Jim Devine wrote:
On 12/2/05, Ted Winslow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
"Capital" is our creation; we (including "capitalists") are not its
creation.
this is a false dichotomy. Capitalism is both "our" creation and a
creator of our consciousness. To Marx, people create history, though
not exactly as they please. What limits their ability to create
history is the pre-existing social structure (along with nature). That
social structure was the creation of people in the past. These people
were also constrained, by the (different) social structure inherited
from their past (along with nature).
It's a chicken/egg process, with people making social structures (or
reproducing old ones) and social structures deeply affecting our
consciousness of them and limiting our actions and the effects of our
actions. People make society, while society makes people.
We are not its creation in the sense that "it" isn't an "subject"
able in this sense to "create" anything. "Fetishism" mistakenly
ascribes agency to what is in fact a product of human agency.
The same ontological point is made about "capital" as means of
production.
“accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of
social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge
(scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of
accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation -
which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it - of the
existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These
objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be
constantly produced anew and consumed anew.” (Marx 1971, pp. 266-7)
He opposes this “idealism” to “the crude, material fetishism into
which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings ‘of this
incredible cobbler’, McCulloch” and to the mistaken interpretations
of his own “materialism.”
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here
as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly
performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism'
with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory
develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch,
where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but
even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate
object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of
bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been
preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the
satisfaction of coarse appetites." (Marx 1971, p. 267)
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human
industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will
over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of
the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge,
objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what
degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of
production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process
of social life itself have come under the control of the general
intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree
the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the
form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice,
of the real life process." (Marx 1973, pp. 705-6)
Ted
.
