MPs talk Bernadette Devlin stays

AS THE thoughts of MPs turned to the long summer recess ahead, it became clear that the member for Mid-Ulster Bernadètte Devlin is to retrain in Armagh prison to serve out her six-month sentence, debate which carried on into the early hours of yesterday morning, there was still confusion over whether or not Miss Devlin would bé allowed to take the oath at Westminster while serving her term in jail.

Having wasted many sleepless hours on this farcical discussion, it was generously decided to refer to the Committee of Privileges both the rights of MPs in general who find themselves in Devlin's position and the extent to which they should be granted facilities to carry out parliamentary activities while in prison.

Not released However, the „Ministry of Home Affairs in Belfast had already stated that Miss Devlin would not be réleased before the recess.

Obviously the Ulster government means to keep her out of circulation for as long as possible while the latest plans to move the Royal Ulster Constabulary back into Bogside are carried through.

to defy ban ORANGEMEN are planning to defy the Ulster government's ban on all parades by going ahead with a march on Sunday in Kilskeery, Co Tyrone. • BY A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT silence the objective role that these confessions [of the accused] played in the investigations against those accused with them.' These 'confessions' were extracted only after prolonged mental and physical torture, as the Party Central Committee well knows. Nevertheless, it condemns not the torturers, but the tortured :

'One cannot pass over in silence that it was Artur London [who received a life sentence at the Slansky trial], and at the same time Eugene Loebl _[also given a life sentence] and Josef Smrkovsky [jailed after a later trial] who designated Rudolf Slansky as the head of the conspiracy at a time when nothing whatever

•..Capital is the all-dominating power of bourgeois society, it must Capitalis proprietr MARX FIRST attacks the absence of any coherence in the usual 'Trinity Formula' (capital-profit, land- rent, labour-wages):

•... the alleged sources of the annually available wealth belong to widely dissimilar spheres and are not at all analagous with one another.

They have about the same relation to each other as lawyer's fees, red beets and music.

Capital is 'a definite socialist production relation', belonging to a definite historical formation of society; land is 'inorganic nature as such'; and labour as such is an abstraction from all the actual productive types of labour.

The latter two are evidently prerequisites of production in any and every mode of production, whereas the first is a definite, historically limited social relation of a certain mode of production.

As an explanation of the division of total value (a homogeneous substance) in the society, the "Trinity Formula' is therefore absurd.

In so far as land contributes to production it does so as use value. There is no way whatsoever of measuring this against the value represented in capital's share of the total product.

'.. how should land create value, i.e. a socially defined quantity of labour, and moreover that particular portion of the value of its own products which forms the rent?' PREREQUISITE Capital itself is, of course, one historically developed and determined form of an essential prerequisite of all production, viz, the accumulated means of production available to society: but in this case these means of production enter the productive process only when transformed into The reality, says Marx, is that value, the creation of social labour, is the source of the incomes of all the three great classes. The proletariat's sale of labour-power entitles it to that portion of the total value which is necessary for its own reproduction, i.e. to replace the value of the labour-power; its share is not based on its contribution to the product (since it is responsible for the total value added to the product), but only on the value of labour-power.

The capitalists, through ownership of means of production, extract from the whole social labour the entire remaining surplus product as surplus value.

But this extraction reaches its limit' at the point where the landlord is in a position to demand a share of the total surplus value.

This share arises not from the 'contribution' of his land the product (which as value does not exist), but from the specific relation of land ownership to the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois class: his ownership of land enables him to put pressure on the capitalist, ('Capital' Vol. III, p. 794.)

("Ibid, p. 796.)

JUST OUT PAGE to extont a share of the surplus; his concentrated landholdings are themselves fixed historically at the outset of the capitalist system as the means by which wage-labour was freed from the land for capitalist exploitation; and in the functioning of capitalist production he 'appears as the personification' of one of the most essential conditions of production'. 18 What is essential here is the historical unity of these class relations in'a given mode of production, and their shares in the homogeneous substance of value as the proof of the real interdependence and exploitative, conflicting relations between them.

The 'matter of fact' theory which would see them as simple 'contributions' to the ongoing 'industrial society' is completely lacking in any such consistency or unity.

FORMULAE

'Conflict, "tension', etc. are added as afterthoughts or as formulae to cover awkward examples of 'temporary disturbances of equilibrium' instead of being demonstrated as central to the whole system, giving it a specific historical character as a particular mode of production and also providing the key to its transformation into another.

This transformation is thus, in Marxism, removed from the sphere of prescriptions for "improving industrial relations' or *reducing the effects of alienation', etc. as it so often appears in the work of sociological 'critics' of 'industrial society' (see especially the work of Georges Friedmann).

For Marx, then, the total value produced by social labour, through the property relations of the capitalist system, is converted into three different sources of revenue. These sources are real, objective in character, but they do not and cannot explain what creates the real source of all three incomes, namely 'valuecreating labour'.

Once this source is recognized, then the shares of capital and landed property can be seen as the result of exploitation made possible by property ownership in a definite, historically limited social system.

SUFFICIENT•

It, on the contrary, the three "sources of income' are considered sufficient for the definition of what constitutes the basis of the given classes, then these classes appear to result from naturally necessary roles in 'industrial production'. Instead of a revolutionary critique, we have a veritable apologia, an ideology going under the name of economics or sociology.

It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conof production, in a certain ceptions of the actual agents and which rational order, should see precisely in this trinity (capitalinterest [profit], land-ground rent, labour-wages) which is devoid of all inner connection, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness.'"

We shall not go into ('Ibid, pp. 800-801.)

("Ibid, p. 810.)

Antiable frim NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS Price 25s as as form the starting-point WI end..?

KAR TEN Saturday July 25, series, Engels' letters of the 1890s on historical materialism were quoted. It was indicated that these letters, stressing the interaction of base and superstructure, and the relative autonomy of superstructural elements in elaborating social and cultural forms, were in no way just an afterthought to account for unforeseen difficulties in the application of the original theory. The following quotation from Vol. III of 'Capital' is given as an example of Marx's own acceptance of this viewpoint.

FORMATIONS

The specific role played by law in relation to production, the different significance of custom and tradition in specific historical tormations, and, most brilliant of all, portrayal of the way in which à custom necessarily enshrined in law to provide the feudal system with stability actually opens the way for new social relations and higher productivity to mature over a long period underneath it, thus turning it into its opposite, are here shown in outline as part of the general preparation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism:

'Since the direct producer (in feudal society) is not the owner, but only a possessor, and since all his surplus labour de jure actually belongs to the landlord, some historians havé expressed astonishment that it should be at all possible for those subject to enforced labour, or serfs, to acquire any independent property, or relatively speaking, wealth, under such circumstances. However, it is evident that tradition must play a dominant role in the primitive and undeveloped circumstances on which these social production relations and the corresponding modé of production are based.

'It is furthermore clear that here as always it is in the interest of the ruling section of society to sanction the existing order as law and to légally establish its limits given through usage and tradition.

Apart from all else, this, by the way, comes about of itself as soon as the constant reproduction . of the basis of the existing order and its fundamental relations assumes a regulated and orderly form in the course of time. And such regulation and order are themselves indispensable elements of any mode of production, if it is to assume social stability and independence from mere chance and arbitrariness. These are precisely the form of its social stability and therefore its relative freedom from mere arbitrarinéss and mere chance.

'Under backward conditions of the production process as well as the corresponding social relations, it achieves this form by mere repetition of their very reproduction. If this has continued on for some time, it entrenches itself as custom and tradition and is finally sanctioned as an explicit law.

•However, since the form of this surplus-labour, enforced labour, is based upon the imperfect development of all social productive powers and the crudeness of the methods of labour itself, it will naturally absorb a relatively much smaller portion of the direct producer's total labour than under-developed modes of production, particularly the capitalist mode of production.

"Take it, for instance, that the enforced labour for the