Lakshmi Rhone: >> I reject Heinrich's claim that wage labor must be formally free. see p. 14.
Angelus Novus wrote: > Your quarrel is with Marx, then, not with Heinrich. From a book called > "Capital, Vol. I", by a certain K. Marx: > > "For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner > of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double > sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own > commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, > is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power." On page 13, Heinrich distinguishes between "capitalism" and "capitalist societies," which I understand to mean the distinction between the abstract "capitalist mode of production" and the concrete "capitalist social formation" (to use Althusserian jargon). Marx's CAPITAL is about the former, which is defined by the exploitation of "doubly free" wage labor (proletarians). But actually-existing capitalism (the latter) can be a complex society. For example, before the US Civil War, actually-existing capitalism involved both pure capitalism (in the North) and the "slave mode of production" (in the South), connected in part by the capitalism-dominated world market. Some people on the left see the Southern slaves as "proletarians." I don't understand that at all. If those folks were proletarians, how about the direct producers under the late Soviet Union? were they proletarians, too? so the USSR was capitalist? -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
