>Upcoming in August, the P2P Foundation blog will >be featuring my book, Jobs, Liberty and the >Bottom Line, as its "book of the week."
1. Based on excerpts from Tom Walker's books: http://p2pfoundation.net/Jobs,_Liberty_and_the_Bottom_Line?title=Jobs,_Liberty_and_the_Bottom_Line&oldid=51250 "My innovation is to animate the labor commons through a new accounting technique - a method of social accounting that takes into explicit account the effects of work-time variation and distribution on social productivity. The calculations that need to be performed for this new social accounting for time are conceptually easy to explain but operationally complex enough to be feasible only with the advent of the personal computer and availability of spreadsheet programs. Moreover, the technology lends itself to a deliberative solution, rather than to the dictate of experts." 2. Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line, Tom Walker, Draft: 01/04/2011, p. 88: http://www.scribd.com/doc/41965697/Jobs-Liberty-and-the-Bottom-Line#outer_page_80 "Although Dilke and Marx both focused on disposable time as the essence of wealth and the bounty of a society beyond capitalism, each drew a different conclusion as to the path to the Promised Land. Dilke saw a natural capitalist progression toward liberty - if only the exactions of the state could be stopped and rolled back. Marx observed a structural barrier to such a realization posed by the capitalist production process that can only be overcome by a cataclysmic overthrow of that process itself. Both based their conclusions on a perception of limits and superfluity - Dilke on the limit imposed by nature on the accumulation of capital; Marx on a similarly finite amount of labor necessary for the reproduction of society. Both evaluated the work and commodities beyond that limit as 'superfluous', echoing Franklin's disdain for 'superfluities' and Smith's for 'trinkets of frivolous utility'. Dilke's and Marx's economic subjects often act out of ignorance (Dilke) or succumb to the hallucinatory fascination of the commodity fetish (Marx) thus discounting their status as 'rational economic actors'." 3. Alas, "Marx's eoconomic subjetcs" make their history themselves, though not consciously. They act both consciously and unconsciously. That's the great narrative of Capital: the inner connection of economic forms, social relations AND forms of consciousness and their development throughout the different levels of the total process of capitalist production as a unity of both production process and circulation process. Hence the supposed "hallucinatory fascination of the commodity fetish" has nothing to do with Marx's view of the real mystification of the capitalist mode of production. The most "cataclysmic overthrow" will be breaking through this mystification and its replacement by clearly - "rational" - understanding the line of march, the condtions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement - by the masses themselves. Marx: "In capital profit, or still better capital interest, land rent, labour wages, in this economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the conversion of social relations into things, the direct coalescence of the material production relations with their historical and social determination. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things. It is the great merit of classical economy to have destroyed this false appearance and illusion, this mutual independence and ossification of the various social elements of wealth, this personification of things and conversion of production relations into entities, this religion of everyday life. It did so by reducing interest to a portion of profit, and rent to the surplus above average profit, so that both of them converge in surplus-value; and by representing the process of circulation as a mere metamorphosis of forms, and finally reducing value and surplus-value of commodities to labour in the direct production process. Nevertheless even the best spokesmen of classical economy remain more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism had dissolved, as cannot be otherwise from a bourgeois standpoint, and thus they all fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-truths and unsolved contradictions. On the other hand, it is just as natural for the actual agents of production to feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital interest, land rent, labour wages, since these are precisely the forms of illusion in which they move about and find their daily occupation. It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conceptions of the actual agents of production, and which arranges them in a certain rational order, should see precisely in this trinity, which is devoid of all inner connection, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness. This formula simultaneously corresponds to the interests of the ruling classes by proclaiming the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue and elevating them to a dogma." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm hk _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
