 There's a third possibility, okay, to go back to our inequality. Is it possible for the corporation to get a new source of revenue, okay, which would help fund, say, an investment expansion or higher rents or higher taxes, yes. The corporation could borrow money. So the corporation can go out and try and issue bonds and get money to cover this crisis. But if it borrows money, say, to expand an accumulation or new investment and so forth in plant and equipment, it's got to repay the debt plus an interest on the debt. So we have something new on the right-hand side, which is a payment to bankers. Because bankers are a subsume class who take their money and they lend it, one of the things they do, they lend it to industrial corporations for the debt. So the corporations can help finance their payments to subsume classes above and beyond that warranted by the surplus or the gross profit the corporation has received, okay. But then you might say, well, my goodness. If I've added this to the right-hand side, the repayment of the debt and the interest, isn't it possible I have a new inequality? And the answer is yes. Yes, because as you know, the debt has to be repaid plus interest on the debt. So yes, the debt covers this, but then over time, you've got to repay the debt and the interest. And so the calculation is on this borrowing that you've done initially, that debt, will that somehow in some way enhance this over time now, enhance this over time? So that the new surplus that the board of directors receives will be high enough to repay the debt, repay the interest on the debt, cover all of its new subsume classes. And that kind of calculation is the comparison between the interest on the debt and the productivity of the debt. And the productivity of the debt here is how it enhances the surplus over time. That's something else the board of directors has to consider. Now in your reading, this is complex, interesting. That's a class analysis of a capitalist society. In your reading, you have been assigned class analyses of other kinds of societies. Marx discusses what I'm going to call the big five, capitalism, feudalism, the ancient slave communism. He discusses a variety of others as well. But those are the ones that he spends the most time with, and the most time spent of those five are obviously in capitalism. So I presented to you readings on, if I remember correctly, readings on each of these. And you've got to bear in mind the commonalities and the differences amongst these different class structures. First, very briefly, we have the surplus labor in capitalism. So surplus labor, bracket capitalism. That's the form in which the surplus is produced and appropriated. And that's distributed all these different subsumed class payments to secure its non-class structure capitalism. We also have a surplus labor in feudalism, F, the notes feudalism, distributed for all the non-class processes that exist in feudalism. The big five, ancient slave, and let's take the last one, communism. What's the commonality here? What's similar? What's similar across all these societies is that surplus labor is produced in each of them, because as again, you can't have a society without this social glue holding it together in the surplus enables that social glue to occur by subsumed classes on the right-hand side, producing the non-class processes enabling the left-hand side to exist in these respective societies. So there's a commonality, class exploitation occurs in one, two, three, four because the workers both collectively produce and appropriate the surplus. There's no class exploitation here defined in the sense that the workers are receiving the surplus that the work is produced, which is not the case in the others. You can understand why Marx favored communism over these others. Just a footnote on that, however. On this ancient, and you're reading, you're going to read about this, what the ancient is is the same individual that produces the surplus also appropriates it. Sometimes it's called in the Morkstein tradition, the petty mode of production. What it really is is individual appropriation. So they hear the worker doesn't work for anybody and nobody works for the worker, okay? So there is a similarity between the ancient and the communist. The worker and the ancient, the singular worker, appropriates his or her own surplus. In communism, the collectivity of the workers produced the surplus, which the same collectivity appropriates. So I have to go back, I have to be a bit more careful here. Here there is, if you want, self-exploitation. Here there is collective exploitation. But this is being cute. In the ancient, the same individual exploits him herself. Whereas in communism, the collectivity of workers exploit themselves. Whereas in capitalism, feudalism, slavery, that is quite different. The other workers produce a respective surplus. But a different group, capitalist, lords, masters, appropriate the surplus received, okay? But so there's a similarity of surplus. The forms of the surplus differ. The forms of the surplus differ because there are different non-class structures in these different societies, which literally constitute, create these different forms of the surplus. So in capitalism, there's a set of laws, set of politics, a set of culture and economics, which is different from that of, say, feudalism. And that difference shows up by having a different surplus form of capitalism than in feudalism. But again, in your readings, you go through in some detail how and why these different class structures compare to one another. And that's a fascinating analysis that Marx presents us in order to understand the similarities and differences amongst these different societies. One last comment on this. Is it possible to have a society in which more than one, perhaps even all of these five class structures exist at one at the same time? Yes. Yes. So one could use this class analysis to begin to reconceptualize the history of any country. For example, in the United States, over time, it's quite possible to have all of these class structures coexisting and then, of course, competing, contending, conflicting with one another. Sometimes perhaps even going to war. So in the United States, over our history, we started out in the States during colonial times, in which we have all of these class structures present in the States, perhaps the most important being the ancient farmer, the ancient manufacturer in the urban areas producing shoes and so forth, et cetera, the farmer owning his or her own land producing crops. Beginning of capitalism, a wage labor system. Perhaps we also had feudalism in the sense of the Vaughn servants in Pennsylvania or in upper state New York, Maryland, certainly slavery in the American South. And of course, the American Indian nations, some anthropologists claim, some historians claim that that was a kind of collective society in which the Indian tribe, the nation, both produced and appropriated the surplus as a collectivity. Well, then you can begin to do all kinds of, once you establish, to argue this, all kinds of interesting new histories for the United States in which, let me just give you one of many examples, the state in the United States then would be providing, remember the state would be on the right hand side here, the state would be providing different conditions of existence for these different class structures to survive. So for example, in the United States, the state would have to be providing the laws and the economics and the culture, let's say for slavery and for capitalism. Well, that means this is weird, bizarre, but it's part of US history. Part of the law would say that workers are free to sell their labor power. Part of the laws of slavery would say certain kinds of workers are not free to sell their labor power because they're slaves, they're things, they're not human beings and hence, human beings can sell their labor power, capitalism, but things can't sell their labor power slavery. So the state is providing two different kinds of laws here in the same society. One law says that some people are free, other laws say that other people are not free. You can see that that's a conflict, a contradiction that in fact in the United States, not just because of that but other things as well, we're gonna go to war over that. The state also, let's take another one, Thomas Jefferson could be a champion of the ancients. The idea here that the kind of democracy that we have in the United States was both a cause and an effect of this ancient society, whereas say Alexander Hamilton could be a champion of capitalism and deeply worried about unless we protect these small growing capitalists, they're gonna be overwhelmed by the more competitive, more efficient British capitalists of the day and if we don't do something to help the capitalist, then despite we have our freedom, we just fought a war, we're free of colonialism, we'll end up de facto as a kind of economic colony of Britain because they will outcompete us. So we need for Hamilton a tariff placed on British goods, which will enable the young industrial capitalists in the United States to grow. So the state is to provide a new condition of existence, we'll get a tax for doing that, new condition of existence, which would be a tariff. Jefferson comes back and says no, no, that tariff is gonna discriminate against these ancient farmers because they're gonna have to pay higher prices for their tools and equipment than they would otherwise. And so in order to have a strong, thriving ancient, we don't want a tariff. Hamilton says we need a tariff, you can see what's gonna happen here. You can have a struggle in this state over this particular political processes of a tariff and we can reproduce this again and again throughout US history. So in your reading, in your syllabus, you're assigned some very interesting readings on these different class structures. Please read them, understand how each functions and how that functioning of each is different from the others. The next time around them, we're going to make use of this class analysis to begin to understand Marx's greatest work, Capital.