[Marxism-Thaxis] The development of bourgeois property moves ownership further and further from actual engagement of production
WL: The issue under discussion is not the bourgeois property relations being revolutionized. Nor is it a question of the bourgeoisie as a class failing to develop the productive forces. The bourgeois property relation as a specific form of ownership rights - as you define it separate from the actual engagement of production, cannot be revolutionized as such, but in the last instance will be shattered. ^^ CB: By revolutionized , I mean the same thing as shattered. They will be sublated. Preserved and overcome. The bourgeois owners are separated from the actual engagement of production, progressively so historically as capitalism goes on and on. The joint stock company was analyzed by Marx and Engels as a step in the structure of property moving the capitalist further from actual engagement of production. Since then the coupon clippers , the hedge fund owners are even further from actual engagement of production. No factories on Wall Street. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The development of bourgeois property movesownership further and further from actual engagement of production
Following your discourse every once and a while. WL, your comment that there will come a point at which capitalist (I prefer 'capitalist' to 'bourgeois' which just means city dweller) property moves further and further from engagement of production needs to be more specific. After all, ownership of production by financial agencies, banks, holding companies and what have you are very distant from actual production, and are despite this no less forms of capitalist ownership than that of the 18th century factory owner who is the organizer (and sometimes inventor), manager, and owner of the machines of his enterprise. The key to the decadence and final exit of capitalism from history will be the decline of the political-economic power, implicit in the ownership of the means of production. One factor contributing to this is the decline in the rate of profit that invariably accompanies industrial development. As the cost of the technical infrastructure of industrialisation rises relative to business income and as the value of variable profits extractable from labour (mostly a matter of the costs of raising, employing and so on of developed industrial labour power relative to the limits of possible exploitation of labour) declines, capitalist ownership becomes ever less worth the trouble. True, long before this happens capitalist enterprise will search every option for maintaining if not increasing profitability; e.g. moving industry to regions where labour is cheap (India and China), outsourcing (again the developing third world countries), importing cheap labour (African medical personnel in the US and GN, Turks in Germany, and Algerians in France), outright stealing of resources (Iraq), developing cheap sources of energy, and cutting costs on human services for the weaker sectors of the community (NO, etc.). There's still a lot of life in the old dog yet. While I'm confident that capitalism is not immortal, I doubt capitalism will go out with a bang. It is more likely that like feudalism it will disappear with a whimper after it has become irrelevant to production and the social relations by which production is organized and prosecuted. Regards, Victor - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx andthe thinkers he inspired' marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 14:34 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The development of bourgeois property movesownership further and further from actual engagement of production WL: The issue under discussion is not the bourgeois property relations being revolutionized. Nor is it a question of the bourgeoisie as a class failing to develop the productive forces. The bourgeois property relation as a specific form of ownership rights - as you define it separate from the actual engagement of production, cannot be revolutionized as such, but in the last instance will be shattered. ^^ CB: By revolutionized , I mean the same thing as shattered. They will be sublated. Preserved and overcome. The bourgeois owners are separated from the actual engagement of production, progressively so historically as capitalism goes on and on. The joint stock company was analyzed by Marx and Engels as a step in the structure of property moving the capitalist further from actual engagement of production. Since then the coupon clippers , the hedge fund owners are even further from actual engagement of production. No factories on Wall Street. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis
http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700 Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix Le Figaro Monday 12 September 2005 According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the decline of the American system. Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a global change in our relationship with nature? Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere. An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. I have known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations. On the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the conditions of black America. What really resonates with my representation of the United States - as developed in Apr=E8s l'empire - is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger. We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical resources, of the engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the crisis. That lifted the veil on an American economy globally perceived as very dynamic, benefiting from a low unemployment rate, credited with a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed to the United States, Europe is supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with endemic unemployment and stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of consumption. Is American household consumption artificially stimulated? The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic system, and the United States acts as a remarkable financial pump, importing capital to the tune of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year. These funds, after redistribution, finance the consumption of imported goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has characterized the United States for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade deficit, which is now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial capacity. American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a vast video game. Is it fair to link the American system's profit-margin orientation - that neo-liberalism denounced by European commentators - and the catastrophe that struck New Orleans? Management of the catastrophe would have been much better in the United States of old. After the Second World War, the United States assured the production of half the goods produced on the planet. Today, the United States shows itself to be at loose ends, bogged down in a devastated Iraq that it doesn't manage to reconstruct. The Americans took a long time to armor their vehicles, to protect their own troops. They had to import light ammunition. What a difference from the United States of the Second World War that simultaneously crushed the Japanese Army with its fleet of aircraft carriers, organized the Normandy landing, re-equipped the Russian army in light materiel, contributed magisterially to Europe's liberations, and kept the European and German populations liberated from Hitler alive. The Americans knew how to dominate the Nazi storm with a mastery they show themselves incapable of today in just a single one of their regions. The explanation is simple: American capitalism of that era was an industrial
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fettering
WL: You seem to be stating the following: 1). the bourgeois property relations . . . a). will not be revolutionized and b). (will not) BE overthrown . . . c).AS A RESULT OF the successful development of the productive forces BY THE BOURGEOISIE. 2). but by . . . d). the failure (of the bourgeoisie) to develop the productive forces, IN OTHER WORDS, BY THE BOURGEOISIE FETTERING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES. ^ CB: Yea, that's what I am saying with the words added in capitals above. I'm saying that that's what Marx says when he says: At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or -what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution WL: That is to say, I understand this to mean - not imply, that social revolution today will result as the failure of the bourgeois to develop the productive forces. You state that this is what Marx implies. The bourgeoisie is the involuntary promoter of industry and its development. Social revolution comes about as the result of the development of the productive forces. The productive forces do not stop developing or stop undergoing revolutionizing. CB: Well,again, that's the opposite of what I am saying. To the extent that bourgeois property relations do not fetter the development of the productive forces, the bourgeois property relations are not likely to be overthrown, at least not because of what is happening with the productive forces. ^ WL:At a certain stage in their development the material power of the productive forces cannot be contained - (continue its extensive and intensive expansion and operate on the basis of the universality of the law system unique to the new qualitative addition to production) by the old relations of production - with the property relations within, and then an epoch of social revolution begins. CB: Of course, inside/outside is a metaphor ( neither one is physically within the other actually), but in using the metaphor Marx is saying that the material productive forces are in the property relations (not that the property relations are in the productive forces). He is saying that when the productive forces can no longer grow within the specific property relations, the property relations will be burst asunder by the oppressed class shattering them. ^ Production and revolutionizing continues to take place but within the bounds of bourgeois property or on the basis of the needs - bourgeois needs, created as the condition for its reproduction. The concept is not the failure of the bourgeoisie to develop the productive forces, but their fettering and/or distortion by the needs of bourgeois property. CB: Maybe , but in this particular formulation, Marx is using fettering to mean hindering the development. ^ WL:I believe at this point the focus of the discussion has been lost because you state the exact opposite to what you state above in the following statement. WL: Bourgeois property by definition does in fact act as a fetter on the material factors of production, at all stages of the evolution of the technological regime. CB: In fact, they don't. Under bourgeois property relations the productive forces have been developed more than under any previous mode of production. ^^ CB: The point hasn't been lost. It is being stated repeatedly. The bourgeoisie have not been fettering the development of the productive forces at all stages of the evolution of the technological regime, otherwise we would expect that an epoch of social revolution would have started in the U.S. and other capitalist countries. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
