Your response was read over the course of several days. I agree with its
principles. Specifically, you state:
"Thus Marx again and again emphasizes that class relation is presupposed
from the moment the two face each other as buyer and seller. Marx said that
one who see capitalist characteristic within buying and selling is caught
in "semblance of circulation."
Property relations are fundamental in formation of capital.
My statement is confusing and thus incorrect.
>This is one side of society being torn from its foundation in
> the buying and selling of labor and provides the substance of a new
> qualitative configuration of capital and the working class as a component of
> capital. Herein resides the antagonism. Herein resides the boundary.
Buying and selling of labor is a property relationship. "Foundation" should
read, "foundation in historically evolved property relations."
I stated:
> Yet, a vast magnitude of profits is realized (materialized) from activity
> increasingly separate from the production of commodities and consequently
> surplus value.
The words "increasingly separated" and the word "increasingly" is an attempt
to show a new dimension in the movement and circulation of money seeking
profitable fields of investment based on the law system unique to money
trading and loaning. It is agreed that no "increasingly separated" movement
of money can transcend property relations. In trying to grab hold of what is
taking place today I have generally used some writings of Engels that
outline the process.
I have a different point of view of the growth of homelessness and poverty
(perhaps, no really sure?). You state:
>In even simple service labor, consumer buys service
>and service works beyond necessary labor time. Merely international capital
>transfer fund from developed world to developing world, so in developed
>world, jobless or homeless problem emerges. Recently England decides new
>approach to homeless as defined social exclusion.
I do not say you are wrong. I do not say I am right. Marx was quoted as:
>With the magnitude of social capital already
> functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale
> of production, and the mass of the laborers set in motion, with the
> development of the productiveness of their labor, with the greater breadth
> and fullness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the
> scale on which greater attraction of laborers by capital is accompanied by
> their greater repulsion; the rapidity of the change in the organic
> composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an
> increasing number of spheres of production becomes involved in this change,
> now simultaneously, now alternately. The laboring population therefore
> produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by
> which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative
> surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. [15]
> This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production;
> and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special
> laws of population, historically valid within its limits and only in so far
> as man has not interfered with them.
First sentence: "the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale
of production, and the mass of the laborers set in motion" =
"international capital transfer fund from developed world to developing
world," ?
Processes within Capital not isolated and independent from itself. Must do
more study and thinking. Below is Engels outline of process. This letter is
the reason why I like crisis theory with quotes = "crisis theory." Letter
to C. Schmidt in Berlin October 27, 1890.
"I noticed that in the 'forties already in Manchester: the London Stock
Exchange reports were utterly useless for the course of industry and its
periodical maxima and minima because these gentry tried to explain
everything from crises on the money market, which were generally only
symptoms. At that time the object was to explain away the origin of
industrial crises as temporary overproduction, so that the thing had in
addition its tendentious side, provocative of distortion. This point has now
gone (for us, at any rate, for good and all), added to which it is indeed a
fact that the money market can also have its own crises, in which direct
disturbances of industry only play a subordinate part or no part at
all--here there is still much, especially in the history of the last twenty
years, to be examined and established.
"Where there is division of labor on a social scale there is also mutual
independence among the different sections of work. In the last instance
production is the decisive factor. But when the trade in products becomes
independent of production itself, it follows a movement of its own, which,
while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular cases and
within this general dependence follows particular laws contained in the
nature of this new factor; this movement has phases of its own and in its
turn reacts on the movement of production. The discovery of America was due
to the thirst for gold which had previously driven the Portuguese to Africa
(compare Soetbeer's Production of Precious Metals), because the enormously
extended European industry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the
trade corresponding to it demanded more means of exchange than Germany, the
great silver country from 1450 to 1550, could provide. The conquest of India
by the Portugue! se, Dutch and English between 1500 and 1800 had imports
from India as its object--nobody dreamt of exporting anything there. And yet
what a colossal reaction these discoveries and conquests, solely conditioned
by the interests of trade, had upon industry: they first created the need
for exports to these countries and developed large-scale industry.
"So it is too with the money market. As soon as trading in money becomes
separate from trade in commodities it has (under certain conditions imposed
by production and commodity trade and within these limits) a development of
its own, special laws and separate phases determined by its own nature. If,
in this further development, trade in money extends in addition to trade in
securities and these securities are not only government securities but also
industrial and transport stocks and shares, so that money trade conquers the
direct control over a portion of the production by which, taken as a whole,
it is itself controlled, then the reaction of money trading on production
becomes still stronger and more complicated. The money traders have become
the owners of railways, mines, iron works, etc. These means of production
take on a double aspect i their working has to be directed sometimes in the
immediate interests of production but sometimes also according to the
requirements o! f the shareholders, in so far as they are money traders. The
most striking example of this is the American railways, whose working is
entirely dependent on the stock exchange operations of a Jay Gould or a
Vanderbilt, etc., these having nothing whatever to do with the particular
railway concerned and its interests as a means of communication. And even
here in England we have seen struggles lasting for tens of years between
different railway companies over the boundaries of their respective
territories-struggles in which an enormous amount of money was thrown away,
not in the interests of production and communications but simply because of
a rivalry which usually only had the object of facilitating the stock
exchange dealings of the shareholding money traders.
"With these few indications of my conception of the relation of production
to commodity trade and of both to money trading, I have already also
answered, in essence, your questions about "historical materialism"
generally. The thing is easiest to grasp from the point of view of the
division of labor. Society gives rise to certain common functions which it
cannot dispense with. The persons selected for these functions form a new
branch of the division of labor within society. This gives them particular
interests, distinct too from the interests of those who gave them their
office; they make themselves independent of the latter and--the state is in
being. And now the development is the same as it was with commodity trade
and later with money trade; the new independent power, while having in the
main to follow the movement of production, also, owing to its inward
independence (the relative independence originally transferred to it and
gradually further developed) reacts in its ! turn upon the conditions and
course of production. It is the interaction of two unequal forces: on one
hand the economic movement, on the other the new political power, which
strives for as much independence as possible, and which, having once been
established, is also endowed with a movement of its own. On the whole, the
economic movement gets its way, but it has also to suffer reactions from the
political movement which it established and endowed with relative
independence itself, from the movement of the state power on the one hand
and of the opposition simultaneously engendered on the other. Just as the
movement of the industrial market is, in the main and with the reservations
already indicated, reflected in the money market and, of course, in inverted
form, so the struggle between the classes already existing and already in
conflict with one another is reflected in the struggle between government
and opposition, but also in inverted form, no longer directly but indirec!
tly, not as a class struggle but as a fight for political principles, and so
distorted that it has taken us thousands of years to get behind it again."
End quote.
Melvin P.
Comrade Melvin
We can become to understand each other. I read several times Engels' word
you cite.
It teached me many things. But important problem still remains
It is about characteristic of current international credit sytem. Differing
Hilferding period ,where fictitious capitals integrated real capital within
nation-state .current capital movements are
double i.e. Real capital and fictitious capital and their movements
are beyond nation-state, in other
word, international. So competition between nation does't not lead
to war ,instead accumulation of
poverty deprivation, and oppression spread worldwide. International
capitals' political forms, i.e
IMF, OECD, world bank on one side facilitate these tendencies and
on the other side fight against its
own product i.e. Worldwide poverty, epidemics, deprivation,
ecological destruction, under the name of
"poverty reduction strategy"" conservation of forest".
So firstly analysis of current credit system is needed, especially
after Breton-Woods convention.
Secondarily,we need to spread ongoing social movements to aim to
abolish Sachen(commodity,money and capital)
MIYACHI TATSUO
Psychiatric Department
Komaki municipal hosipital
1-20.JOHBUHSHI
KOMAKI CITY
AICHI PREF.
486-0044
TEL:0568-76-4131
FAX 0568-76-4145
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