From: Angelus Novus
Charles, the historical material always comes after the theoretical material, in order to illustrate it. ^^^ CB: Yes, including historical examples of barter illustrate the theoretical discussion of direct commodity exchange without money, which historical fact your school of thought denies ever existed. In Ch. 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture and Ch. 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, there is a historico-theoretical discussion of the historical transition from the Manufacture to the Modern Industrial phases of capital accumulation. In the section II: Primitive Accumulation there is a discussion of the history of the capitalist slave mode which , of course , is not wage or free labor, but is a phase in the history of the development of the capitalist mode of production and accumulation. ^^^^^^ Angelus: Thus, the chapter on the Working Day comes **after** the theoretical presentation of absolute surplus-value. ^^^^^^ CB: However, that particular chapter does not discuss a historical _development_,but a moment. ^^^^^ The material on the "so-called primitive accumulation" comes at the very end of Vol. I, giving an account of the emergence of the "worker free in a double sense" that is merely presupposed in the theoretical account. ^^^^^ CB: See above. Notice there is no theoretical discussion of capitalist slavery. So, this chapter is a historical discussion of an earlier phase of capitalism and there by _Capital_ is a "work of history". You had said: "Angelus :Heinrich says nothing at all about capitalism "developing" on the basis of formally free wage labor.? His argument is not a historicist one, and he argues against the Kautsky/Engels orthodoxy of seeing Capital as a work of history.? It is an analysis of the capitalist mode of production, "at its ideal average", AS MARX STATES VERY CLEARLY IN HIS OWN PREFACE TO CAPITAL." CB: _Capital_ is both a work of history and a work of theoretical history or HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ^^^^^ And, again, Marx states explicitly in his preface that he is presenting an account of the capitalist mode of production "at its ideal average."? So the burden of proof is on anyone arguing that the sequence of categories in Capital is supposed to depict some "historical" sequence. ^^^^^ CB: That's not the only thing he says in the Prefaces he is doing in _Capital_. He also says its a work of dialectics, which means its a work of development, the development of capitalist accumulation, as I have proven clearly above. There are many discussions of pre-capitalist and early capitalist institutions. He relates them theoretically to the modern capitalist mode. In the following, Marx discusses the proto-capitalist mode, its transition to capitalism and the tendency of capitalism to develop historically to monopoly capitalism or concentration or centralisation of wealth: Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour. [1] As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. [2] ^^^^^^ I think a lot of people's alarm bells go off when they hear that Capital is not a historical work because they mistake that for an assertion that Capital is "ahistorical".? But that's not the case.? Marx is definitely aware of the historical specificity and contingency of the categories he is criticizing. Contrast this to David Graeber, whose book Debt is a work of history, but a strangely ahistorical one, because Graeber insufficiently pays attention to the historical specificity of categories.? This is particularly apparent in his treatment of "money", where he argues that money plays a completely different role in societies in which it is not the mediating instance for the exchange of products, yet he oddly insists on seeing it as basically the same stuff that we call "money". ^^^^^ CB: I agree with you about Graeber. No alarm bells for me , cause I can demonstrate as above that _Capital_ is a work of history and theoretical history or historical materialism. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
