My comments interjected
tom walker wrote:
So what does Nitzan and Bichler propose to do in response to that alleged fetishization of so-called real capital? They propose to "reverse" the distinction. Call finance capital "real" and industrial capital "fictitious." That's all very well taken in terms of clearing out cobwebs but it simply reproduces the underlying temptation for fetishization. One can as easily fetishize the present value of expected future earnings as one can a machine. Just ask Frank Partnoy.
I agree, but I think that the danger of fetishizing is inherent once we impose a structure on society; in other words, once we theorize it. In Section 3 of "New Imperialism or New Capitalism?", as elsewhere in our work, we treat capitalization as the architecture of capitalist power articulated by the capitalist nomos. In other words, capitalization a socially created logic. Forgive me for quoting our own work in the interest of expediency:
"... we do not pretend to offer a general theory of ‘capitalist society.’ We limit ourselves to the study of the ‘capitalist order’ only, the order of those who rule. To rule means to see the world from a singular viewpoint, to be locked into a unitary logic, to be subservient to your own architecture of power. Dominant capital cannot deviate from the boundaries of this architecture, even if it wants to. Its individual members are forced to accept the very logic they impose on the rest of humanity. And the more effective they are in imposing that logic, the more predictable they themselves become. This is why their world could be theorized and to some extent predicted."
From the viewpoint of dominant capital, capitalization IS a fetish. This fetish is what we try to understand. Hopefully, we will not turn it into our own fetish.
But what do we get if we dig deeper into the distinction between real and fictitious capital? That distinction has its precise counterpart in the much criticized distinction between productive and unproductive labour. One could say (for the sake of argument) that "productive labour is to real capital as unproductive labour is to fictitious capital." So, if we reverse the distinction between fictitious and real capital, we should have to also reduce the terms between productive and unproductive labour.
Lo and behold! That is precisely what that (sniff) "post-Marxist" Virno was suggesting. Well, pretty close. Actually, he says something more like the old distinction is dissolved in the new forms of labour. Which brings me to another distinction involving the word "real," the distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital in the labour process. Marx was saying in the previously unpublished "chapter six" that these relationships had evolved from one to the other form, so there's no reason to expect them to suddenly stop evolving.
But maybe Marx tried to explain things with too much misplaced concreteness. This is where I would detour back to the oblivious "anonymous pamphlet of 1821." There we find an extensive discussion of fictitious capital and unproductive labour -- a discussion, moreover, that places fictitious capital at the core of a distinctive accumulation process, separate from and counter to the process of accumulating "real wealth" (which for the author of the pamphlet was disposable time and the facilities for procuring that disposable time).
"But it is here that /power/ has ever interfered, and by misdirecting the labour of one part, and destroying the labour of another, no longer permits a real accumulation of surplus produce, nor consequently such an increase of capital as shall reduce the value of existing capital, or reduce the capitalist to the necessity of labouring again."
I think here we differ. Useful things are created by human beings who transform nature through their labor (some useful things exist without labor). But in our view, that "labor," whether productive or unproductive (if that could be at all decided), is a qualitative process. As such, it does not -- and cannot -- contain the quantitative "code" for understanding the pecuniary process of accumulation, not exactly and not even approximately. This is what we argue in the paper.
Jonathan Nitzan wrote:
"We argue against the very notion that capital derives its pecuniary quantities from some "substantive" reality based on "stuff" (whether measured in utils or abstract labor). As we see it, capital is the numerical architecture of capitalism, the basic code of the "capitalist nomos". Marx's distinction between "real" and "fictitious" capital should be reversed.
"Finance is the only real form of capital. The notions that machines can have a "quantity" is the fiction. Finance, or capitalization, represents the present value of expected feature earnings. The earnings and their discounting mechanism have nothing do with the quantity of any "stuff" such as machines, goods or services. Rather, they are the numerical representation of the power of exclusion. This power permeates the entire social process, from the assembly line, through formal politics, to religion, culture, consumption and what not. In that sense, capital represents the capitalization of power."
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