labour power).

“Abstractedly considered, that is, apart from circumstances not immediately flowing from the laws of the simple circulation of commodities, there is in an exchange nothing (if we except the replacing of one use-value by another) but a metamorphosis, a mere change in the form of the commodity.

The same exchange-value, i.e., the same quantity of incorporated social labour, remains throughout in the hands of the owner of the commodity, first in the shape of his own commodity, then in the form of the money for which he exchanged it, and lastly, in the shape of commodity he buys with that money.

This change of form does not imply a change in the magnitude of the value. But the change, which the value of the commodity undergoes this process, is limited to a change in its money-form.

This form exists first as the the price of the commodity offered for sale, then as actual sum of money, which, however, was already expressed in the price, and lastly, as the price of an equivalent commodity.

This change of form no more implies, taken alone, a change in the quantity of value, than does the change of a £5 in to sovereigns, half sovereign and shillings.

So far therefore as the circulation of commodities effects a change in the form alone of their values, and is free from disturbing influences, it must be the exchange of equivalent.

Little as vulgar-economy knows about the nature of value, yet whenever its wishes to consider the phenomena of circulation in their purity, it assumes that supply and demand are equal, which amounts to this, that their effect is nil.

If therefore, as regards the use-values exchanges, both buyer and seller may possibly gain something, this is not the case as regard exchange-values.

Here we must rather say, ‘Where equality exist there can be no gain’. It is true, commodities may be sold at price deviating from their values, but these deviations are to considered as infarction of the laws of the exchange of commodities, which in its normal state is an exchange of equivalents, consequently, no method for increasing value.

… Apart from circulation, the commodity owner is in relation only with his own commodity. So far as regard value, that relation is limited to this, that the commodity contains a quantity of his own labour, that quantity being measured by definite social standard.

This quantity is expressed by the value of commodity, and since the value is reckoned in money of account, this quantity is also expressed by the price, which we will supposed to be £10.

But his labour is not represented both by the value of commodity, and by a surplus over that value, not by price of 10 that is also a price of 11, not by a value that is greater than itself.

The commodity owner can, by his labour, create value, but not self-expanding value. He can increase the value of his commodity, by adding fresh labour, and therefore more value to the value in hand, by making, for instance, leather into boots.

The same material has now more value because it contain a greater quantity of labour.

The boots have therefore more value than the leather, but the value of leather what it was; it has not expanded itself, has not, during making of the boots, annexed surplus-value.

It is therefore impossible that outside the sphere of circulation, a producer of commodities can, without coming into contact with other commodity-owners, expand value, and consequently convert money or commodities into capital.

It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and its equally impossible for it to originate apart form circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.

We have, therefore, a double result.

The conversion of money into capital has to be explained on the basis of the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, in such a way that the starting-point is the exchange of equivalents.

Our friends, Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist, must buy his commodities at their value, must sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process must withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at starting.

His development into full-grown capitalist must take place, both within the sphere of circulation and without it.” [Marx, Capital I, hal. 158 – 159, 165 – 166]¹⁴

Dalam kutipan Marx di atas disebutkan bahwa penciptaan (dan penambahan) nilai terjadi dari kerja. Ini berarti bahwa proses tersebut berlangsung dalam wilayah produksi.

Tetapi mengapa Marx mengatakan bahwa proses tersebut juga berasal dari wilayah sirkulasi. Hal itu disebabkan karena untuk menjadi kapitalis, kawan kita, si Koper-uang (Moneybags), pertama-tama harus membeli komoditas yang khusus dari pasar, yaitu tenaga kerja. Kekhususan dari komoditas ini ialah nilai-pakainya merupakan sumber dari nilai.

1.2. Eksploitasi Tenaga Kerja Buruh Sebagai Sumber Nilai Tambah (Profit)

“In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commoditiy in capacity for labour or labour-power.” [Marx, Capital I, hal. 167]¹⁴

Terlepas dari wilayah sirkulasi, konsumsi nilai pakai tenaga kerja dalam proses produksi komoditas merupakan sumber penciptaan nilai yang sebenarnya.

Perlu dicatat di sini bahwa kapitalis membeli tenaga kerja buruhnya dengan membayar biaya kebutuhan hidupnya (dalam bentuk upah minimal untuk bertahan hidup).

Akan tetapi ia mempekerjakan buruhnya lebih dari nilai biaya subsistensinya.

Dengan demikian eksploitasi yang terjadi sesungguhnya saat kapitalis menambah jam kerja buruh melebihi nilai biaya subsistensinya.

Di sini kami merasa perlu mengutip lebih panjang tentang penjelasan teori nilai kerja yang mahapenting ini:

“Let us examine the matter more closely.

The value of a day’s labour-power amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is embodied in that quantity of labour-power, i.e., because the means of subsistence that are daily required for the production of labor-power, cost half a day’s labour.

But the past labour that is embodied in the labour power, and the living labour that it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining it, and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things.

The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value.

The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day.

Therefore, the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in labour process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour power.

The useful qualities that labour-power possesses, and by virtue of which it makes yarn of boots, were to him nothing more than a condition sine qua non; for in order to create, labour must be expended in a useful manner.

What really influence him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but more value than it has itself.

This is the special service that the capitalist expects from labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the ‘eternal law’ of the exchange of commodities.

The seller of labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes its exchange-value, and parts with its use-value. He cannot take the one without giving the other.

The use-value of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belong just as little to its seller, as the use value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who has sold it.

The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power, his, therefore, is the use of it for a day; a day’s labour belong to him.

The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller.

Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the cause of his laughter.

The labourer therefore find, in workshop, the means of production necessary for working, not only during six, but during twelve hours. Just as during the six hour’s process our 10 lbs. of cotton absorbed six hour’s labour, and became 10 lbs. of yarn, so on, 20 lbs. of cotton will absorb 12 hour’s of labour and be changed into 20 lbs. of yarn. Let us now examine the product of this prolonged process.

There is now materialized in this 20 lbs. of yarn the labour of five days, of which four days are due to cotton and the lost steel of the spindle, the remaining days having been absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process.

Expressed in gold, the labour of five days is thirty shillings. This is therefore the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn, giving, as before, eighteenpence as the price of a pound. But the sum of the values of the commodities that entered into the process amounts to 27 shillings.

The value of the yarn is 30 shillings. Therefore the value of the product is 1/9 greater than the value advanced for its production; 27 shillings have been transformed into 30 shillings; a surplus-value of 3 shillings has been created. The trick has at last succeded; money has been converted into capital.

Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that regulated the exchange of commodities, have been in no ways violated.

Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent.

For the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full power. He then did what is done by every purchasher of commodities; he consumed their use-value.

The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the process of producing commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn, having value of 30 shillings.

The capitalist, formerly a buyer, now return to the market as a seller, of commodities. He sell his yarn at eighteenpence a pound, which is its exact value.

Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings more from circulation than he originally threw into it.

This metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, take place both within the sphere of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation, because what is done within it is only stepping-stone to the production of surplus-value, a process which is entirely confined to everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds the sphere of production.

Thus ‘tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.’ [everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds]

By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialized, and dead labour in capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.” [Marx, Capital I, hal. 193 – 195]¹⁴

Nilai lebih (profit) diperoleh saat kapitalis menggunakan nilai pakai tenaga kerja melebihi nilai tukarnya.

Nilai tukar tenaga kerja adalah nilai yang setara dengan nilai kebutuhan minimum buruh memertahankan hidupnya yang dikonversi dalam jam kerja.

Dalam ilustrasi Marx di atas, waktu kerja yang diperlukan buruh untuk memertahankan hidupnya sebenarnya adalah 6 jam namun kapitalis memerkerjakan buruh selama 12 jam (not only during six, but during twelve hours).

Berarti kapitalis menambahkan kerja buruh 2 kali lipat dari semestinya. Demikian pula jika biaya 6 jam kerja dalam ilustrasi Marx di atas adalah 3 shilling, maka 6 jam berikutnya di mana buruh bekerja gratis untuk kapitalis juga bernilai 3 shilling yang diambil sebagai nilai lebih (profit) bagi kapitalis.

Dari 12 jam kerja buruh tercipta 20 pon (lbs) kain (yarn) yang bernilai 30 shilling. Seluruh biaya produksi adalah bernilai 27 shilling di mana 3 shilling merupakan biaya untuk upah sehingga 24 shilling sisanya adalah biaya untuk alat-alat produksi.

Sesungguhnya bila kita berbicara dalam terminologi Islam, riba yang sebenarnya terjadi saat kapitalis menambahkan waktu kerja buruh melebihi waktu kerja yang setara dengan nilai kebutuhan hidupnya.

Tambahan waktu kerja ini benar-benar bersifat terselubung, menipu dan jahat.

Penolakan riba mestinya diarahkan kepada sistem produksi nilai lebih dalam kapitalisme, bukan melestarikan nilai lebih yang kemudian didistribusikan dalam sistem bagi hasil.

1.3. Profit Dagang dan Profit Sektor Keuangan Berasal dari Profit Sektor Industri (Eksploitasi Tenaga Kerja Buruh Sektor Industri)

Dengan menunjukan bahwa asal-usul profit bersumber dari kerja buruh pada wilayah produksi (sektor industri), demikian pula Marx menunjukan bahwa sumber profit dagang (kapital komersial) dan bunga (bank) juga merupakan bagian dari nilai lebih yang diciptakan buruh.

“Suppose, the total industrial capital advanced in the course of the year = 720c + 180v = 900 (say million £), and that s’ = 100%. The product therefore = 720c + 180v + 180s.

Let us call this product or the produced commodity-capital, C, whose value, or price of production (since both are identical for the totality of commodities) = 1,080, and the rate of profit for the total social capital of 900 = 20%. These 20% are, according to our earlier analyses, the average rate of profit, since the surplus-value is not calculated here on this or that capital of any particular composition, but on the total industrial capital of average composition.

Thus, C = 1,080, and the rate of profit = 20%.

Let us now assume, however, that aside from these £900 of industrial capital, there are still £100 of merchant’s capital, which shares in the profit pro rata to its magnitude just as the former.

According to our assumption, it is 1/10 of the total capital of 1,000. Therefore, it participates to the extent of 1/10 in the total surplus-value of 180, and thus secures a profit of 18%.

Actually, then, the profit to be distributed among the other 1/10 of the total capital is only = 162, or on the capital of 900 likewise = 18%.

Hence, the price at which C is sold by the owners of the industrial capital of 900 to the merchants = 720c + 180v + 162s = 1,062.

If the dealer then adds the average profit of 18% to his capital of 100, he sells the commodities at 1,062 + 18 = 1,080, i.e., at their price of production, or, from the standpoint of the total commodity-capital, at their value, although he makes his profit only during and through the circulation process, and only from an excess of his selling price over his purchase price.

Yet he does not sell the commodities above their value, or above their price of production, precisely because he has bought them from the industrial capitalist below their value, or below their price of production.

Thus, merchant’s capital enters the formation of the general rate of profit as a determinant pro rata to its part in the total capital.

Hence, if we say in the given case that the average rate of profit = 18%, it would = 20%, if it were not that 1/10 of the total capital was merchant’s capital and the general rate of profit thereby lowered by 1/10.

This leads to a closer and more comprehensive definition of the price of production.

By price of production we mean, just as before, the price of a commodity = its costs (the value of the constant + variable capital contained in it) + the average profit.

But this average profit is now determined differently. It is determined by the total profit produced by the total productive capital; but not as calculated on the total productive capital alone, so that if this = 900, as assumed above, and the profit = 180, then the average rate of profit = 180/900 = 20%.

But, rather, as calculated on the total productive + merchant’s capital, so that with 900 productive and 100 merchant’s capital, the average rate of profit = 180/1,000 = 18%.

The price of production is, therefore = k (the costs) + 18, instead of k + 20.

The share of the total profit falling to merchant’s capital is thus included in the average rate of profit. The actual value, or price of production, of the total commodity-capital is therefore = k + p + m (where m is commercial profit).

The price of production, or the price at which the industrial capitalist as such sells his commodities, is thus smaller than the actual price of production of the commodity; or in terms of all commodities taken together, the prices at which the class of industrial capitalists sell their commodities are lower than their value.

Hence, in the above case, 900 (costs) + 18% on 900, or 900 + 162= 1,062.

It follows, then, that in selling a commodity at 118 for which he paid 100 the merchant does, indeed, add 18% to the price. But since this commodity, for which he paid 100, is really worth 118, he does not sell it above its value.

We shall henceforth use the term price of production in this, its more precise, sense.

It is evident, therefore, that the profit of the industrial capitalist equals the excess of the price of production of the commodity over its costprice, and that commercial profit, as distinct from this industrial profit, equals the excess of the selling price over the price of production of the commodity which, for the merchant, is its purchase price;

but that the actual price of the commodity = its price of production + the commercial profit. Just as industrial capital realises only such profits as already exist in the value of commodities as surplus-value, so merchant’s capital realises profits only because the entire surplus-value, or profit, has not as yet been fully realised in the price charged for the commodities by the industrial capitalist.

The merchant’s selling price thus exceeds the purchase price not because the former exceeds the total value, but because the latter is below this value.

Merchant’s capital, therefore, participates in levelling surplus-value to average profit, although it does not take part in its production.

Thus, the general rate of profit contains a deduction from surplus-value due to merchant’s capital, hence a deduction from the profit of industrial capital.” [Karl Marx, Capital III, hal. 197 – 198]¹⁵

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(Catatan penulis: dalam ilustrasi Marx di atas 720c adalah simbol untuk menandakan besarnya investasi dalam kapital konstan (c) untuk alat-alat produksi yakni sebesar 720 juta pound sterling sedangkan 180v adalah besarnya investasi dalam kapital variabel (v) berupa upah buruh sebesar 180 juta pound sterling; dan 180s menyimbolkan besarnya nilai lebih (s) atau keuntungan kapitalis yang diperoleh, yakni 180 juta pound sterling; s’ menandakan tingkat nilai lebih yang menandakan tingkat eksploitasi terhadap buruh yang diperoleh dari rasio nilai kapital variabel terhadap nilai lebih atau v/s.

Dalam ilustrasi di atas 180/180 = 100%. Demikian dalam ilustrasi sebelumnya s’ = 6 jam / 6 jam = 3 shilling / 3 shilling = 100%.

Tingkat nilai lebih perlu dibedakan dengan tingkat profit atau rate of profit yang diperoleh dari rasio antara nilai lebih dengan seluruh modal industri atau s/(c + v))

———

Demikian pula pada bunga atau kapital pembawa-bunga, Marx menunjukan bahwa bunga berasal dari profit industri.

“Let us first consider the singular circulation of interest-bearing capital. We shall then secondly have to analyse the peculiar manner in which it is sold as a commodity, namely loaned instead of relinquished once and for all.

The point of departure is the money which A advances to B. This may be done with or without security.

The first-named form, however, is the more ancient, save advances on commodities or paper, such as bills of exchange, shares, etc. These special forms do not concern us at this point. We are dealing here with interest-bearing capital in its usual form.

In B’s possession the money is actually converted into capital, passes through M – C – M’ and returns to A as M’, as M+ΔM, where ΔM represents the interest. For the sake of simplicity we shall not consider here the case, in which capital remains in B’s possession for a long term and interest is paid at regular intervals.

The movement, therefore, is

M – M – C – M’ – M’.

What appears duplicated here, is 1) the outlay of money as capital, and 2) its reflux as realised capital, as M’ or M+ΔM.

In the movement of merchant’s capital, M – C – M’, the same commodity changes hands twice, or more than twice, if merchant sells to merchant. But every such change of place of the same commodity indicates a metamorphosis, a purchase or sale of the commodity, no matter how often the process may be repeated, until it enters consumption.

On the other hand, the same money changes hands twice in C – M – C, but this indicates the complete metamorphosis of the commodity, which is first converted into money and then from money back into another commodity.

But in interest-bearing capital the first time M changes hands is by no means a phase either of the commodity metamorphosis, or of reproduction of capital. It first becomes one when it is expended a second time, in the hands of the active capitalist who carries on trade with it, or transforms it into productive capital.

M’s first change of hands does not express anything here, beyond its transfer from A to B – a transfer which usually takes place under certain legal forms and stipulations.

This double outlay of money as capital, of which the first is merely a transfer from A to B, is matched by its double reflux. As M’, or M + ΔM, it flows back out of the process to B, the person acting as capitalist.

The latter then transfers it back to A, but together with a part of the profit, as realised capital, as M + ΔM, in which ΔM is not the entire profit, but only a portion of the profit – the interest. It flows back to B only as what he had expended, as functioning capital, but as the property of A.

To make its reflux complete, B must consequently return it to A. But in addition to the capital, B must also turn over to A a portion of the profit, a part which goes under the name of interest, which he had made with this capital since A had given him the money only as a capital, i.e., as value which is not only preserved in its movement, but also creates surplus-value for its owner.

It remains in B’s hands only so long as it is functioning capital. And with its reflux – on the stipulated date – it ceases to function as capital. When no longer acting as capital, however, it must again be returned to A, who had never ceased being its legal owner.

The form of lending, which is peculiar to this commodity, to capital as commodity, and which also occurs in other transactions instead of that of sale, follows from the simple definition that capital obtains here as a commodity, or that money as capital becomes a commodity.” [Marx, Capital III, hal. 231 – 232]¹⁴

Karena bunga merupakan bagian dari profit, maka sebagai konsekuensinya besar bunga tidak akan melebih profit industri.

“Since interest is merely a part of profit paid, according to our earlier assumption, by the industrial capitalist to the money-capitalist, the maximum limit of interest is the profit itself, in which case the portion pocketed by the productive capitalist would = 0.

Aside from exceptional cases, in which interest might actually be larger than profit, but then could not be paid out of the profit, one might consider as the maximum limit of interest the total profit minus the portion (to be subsequently analysed) which resolves itself into wages of superintendence.

The minimum limit of interest is altogether indeterminable. It may fall to any low. Yet in that case there will always be counteracting influences to raise it again above this relative minimum.

Let us first assume that there is a fixed relation between the total profit and that part of it which has to be paid as interest to the money-capitalist.

It is then clear that the interest will rise or fall with the total profit, and the latter is determined by the general rate of profit and its fluctuations.

For instance, if the average rate of profit were = 20% and the interest = ¼ of the profit, the rate of interest would = 5%; if the average rate of profit were = 16%, the rate of interest would = 4%.

With the rate of profit at 20%, the rate of interest might rise to 8%, and the industrial capitalist would still make the same profit as he would at a rate of profit = 16% and a rate of interest = 4%, namely 12%.

Should interest rise only to 6% or 7%, he would still keep a larger share of the profit. If the interest amounted to a constant quota of the average profit, it would follow that the higher the general rate of profit, the greater the absolute difference between the total profit and the interest, and the greater the portion of the total profit pocketed by the productive capitalist, and vice versa.

Take it that interest = 1/5 of the average profit. One-fifth of 10 is 2; the difference between total profit and interest = 8. One-fifth of 20 = 4; difference = 20 – 4 = 16; 1/5 of 25 = 5; difference = 25 – 5 = 20; 1/5 of 30 = 6; difference = 30 – 6 = 24; 1/5 of 35 = 7; difference = 35 – 7 = 28. The different rates of interest of 4, 5, 6, 7% would here always represent no more than 1/5, or 20% of the total profit.

If the rates of profit are different, therefore, different rates of interest may represent the same aliquot parts of the total profit, or the same percentage of the total profit.

With such constant proportions of interest, the industrial profit (the difference between the total profit and the interest) would rise proportionately to the general rate of profit, and conversely.

All other conditions taken as equal, i.e., assuming the proportion between interest and total profit to be more or less constant, the functioning capitalist is able and willing to pay a higher or lower interest directly proportional to the level of the rate of profit.

Since we have seen that the rate of profit is inversely proportional to the development of capitalist production, it follows that the higher or lower rate of interest in a country is in the same inverse proportion to the degree of industrial development, at least in so far as the difference in the rate of interest actually expresses the difference in the rates of profit.

It shall later develop that this need not always be the case. In this sense it may be said that interest is regulated through profit, or, more precisely, the general rate of profit. And this mode of regulating interest applies even to its average.

In any event the average rate of profit is to be regarded as the ultimate determinant of the maximum limit of interest.” [Karl Marx, Capital III, hal. 243 – 244]¹⁵

Teori nilai kerja menjelaskan bahwa seluruh nilai tambah dalam perekonomian dihasilkan dari kerja buruh. Semua profit baik sektor industri produktif, perdagangan, jasa dan bunga sektor keuangan serta sektor lainnya merupakan bagian dari profit industri.

Sementara itu nilai lebih industri diperoleh dari eksploitasi tenaga kerja buruh.

Menolak riba atau bunga namun tidak menolak sistem eksploitasi tenaga kerja buruh dalam kapitalisme sama saja melestarikan sistem eksploitasi tersebut.

2. Sistem Kredit, Bank dan Bunga Sebagai Kondisi Historis Kapitalisme Modern

Eksposisi pada bagian ini dibagi dalam tiga tahapan.

Pertama menjelaskan tuntutan produksi kapital yang semakin membesar dan membutuhkan modal yang besar.

Kedua menjelaskan kemunculan bank sebagai pemenuhan dalam memenuhi tuntutan produksi kapitalisme.

Ketiga menjelaskan fungsi kredit dalam produksi kapitalisme.

Dengan kata lain bank, bunga dan kredit adalah tuntutan historis kapitalisme sehingga mengeluarkan penjelasan moralis dalam corak produksinya.

2.1. Tuntutan Adanya Timbunan Kapital untuk Memenuhi Tingkat Produksi yang Semakin Meningkat dalam Kapitalisme

Timbunan kekayaan (hoarding) yang darinya lembaga keuangan bank didirikan muncul sebagai tuntutan historis kapitalisme dan bukan merupakan kehendak subyektif pemilik uang untuk menimbun uang.

Hal ini berbeda dengan beberapa masyarakat asiatik yang menimbun kekayaannya dalam kubur.

Sebagaimana kita pelajari di atas bahwa dalam siklus kapitalisme industrial, kapitalis memulai siklus dari sejumlah uang M dan kemudian diujung proses ia perlu merealisasi penjualan produknya untuk memeroleh sejumlah uang baru M’ yang lebih besar lagi.

Kita dapat memecah M’ menjadi M + m, di mana m adalah nilai lebih (keuntungan).

Untuk mengulangi produksi kembali dalam skala yang sama maka jumlah dana yang diperlukan adalah M bukan M’. Pertanyaannya ialah bagaimana dengan nasib nilai lebih m?

Di sini ada dua kemungkinan yang muncul.

Pertama, kapitalis dapat memutuskan untuk membelanjakan m untuk kepentingannya sendiri; kedua, menggunakan m dalam produksi dalam skala yang lebih besar lagi. Kapitalis di samping memulai produksi dari M dapat juga memulai dari M’ untuk memeroleh uang yang lebih besar lagi M’’.

Akan tetapi untuk berproduksi dalam skala yang lebih besar diperlukan syarat minimum modal.

Kapitalis dapat meningkatkan produksi dengan membeli mesin baru, menambah bahan baku dan merekrut tambahan pekerja baru. Jika m belum memenuhi syarat minimal modal yang diperlukan untuk skala produksi yang diperluas, maka m ditimbun sementara.

“Whether or not m, the surplus-value turned into money, is immediately added to the capital-value in process and is thus enabled to enter the circuit together with capital M now having the magnitude M’, depends on circumstances which are independent of the mere existence of m.

If m is to serve as money-capital in a second independent business, to be run side by side with the first, it is evident that it cannot be used for this purpose unless it is of the minimum size required for it.

And if it is intended to be used for the expansion of the original business, the relations between the material factors of P and their value-relations likewise demand a minimum magnitude for m.

All the means of production employed in this business have not only a qualitative but also a definite quantitative relation to one another, are proportionate in quantity.

These material relations as well as the pertinent value-relations of the factors entering into the productive capital determine the minimum magnitude m must possess to be capable of transformation into additional means of production and labour-power, or only into the former, as an accretion to the productive capital.

Thus the owner of a spinning-mill cannot increase the number of his spindles without at the same time purchasing a corresponding number of carders and roving frames, apart from the increased expenditure for cotton and wages which such an expansion of his business demands.

To carry this out the surplus-value must therefore have reached a considerable figure (generally calculated to be £1 per newly installed spindle).

If m does not reach this minimum size the circuit of capital must be repeated until the sum of m successively produced by it can function together with M, hence M’ — C’  .

Even mere changes of detail, for instance in the spinning machinery, introduced to make it more productive, require greater expenditures for spinning material, more roving machinery, etc. In the meantime m is accumulated, and its accumulation is not its own function but the result of repeated P …

Its own function consists in persisting in the money state until it receives sufficient increment from the repeated surplus-value-creating circuits, i.e., from outside, to possess the minimum magnitude necessary for its active function, the magnitude in which alone it can really enter as money-capital — in the case at hand as the accumulated part of the functioning of money-capital M — into the functioning of M.

But in the interim it is accumulated and exists only in the shape of a hoard in process of formation, of growth. Hence the accumulation of money, hoarding, appears here as a process by which real accumulation, the extension of the scale on which industrial capital operates, is temporarily accompanied.

Temporarily, for so long as the hoard remains in the condition of a hoard, it does not function as capital, does not take part in the process of creating surplus-value, remains a sum of money which grows only because money, come by without its doing anything, is thrown in the same coffer.

The form of a hoard is simply the form of money not in circulation, of money whose circulation has been interrupted and which is therefore fixed in its money-form. As for the process of hoarding, it is common to all commodity production and figures as an end in itself only in the undeveloped, pre-capitalist forms of this production.

In the present case, however, the hoard appears as a form of money-capital and the formation of a hoard as a process which temporarily accompanies the accumulation of capital because and so far as the money here figures as latent money-capital; because the formation of a hoard, the state of being a hoard, in which the surplus value existing in money-form finds itself, is a functionally determined preparatory stage gone through outside of the circuit described by the capital and required for the transformation of the surplus-value into really functioning capital.

By its definition it is therefore latent money-capital. Hence the size it must acquire before it can take part in the process is determined in each case by the value constitution of the productive capital. But so long as it remains in the condition of a hoard it does not yet perform the functions of money-capital but is still idle money-capital; not money-capital whose function has been interrupted, as was the case before, but money-capital not yet capable of performing it.

We are here discussing the accumulation of money in its original real form of an actual hoard of money. It may also exist in the form of a mere outstanding money, of claims on debtors by capitalists who have sold C’.

As for other forms in which this latent money-capital may exist in the meantime even in the shape of money-breeding money, such as interest-bearing bank deposits, bills of exchange or securities of any description, these do not belong here. Surplus value realized in the form of money in such cases performs special capital-functions outside the circuit described by the industrial capital which originated it — functions which in the first place have nothing to do with that circuit as such but which in the second place presuppose capital functions which differ from the functions of industrial capital and which have not yet been developed here.” [Marx, Capital Vol. II, hal. 82 – 84]¹⁶

———

(Catatan penulis: M’ — C’  adalah siklus kapital uang M’ ke komoditi C’ yang terdiri dari upah tenaga kerja (L) dan alat-alat produksi (MP).

Arti simbol tersebut adalah kapitalis memulai produksi berikutnya dalam skala yang lebih besar yakni M’ yang digunakan untuk membeli keperluan produksi berupa L dan MP)

——–

2.2.Tuntutan Historis Kehadiran Institusi Keuangan Bank

Dalam produksi, kapitalis perlu melakukan pembayaran kepada banyak pihak maupun sebaliknya menerima pembayaran dari pihak-pihak lainnya.

Secara keseluruhan aktivitas ini terlalu besar untuk dikerjakan oleh pelaku produksi sendiri sehingga di antara kapitalis perlu ada pembagian kerja kepada siapa urusan transaksi keuangan ditangani.

Lembaga keuangan bank dan kredit berkembang dikondisikan oleh faktor-faktor akumulasi timbunan uang, peningkatan skala transaksi keuangan dan barang (sirkulasi kapital) serta kecepatan daur produksi kapital.

Marx menjelaskan bagaimana proses historis kemunculan lembaga keuangan dan perkembangan kredit dalam Bab. XIX Kapital, Jilid III tentang money-dealing capital:

“The purely technical movements performed by money in the circulation process of industrial, and, as we may now add, of commercial capital (since it takes over a part of the circulation movement of industrial capital as its own, peculiar movement), if individualised as a function of some particular capital performing just these, and only these, operations as its specific operations, convert this capital into money-dealing capital.

A portion of industrial capital, and, more precisely, also of commercial capital, not only obtains all the time in the form of money, as money-capital in general, but as money-capital engaged precisely in these technical functions.

A definite part of the total capital dissociates itself from the rest and stands apart in the form of money-capital, whose capitalist function consists exclusively in performing these operations for the entire class of industrial and commercial capitalists. As in the case of commercial capital, a portion of industrial capital engaged in the circulation process in the form of money-capital separates from the rest and performs these operations of the reproduction process for all the other capital.

The movements of this money-capital are, therefore, once more merely movements of an individualised part of industrial capital engaged in the reproduction process. It is only when, and in so far as, capital is newly invested – which also applies to accumulation – that capital in money-form appears as the starting-point and the end result of the movement.

But for all capitals already engaged in the process, these first and last points appear merely as points of transit.

Since, as already seen in the case of simple commodity-circulation, from the moment of leaving the sphere of production to the moment of its re-entry industrial capital undergoes the metamorphosis C’ – M – C, M in fact represents the end result of one phase of the metamorphosis, just to become the starting-point of the reverse phase, which supplements it.

And although the C – M of industrial capital is always M – C – M for merchant’s capital, the actual process for the latter is continually also C – M – C once it has begun to function. But it performs the acts C – M and M – C simultaneously.

This is to say that there is not just one capital in the stage C – M while another is in the stage M – C, but that the same capital buys continually and sells continually at one and the same time because of the continuity of the production process. It is to be found always in both stages at one and the same time.

While one of its parts turns into money, later to be reconverted into commodities, another turns simultaneously into commodities, to be reconverted into money.

It all depends on the form of the commodity exchange whether the money serves here as a means of circulation or of payment. In both cases the capitalist has to pay out money constantly to many persons, and to receive money continually from many persons.

This purely technical operation of disbursing and receiving money is in itself labour which, as long as the money serves as a means of payment, necessitates drawing up payment balances and acts of balancing accounts.

This labour is a cost of circulation, i.e., not labour creating value. It is shortened in being carried out by a special section of agents, or capitalists, for the rest of the capitalist class.

A definite portion of the capital must be on hand constantly as a hoard, as potential money-capital – a reserve of means of purchase, a reserve of means of payment, and idle capital in the form of money waiting to be put to work.

 Another portion streams back continually in this form. Aside from collecting, paying, and book-keeping, this entails safekeeping the hoard, which is an operation all in itself.

It is, indeed, a continuous conversion of the hoard into means of circulation and means of payment, and its restoration by means of money secured through sales and from payments due.

This constant movement of the part of capital existing as money, dissociated from the function of capital itself, this purely technical function, causes its own labour and expense, classified as costs of circulation.

The division of labour brings it about that these technical operations, dependent upon the functions of capital, should be performed for the entire capitalist class as much as possible by a special section of agents or capitalists as their exclusive function – or that these operations should be concentrated in their hands.

We have here, as in merchant’s capital, division of labour in a twofold sense. It becomes a specialised business, and because performed as a specialised business for the money-mechanism of the whole class, it is concentrated and conducted on a large scale.

A further division of labour takes place within it, both through division into various independent branches, and through segmentation of work within these branches (large offices, numerous book-keepers and cashiers, and far-reaching division of labour).

Paying and receiving money, settling accounts, keeping current accounts, storing money, etc. – all this, dissociated from the acts necessitating these technical operations, makes money-dealing capital of the capital advanced for these functions.

The various operations, whose individualisation into specific businesses gives rise to the money trade, spring from the different purposes of money itself and from its functions, which capital in its money-form must therefore likewise carry out.

I have pointed out earlier that finance developed originally from the exchange of products between different communities. 

Trading in money, commerce in the money-commodity, first developed therefore out of international commerce.

Ever since different national coins have existed merchants buying in foreign countries have had to exchange their national coins for local coins, and vice versa, or to exchange different coins for uncoined pure silver or gold – the world-money.

Hence the exchange business which is to be regarded as one of the natural foundations of modern finance. Out of it developed banks of exchange, in which silver (or gold) serves as world-money – now called bank money or commercial money – as distinct from currency.

Exchange transactions, in the sense of mere notes of payment to travellers from a money-changer in one country to a changer in another country, developed back in Rome and Greece out of the actual money-changing.

Trading in gold and silver as commodities (raw materials for the making of luxury articles) is the natural basis of the bullion trade, or the trade which acts as a medium for the functions of money as universal money.

These functions, as previously explained (Buch I, Kap. III, 3, c [English edition: Ch. III, 3, c. – Ed.]), are two-fold: currency movement back and forth between the various national spheres of circulation in order to balance international payments and in connection with the migrations of capital in quest of interest; simultaneously, flow of precious metals from their sources of production via the world-market and their distribution among the various national spheres of circulation.

Goldsmiths acted as bankers still during the greater part of the 17th century in England.

We shall completely disregard the way in which the balancing of international accounts developed further in the bill jobbing, etc., and everything referring to transactions in valuable papers; in short, we shall leave out of consideration all special forms of the credit system, which do not as yet concern us here.

National money discards its local character in the capacity of universal money; one national currency is expressed in another, and thus all of them are finally reduced to their content of gold or silver, while the latter, being the two commodities circulating as world-money, are simultaneously reduced to their reciprocal value-ratio, which changes continually. It is this intermediate operation which the money trader makes his special occupation.

Money-changing and the bullion trade are thus the original forms of the money trade, and spring from the two-fold functions of money – as national money and world-money.

The capitalist process of production, just as commerce in general, even under pre-capitalist methods, imply:

First, the accumulation of money as a hoard, i.e., here as that part of capital which must always be on hand in the form of money as a reserve fund of means of payment and purchase.

This is the first form of a hoard, as it reappears under the capitalist mode of production, and as it appears generally with the development of merchant’s capital, at least for the purposes of this capital. Both remarks apply to national, as well as international, circulation.

The hoard is in continuous flux, pours ceaselessly into circulation, and returns ceaselessly from it. The second form of a hoard is that of idle, temporarily unemployed capital in the shape of money, including newly accumulated and not yet invested money-capital.

The functions entailed by this formation of a hoard are primarily those of safekeeping, bookkeeping, etc.

Secondly, however, this involves outlays of money for purchases, collecting money from sales, making and receiving payments, balancing payments, etc.

The money-dealer performs all these services at first as a simple cashier of the merchants and industrial capitalists. The money trade becomes fully developed, even in its first stages, as soon as its ordinary functions are supplemented by lending and borrowing and by credit.

Of this more in the next part, which deals with interest-bearing capital.

The bullion trade itself, the transfer of gold or silver from one country to another, is merely the result of trading in commodities.

It is determined by the rate of exchange which expresses the standing of international payments and the interest rates in the different markets. The bullion trader as such acts merely as an intermediary of the results.” [Marx, Capital, Vol. III, hal. 310 – 315]¹⁵

2.3. Fungsi Kredit dalam Kapitalisme

Di samping syarat produksi kapitalisme yang semakin bergantung kepada kredit, namun selanjutnya kredit itu sendiri mendorong perkembangan kapitalisme lebih lanjut.

Sistem kredit tersebut mendorong efisiensi transaksi dan semakin mensubordinasi sektor produktif di bawah sektor finansial. Marx menjelaskan fungsi kredit dalam kapitalisme pada Bab XXVII, Kapital, Jilid III¹⁵:

“The general remarks, which the credit system so far elicited from us, were the following:

1. Its necessary development to effect the equalisation of the rate of profit, or the movements of this equalisation, upon which the entire capitalist production rests.

2. Reduction of the costs of circulation.

1) One of the principal costs of circulation is money itself, being value in itself. It is economised through credit in three ways.

1. By dropping away entirely in a great many transactions.

2. By the accelerated circulation of the circulating medium. This corresponds in part with what is to be said under

2). On the one hand, the acceleration is technical; i.e., with the same magnitude and number of actual turnovers of commodities for consumption, a smaller quantity of money or money tokens performs the same service.

This is bound up with the technique of banking. On the other hand, credit accelerates the velocity of the metamorphoses of commodities and thereby the velocity of money circulation.

1. Substitution of paper for gold money.

2. Acceleration, by means of credit, of the individual phases of circulation or of the metamorphosis of commodities, later the metamorphosis of capital, and with it an acceleration of the process of reproduction in general. (On the other hand, credit helps to keep the acts of buying and selling longer apart and serves thereby as a basis for speculation.)

Contraction of reserve funds, which may be viewed in two ways: as a reduction of the circulating medium, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a reduction of that part of capital which must always exist in the form of money. 

3. Formation of stock companies. Thereby:

1) An enormous expansion of the scale of production and of enterprises, that was impossible for individual capitals. At the same time, enterprises that were formerly government enterprises, become public.

2) The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings.

It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.

3) Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people’s capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist.

Even if the dividends which they receive include the interest and the profit of enterprise, i.e., the total profit (for the salary of the manager is, or should be, simply the wage of a specific type of skilled labour, whose price is regulated in the labour-market like that of any other labour), this total profit is henceforth received only in the form of interest, i.e., as mere compensation for owning capital that now is entirely divorced from the function in the actual process of reproduction, just as this function in the person of the manager is divorced from ownership of capital.

Profit thus appears (no longer only that portion of it, the interest, which derives its justification from the profit of the borrower) as a mere appropriation of the surplus-labour of others, arising from the conversion of means of production into capital, i.e., from their alienation vis-à-vis the actual producer, from their antithesis as another’s property to every individual actually at work in production, from manager down to the last day-labourer.

In stock companies the function is divorced from capital ownership, hence also labour is entirely divorced from ownership of means of production and surplus-labour.

This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property.

On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions.

Before we go any further, there is still the following economically important fact to be noted: Since profit here assumes the pure form of interest, undertakings of this sort are still possible if they yield bare interest, and this is one of the causes, stemming the fall of the general rate of profit, since such undertakings, in which the ratio of constant capital to the variable is so enormous, do not necessarily enter into the equalisation of the general rate of profit.

[Since Marx wrote the above, new forms of industrial enterprises have developed, as we know, representing the second and third degree of stock companies.

The daily growing speed with which production may be enlarged in all fields of large-scale industry today, is offset by the evergreater slowness with which the market for these increased products expands.

What the former turns out in months, can scarcely be absorbed by the latter in years. Add to this the protective tariff policy, by which every industrial country shuts itself off from all others, particularly from England, and also artificially increases domestic production capacity.

The results are a general chronic over-production, depressed prices, falling and even wholly disappearing profits; in short, the old boasted freedom of competition has reached the end of its tether and must itself announce its obvious, scandalous bankruptcy.

And in every country this is taking place through the big industrialists of a certain branch joining in a cartel for the regulation of production. A committee fixes the quantity to be produced by each establishment and is the final authority for distributing the incoming orders.

Occasionally even international cartels were established, as between the English and German iron industries. But even this form of association in production did not suffice.

The antagonism of interests between the individual firms broke through it only too often, restoring competition.

This led in some branches, where the scale of production permitted, to the concentration of the entire production of that branch of industry in one big joint-stock company under single management.

This has been repeatedly effected in America; in Europe the biggest example so far is the United Alkali Trust, which has brought all British alkali production into the hands of a single business firm.

The former owners of the more than thirty individual plants have received shares for the appraised value of their entire establishments, totalling about £5 million, which represent the fixed capital of the trust.

The technical management remains in the same hands as before, but business control is concentrated in the hands of the general management. The floating capital, totalling about £1 million, was offered to the public for subscription.

The total capital is, therefore, £6 million. Thus, in this branch, which forms the basis of the whole chemical industry, competition has been replaced by monopoly in England, and the road has been paved, most gratifyingly, for future expropriation by the whole of society, the nation. – F.E.]

This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects.

It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.

1. side from the stock-company business, which represents the abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself and destroys private industry as it expands and invades new spheres of production, credit offers to the individual capitalist; or to one who is regarded a capitalist, absolute control within certain limits over the capital and property of others, and thereby over the labour of others.

The control over social capital, not the individual capital of his own, gives him control of social labour. The capital itself, which a man really owns or is supposed to own in the opinion of the public, becomes purely a basis for the superstructure of credit.

This is particularly true of wholesale commerce, through which the greatest portion of the social product passes. All standards of measurement, all excuses more or less still justified under capitalist production, disappear here.

What the speculating wholesale merchant risks is social property, not his own. Equally sordid becomes the phrase relating the origin of capital to savings, for what he demands is that others should save for him.

[Just as all France recently saved up one and a half billion francs for the Panama Canal swindlers. In fact, a description of the entire Panama swindle is here correctly anticipated, fully twenty years before it occurred. – F.E.]

The other phrase concerning abstention is squarely refuted by his luxury, which is now itself a means of credit. Conceptions which have some meaning on a less developed stage of capitalist production, become quite meaningless here.

Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves.

It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals.

With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter’s social property, much as they are their social products.

However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the aspect of pure adventurers.

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves.

There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form.

The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system.

But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.

They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.

Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production.

The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale.

The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.

So far we have considered the development of the credit system – and the implicit latent abolition of capitalist property – mainly with reference to industrial capital.

In the following chapters we shall consider credit with reference to interest-bearing capital as such, and to its effect on this capital, and the form it thereby assumes; and there are generally a few more specifically economic remarks still to be made.

But first this:

The credit system appears as the main lever of over-production and over-speculation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits, and is so forced because a large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner, who anxiously weighs the limitations of his private capital in so far as he handles it himself.

This simply demonstrates the fact that the self-expansion of capital based on the contradictory nature of capitalist production permits an actual free development only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes an immanent fetter and barrier to production, which are continually broken through by the credit system.

Hence, the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world-market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection.

At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction – crises – and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.

The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production.

It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Péreire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.”

Sistem kredit kapitalisme merupakan perkembangan kekuatan produksi yang menglobal yang jauh melampau kekuatan-kekuatan produksi dari corak-corak produksi sebelumnya seperti feodalisme dan perbudakan.

Marx menunjukan bahwa dalam perkembangan tersebut terdapat potensi untuk mengabolisi sistem kapitalisme di mana alat-alat produksi kini mustahil dimiliki oleh seorang kapitalis.

Dengan demikian solusi mengatasi krisis kapitalisme sudah terdapat dalam sistem kapitalisme itu sendiri dalam bentuk sosialisasi alat-alat produksi sehingga tidak perlu didatangkan dari luar sistem sebagaimana diusung oleh ekonom-ekonom Islam dalam teologi dan moralitasnya.

Kapitalisme dengan kontradiksinya menggali liang kuburnya sendiri.

Yang diperlukan adalah kajian ilmiah untuk memahami proses keruntuhan tersebut dan yang memberikan arahan praksis menyiapkan dunia baru dari benih yang mulai tumbuh dari sistem yang sudah sekarat itu.

Pandangan Ekonomi Islam tentang Risiko dan Solusinya

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[Berlanjut ke … silakan simak/klik hlm 142c-III — Red DK]

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Referensi

1. https://www.youthmanual.com/index.php/post/dunia-kuliah/jurusan-dan-perkuliahan/program-studi-ekonomi-islam-dengan-prospek-kerja-terbaik-beserta-pilihan-kampusnya, diakses 17 Juli 2019.
2. Munrokhim Misanam, Priyonggo Suseno, M. Bhekti Hendrieanto, Ekonomi Islam, Ditulis oleh Pusat Pengkajian dan Pengembangan Ekonomi Islam (P3EI) Universitas Islam Indonesia Yogyakarta atas kerja sama dengan Bank Indonesia, Rajawali Press, Depok, 2013.
3. Timur Kuran, Islam and Mammon. The Economic Predicament of Islamism, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2004.
4. Nagaoka Shinsuke, Critical Overview of the History of Islamic Economics: Formation, Transformation, and New Horizons, Asian and African Area Studies, 11(2): 114-136, 2012.
5. Mohammad Omar Farooq, Contemporary Islamic Economic Thought, dalam Contemporary Islamic Finance. Innovation, Application, and Best Practice, Karen Hunt-Ahmed (Ed.), The Kolb Series in Finance, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2013.
6. Adiwarman A. Karim, Ekonomi Mikro Islami, Penerbit Rajawali, 2007.
7. Adiwarman A. Karim, Ekonomi Makro Islami, Penerbit Rajawali, 2014
8. Obiyathulla Ismath Bacha & Abbas Mirakhor, Islamic Capital Market, John Wiley & Sons, Singapore, 2013
9. Mohammad Yusuf & Wiroso, Bisnis Syariah, Edisi 2, Mitra Wacana Media, 2011
10. I. Bacha & A. Mirakhor, Islamic Capital Market and Development, dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
11. Maxim Rodinson, Islam dan Kapitalisme, Penerbit Iqra, Bandung, 1982.
12. Cynthia Shawamreh, The Legal Framework of Islamic Finance, dalam Contemporary Islamic Finance. Innovation, Application, and Best Practice, Karen Hunt-Ahmed (Ed.), The Kolb Series in Finance, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2013.
13. Muhammad Nejatullah Siddiqi, Issues in Islamic Banking. Selected Papers, The Islamic Foundation, Leceister, 1983 (Reprinted 1994).
14. Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Foreign Publisher, Moscow, tanpa tahun.
15. Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, versi ebook diunduh dari https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf
16. Karl Marx, Capital Volume II, Foreign Publisher, Moscow, tanpa tahun.
17. Abbas Mirakhor & Wang Yong Bao, Epistemological Foundation of Finance: Islamic and Conventional, dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
18. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, Perkembangan Pemikiran Ekonomi. Buku I. Dasar Teori dalam Ekonomi Umum, Edisi 1, Cet. 1, Yayasan Obor Indonesia, Jakarta, 1991.
19. Allan H. Meltzer, Moneterisme dan Krisis Ilmu Ekonomi, dalam Krisis Teori Ekonomi, Daniel Bell & Irving Kristol (Ed.), Umar Juoro (Terj.), LP3ES, Jakarta, 1981
20. Andrew Sheng & Ajit Singh, Islamic Financial Revisited: Conceptual and Analitical Issues from The Perspective of Conventional Economics, dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
21. Nuri Erbaş & Abbas Mirakhor, The Foundational Market Principal of Islam, Knightian Uncertainty, and Economic Justice, dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
22. Hyman P. Minsky, Finantial Crises: Systemic or Idiosyncratic, Working Paper No. 51, (Prepared for presentation at “The Crises in Finance,” a Conference of The Jerome Levy Economics Institute Bard College), April 1991.
23. Hyman P. Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis, Working Paper No. 74, (Prepared for Handbook of Radical Political Economy, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, Edward Elgar: Aldershot, 1993), May 1992.
24. Karl Marx, Theory of Surplus Value, ditulis tahun 1863, Ebook disiapkan J. Eduardo Brissos
25. Hossein Askari & Scheherazade Rehman, A Survey of the Economic Development of OIC Countries, dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
26. Habib Ahmed, Financial Inclusion and Islamic Finance: Organizational Formats, Products, Outreach and Sustainability, , dalam Economic Development and Islamic Finance, Zamir Iqbal & Abbas Mirakhor (Editor), The World Bank, 2013.
27. Blake Goud, Islamic Microfinance, dalam Contemporary Islamic Finance. Innovation, Application, and Best Practice, Karen Hunt-Ahmed (Ed.), The Kolb Series in Finance, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2013.

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* Tulisan HM Isbakh Bagian III ini aslinya adalah utuh. Seperti halnya pada Bagian I dan Bagian II, di Bagian III ini kami sengaja membaginya atas tiga halaman (hlm 142a-III, hlm 142b-III  dan hlm 142c-III), seijin penulisnya, semata untuk memberikan semacam jeda, waktu mengaso sebentar, pada perangkat pembaca budiman. Meski Referensi kami cantumkan pula bukan saja di akhir dari hlm 142c-III tapi juga pada hlm 142a-III dan hlm 142b-III ini.

Juga perlu kami jelaskan, bahwa alinea-alinea baru, kutipan-kutipan yang indent (masuk beberapa spasi ke arah kanan di awal alinea) termasuk cetak tebal (bila tidak ada keterangan dari penulis) adalah dari kami. Tanpa menyentuh isi sama sekali, lagi-lagi semata untuk “menyesuaikan” dengan perangkat (Red DK).