Jonathan, I hope I haven't used any personalized or offensive language in my discussion with you.
More discussion below. Charles ^^^^^ >CB: Are you saying capitalism has changed from Marx's time or that your concepts always applied better than Marx's ? > JN: A bit of both, although "always" is too strong a word. As our cosmology changes, so do our theories of society. It is hard to judge Marx on many issues by today's standards. CB: Why has your cosmology changed ? >CB: > >In your earlier posts , you seem to be saying that apprehending that the capitalists control social reproduction and labor power is _not_ a first step , but rather superceded in some sense. > We argue that capital represents the power of (mostly dominant) capitalists to shape the process of social reproduction. In and of themselves, labor and labor power do not help us understand the QUANTITATIVE process of accumulation, and in fact are merely one of many aspects of social reproduction. We elaborate on this point in section 3 of the paper, and particularly in the subsection "The Capitalist Order and Humane Society: An Interpolation". ^^^^ CB: I have to tell you that, following Marx , I already thought that capital represents the power of the capitalists to shape the process of social reproduction. Is it your understanding that Marx's theory doesn't already assert that ? Are you saying that labor and labor power do not help _at all_ in understanding the quantitative process of accumulation ? What is a summary of your argument in section 3 of your paper ? ^^^^^ CB:Also, why are you trying to understand the process of accumulation ? With >the aim of changing the system , or not ? > Jonathon: We are trying to understand accumulation because, in our view, it is the process that directs contemporary society. Obviously we are unhappy with it -- but what exactly are we unhappy with, why are we unhappy with it, and how should it be changed are questions that we cannot answer until we understand accumulation. We feel that Marx had crucial insights in many respects. In others areas -- most importantly in his value theory -- he drove himself into a dead ally. That dead ally is what we are trying to get out of. ^^^ CB: Isn't it clear that the capitalists have to be forced by non-capitalists to stop accumulating , whatever accumulation really is ? You don't expect the accumulators to stop accumulating on their own , do you ? Accumulation results in mass unemployment, mass poverty among the non-accumulators. It results in wars in which the non-accumulators are the main victims. It results in environmental pollution. So, we must accumulate the accumulators, no ? >^^^^^^^^ Jonathon: The owners of Microsoft control an organization. Is this organization (less the building and computers) not "private property"? CB: I don't mean to ignore your emphasis on the non-importance of labor and labor power, but it seems to me that the private property that remains of the organization, when you take away the buildings and computers is people's labor and labor power. Jonathon: Microsoft's capitalization hinges on the existence and enforcement of intellectual property rights, which involve a combination of the law and government policy. In this sense, part of the "property" of MS owners is their ability to commodify the law and the state organs that enforce this law. CB: Yes. The Marxist theory is that the support of the state power for the private property rights of the ruling class ( in capitalism the ruling class is the bourgeoisie, owners of capital, accumulators) with major force is a necessary condition of for the system to go on. I guess another way to say this is that the ruling class "owns" the state and the law. Seems to me the classical way of saying it is better. The state and law aren't exactly something the bourgeoisie accumulate, in your sense of explaining things quantitatively. See _The State and Revolution_ by Vladimir Lenin; _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ by Frederick Engels. ^^^^^^ Jonathon:When there is war in the Middle East and the price of oil rises, the result is capitalized by the large energy conglomerates. From this viewpoint, is war not part of "private property"? We articulate these aspects in our paper. See also, "Differential Accumulation: Toward a New Political Economy of Capital" (1998) http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000009/ CB: How does this concept of war as private property enhance your quantitative calculations of accumulation ? How does war as private property enhance the project of stopping the accumulators ? ^^^^^^^ Jonathon: We studied the political economy of Israel; the political economy of military spending; the political economy of energy conflicts in the Middle East; the political economy of the great U-turn in South Africa; the political economy of stagflation; the political economy of high-technology; the political economy of corporate merger, and more. Most of these works are available on our website (http:/www.bnarchives.net). I would be happy to give you more precise references. ^^^^ CB: Thanks for the references. I'll take a look. I prefer, since I have you right here to get your answers directly here on the list. I prefer to have summaries of your arguments elsewhere. As you say below, this is an email list. Jonathon: No. I was referring to the particular directions the questions were taking. I assumed that neither of us wanted to reproduce here a 150 years of debate. This is an email exchange, it is too limited a vehicle and too time consuming. CB: I got the impression that you are putting forth new ideas that have not been discussed in the last 150 years. Is there some one else in the last 150 years who has been raising in debate with Marxism the same ideas you raise now ? From: Jonathan Nitzan My comments interjected 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: ^^^^ CB: OK your new proposed understanding of the socially created logic may be better than Marx's, but that it is a socially created logic is not a difference with Marx. Marx is famous for having argued that capitalism and capitalization is a socially created logic. I have to wonder, if you don't recognize that Marx originated the idea that capitalism is a socially created, not natural, logic, are you understanding Marx enough to make the fundamental critique you claim. Marx poses abstract labor as a fiction, for example. Concrete labor, use-value is "stuff". Abstract labor, exchange-value , is not "stuff" in Marx's approach. You have to say "Marx had a fiction, we have a fiction, and our fiction works better for explaining what it happening." ^^^^^ Jonathon: "... 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." ^^^^^ CB: Funny, because I have always thought of _Capital_ as written from the viewpoint of the capitalists. _Capital_ is the logic of the capitalists. ^^^^^ 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. 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. ^^^^^ CB: Doesn't Marx clearly call the production of use-values the qualitative aspect ? Use-values are qualitative; exchange-values are quantitative in terms of labor TIME, quantities of time. As labor time, labor can contain a quantitative code.
