At 27/06/02 09:17 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: >Burford: > >The most important circumstance is that with rising capitalist > >productivity, which Marx recognised vividly in a text like the Communist > >Manifesto, the sum total of use values, of products of social labour, in > >the world can increase. > >The Communist Manifesto was written before V. 1 of Capital, where Marx >fully explored value theory.
I am not sure if Proyect accepts may main point that >You are absolutely right in your fundamental perception that the >distribution of exchange value is a zero sum game. > > >This is most important for progressive people in the imperial metropolises >(?) of this world, especially the USA, to understand. It is true that Capital was written after the Communist Manifesto. My statement was also alluding to the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" (Vol I Chap 25). Perhaps Proyect would consider that should be understood only on a state level and not a global level. >Furthermore, there is no link between >capitalist productivity and the increase of "use values", ie., goods like >clothing, food, etc, detached from their role as commodities. But capital competes by cheapening the price of commodities by lowering their labour content. So I am unclear what point Proyect is making here. How can we consider capitalist productivity of use values "detached from their role as commodities"? >In fact, the >rise of capitalism is linked to a decrease in use values in most of Latin >America, Asia and Africa. Very possibly That is not because capitalism does not cheapen the exchange value of commodities but because there is relatively less exchange value for the populations of Latin America, Asia and Africa to purchase them. This is an expression of the limited purchasing power of the masses and why Nancy is correct to be thinking of a zero sum game. >Despite being organized around so-called >tributary relationships, the average citizen of the Inkan or Moghul empires >were far better off before the introduction of capitalism. Very possibly. There was no unemployment before capitalism. > >Also the total number of wage labourers in the world can increase as small > >producers pour off the land at an unprecedented rate in the history of the > >world. > >The use of the verb "can" above is dubious at best. The actual experience >is mass unemployment or entry into the informal sector (prostitution, drug >dealing, peddling, begging, theft, etc.) They form a vast reserve army of labour. That is why the use of the verb "can" is not dubious at all in this context. > >The widening disparities of exchange value may be mitigated by reforms such > >as the latest agreement at the G8 about Africa. > >Such "reforms" are completely undermined by the ability of Western >corporations, including massive cotton producers, to destroy the economies >of subSaharan Africa. Today's G8 agreement on Africa is totally inadequate. > >Nevertheless the immiseration of the people of Africa is *directly* linked > >to the centralisation and concentration of capital in countries like the > >USA and England. > > > >(From which the intelligentsia of the west benefit as we stroll around the > >shopping areas of the more interesting suburbs, sustained periodically by > >the odd frappacino in surroundings subtly suggestive of some fetishised > >link with care free south american peasants). > >The only way to absolve oneself of guilt is to participate in >anti-capitalist activity (including scholarship) of the most unrelenting >character. The intelligentsia is not a class in its own right with a distinctive relationship to the means of production but rather a stratum that can play different roles in different economic and political conjuctions. It tends to individualism and subjectivism. Being motivated mainly by guilt is a possibility but I am not aware that Marx considered the revolution would be greatly motivated by guilt. Rather he thought that working people should be their own liberators. What *is* difficult is the nature of the alliance between progressive people in the imperialist west and the mass of people in the LDC's. Too much guilt IMO is a distraction from understanding a way forward, which we should be able to argue is in the material interest of the great majority of people of the world. Probably 95%. It *is* necessary to focus on the zero sum game of exchange value and discuss and change the system *as a whole*. Chris Burford London
