A clarification: Marx expressed some reservations -- but general agreement
-- with Hodgskin on the question of co-existing labour vs. the physicality
of capital. I would suggest that Marx's equivocation may have been
rhetorical, in that it is difficult to convince people that the physical
objects -- the machinery -- are, in themselves, ineffectual. But here we
ascend into "contradictions" and even contradictions that blow the logic of
capital sky-high. Well, great Hegel's ghost, we don't need no
contradictions. The fetishism of commodities is like the turtles on whose
backs the world rests. It's fetishism all the way down.

What is a tractor without fuel and without a driver? A metal sculpture.


On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes, the "means of production." I would suggest that on this question it
> would be prudent to go back a bit before Herr Marx to Mr. Hodgskin's
> argument about co-existing labour. The "means of production" are not, in
> fact, machines or raw materials but the simultaneous labour of other
> workers. If one follows Marx through all the convolutions of the fetishism
> of commodities, I think one will arrive back at a perhaps more subtle
> interpretation of Hodgskin's co-existing labour, but one whose subtlety
> makes it too FUCKING easy to reduce to a vulgar materialist "substance".
> Marx equivocated on this point, so either reading is plausible.
>
> But just because Marx equivocated, doesn't mean that we have to.
>
> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 5:05 PM, <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>>
>> If you define class struggle as struggle for control of
>> means of production, the environmental movement is a kind of
>> class struggle.  It is the struggle for control over and
>> benefit from the earth's natural resources, which are means
>> of production.
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
>



-- 
Cheers,

Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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