JONATHAN NITZAN:
I’m glad to hear that “we are not alone”, and that, as Leo Szilard put it, Postone, Virno -- and presumably also Hardt and Negri Inc. -- “have said it all along”. Personally, though, I cannot see any connection between their work and ours.
I suppose the difference boils down to this: They are post-Marxist. They already know everything about the accumulation of capital. They understand how the stock market “works”, they understand derivatives, monetary and fiscal policy, capitalist accounting practices, the “translation” of work (or power) into profit, the conversion of uncertainty into “risk”, mergers and acquisitions, high technology, energy conflicts, inflation and stagflation, military spending, financial crises, intellectual property rights, ownership structures and the ruling class (among others). These are all “known”. They don’t need to be studied. They can be asserted (or better still ignored). The only task left is to theorize the “capitalist whole”.
We, on the other hand, still feel a little insecure. We feel that we do not understand these central processes of accumulation very well, and that the only way to theorize capitalism is to study them in depth and in detail. We learned that from Marx. Moreover, as we delve deeper, we realize that the puzzle itself changes; that in order to understand this changing puzzle we need to invent new concepts; and most importantly, that we need to ask new questions.
You may feel that the fact that capitalists control social reproduction -- including the creative abilities of human beings (“labor power”) -- is sufficient to understand the process of accumulation. We don’t. We see it merely as a first step. You feel that you know precisely what to overthrow (“private ownership in the basic means of production”). We are not sure exactly what are the “basic means of production” (Machines? Ideas? Organizations? Government regulations and policies? Everything?).
I’m not sure why you ask me about the “revolutionary process” in Venezuela. I don’t know much about this “revolutionary process” (is it indeed “revolutionary”?), and I prefer to not express an opinion on things I did not study.
So no harm intended, but I think the gap between us is just too wide for this sort of debate.
Jonathan
======================== CHARLES BROWN:
Do you use the Marxist concept of "state" and state power ? See _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ and _The State and Revolution_ .
What's "capitalist nomos" ? Naming ?
How do you want to "change" capitalism differently than "overthrowing" it ? What we want to overthrow is private ownership in the basic means of production, i.e. private property. "Economics" and "politics" are united in the concept of "private property."
How would your ideas apply to the revolutionary process in Venezuela ?
======================== TOM WALKER:
1. Does what you say differ -- or if it does, how does it differ -- from Postone's distinction between social domination as the "fundamental core of capitalism" and the regime of accumulation as its 19th century, "increasingly abstract" form (Time, Labor, and Social Domination?
2. The same question(s) with regard to Virno's analysis of the politicization of post-fordist labor (A Grammar of the Multitude)?
You see, I think you're on to something. But I don't believe you're alone.
3. Regarding a comment by Virno on labor power, I think it would have general application to the issue of power. He pointed out that labor power is always something that is not yet real. It is, rather, a potential, as the Latin term renders more explicit.
When power is realized as something concrete, that something -- whether it be the making of a commodity, the sacking of a town, the issuing of a decree (or the withdrawal of labor or political consent) -- is no longer power per se although the end product may of course contribute to the renewal and expansion of the power -- a new potential.
Returning again to the "left-hand side of the equation," it seems to me that labor power is an expression of capitalist power in both a positive and negative form. So long as labor power is available to be bought by capital, those human capabilities are not being exercised as autonomous political action. Thus one might say that the political power of capital is precisely the abdication of a possible alternative to that power and in fact it is NOTHING MORE than that abdication. So, in a manner of speaking the qualitative side can be understood as simply the uninterrupted reproduction of the quantitative side _as_ quantitative.
