Importantly, these conditions are general because they are potentially available to all individual capitals; this does not mean they are free or practically obtainable by all. The case is different for different conditions. Something might be a commodity as well as a general condition. For example, transportation and communication – e.g. container shipping or the hardware required to connect to the internet – are something that all individual capitals have to pay for and are necessary for contemporary capitalist production. As long as a mode of transportation is common carriage, it counts as a general condition of production. Other conditions are free or are paid for indirectly, through taxation. For instance, any and all capitals find themselves on the world market whether they like it or not. On the other hand, the protection of shipping lanes and the maintenance of transportation infrastructure are paid for by taxes.
Infrastructure is but one vital component to the general conditions of production. As one of us has pointed out, the general conditions include a bewildering array of things: the means of communication and transport; the general use of buildings for production and storage; the market, i.e. the sphere and process of circulation; the political world order; the general state of science, technology and engineering; and, confusingly, also specific kinds of production – such as the production of machinery by machinery and the degree of automation in production – as well as the mass and velocity at which production occurs (Kjøsen 2016: 64).
What is the specific function of the general conditions of production? Marx argued, while discussing infrastructure, that ‘All general conditions of production ... facilitate circulation or ... make it possible ... or ... increase the force of production’ (1993: 530–1). A well-designed system of highways, bridges and tunnels will, of course, facilitate circulation in the sense of making it faster or, if built where there previously were no roads, would make circulation there possible. Speeding circulation makes it possible for capital to accelerate the cycle of extracting surplus-value in production and realizing it in the market (Marx 1992: 203). Similar considerations apply to non-infrastructural general conditions of production; for example, increasing the degree of automation in production intensifies surplus-value extraction because machinery allows the application of physical force far exceeding that possessed by human labour alone (Marx 1990: 509).
means of cognition
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