--- Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It seems most unlikely that the crowning heights of > the South African > economy was non-capitalist. When you end up with > describing DeBeers > as "non-capitalist" and some machine shop with 100 > highly paid white > workers as "capitalist", then your definition is not > very useful.
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/07/28/1916205&mode=nested&tid=9 [...] Ideal Average and Historical Manifestation One who undertakes a reading of Capital must first of all take note of what it is that Marx is portraying: Marx uses many examples from contemporary English capitalism, but that is not the object of study in Capital, and neither is competitive 19th century capitalism, as Lenin suggested (and which Lenin attempted to supplement with a theory of monopoly capitalism). Rather, Marx is attempting to depict the fundamental connections of capitalism, or, as Marx put it at the end of volume III of Capital, the capitalist mode of production in its ideal average. Marx does not concern himself with a particular, empirically existing capitalism, but with the structures that lay at the heart of every particular capitalism. Marx thus argues at an extremely high level of abstraction, but it is for that very reason that we can find some use for Capital today. At least in its intent, the Marxian analysis is not concerned solely with the 19th century. For this reason, one does not have to first extricate Marx from his links with the 19th century, as Karl Heinz Roth suggests (Roth 2005, p.47). In some respects, one could even say that Capital has more applicability to the 20th and 21st centuries than to the 19th. Some of the central mechanisms of capitalist dynamics analyzed by Marx first develop to full effect in the 20th century, such as the production of relative surplus value. The expansion of surplus value through the reduction of the value of labor power as a result of the reduction of the value of means of subsistence could first take hold after consumption itself was widely capitalized, which first happened in the 20th century. The control of the movement of accumulation through the finance and credit system, which Marx examined in the third volume of Capital, occurs at a global level for the first time during the last quarter of the 20th century. But the high level of abstraction in Capital comes at a price. Portraying the capitalist mode of production at the level of its ideal average also means that the intent is not an analysis of the capitalist mode of production in its concrete manifestations in space and time. Such an analysis would also not consist merely of supplementing general laws with concrete data. The capitalist mode of production does not exist at the level of an ideal average; it is always embedded in a concrete social and political web, and always possesses a historical character. The difference between the ideal average analyzed by Marx and the concrete manifestation of the capitalist mode of production is frequently, and unacceptably, abridged; by some Marxists, in the sense that they play down the difference, dissolving it into ultimately negligible historical differences in the face of an unchanging constancy of capitalist exploitation, or in the sense that they attempt to derive every social occurrence out of the fundamental economic categories. By comparison, opponents of Marx fondly use this difference as an argument against Marxian theory: since reality diverges from theory, there must be something wrong with the theory. In a passage from his book not published in the Jungle World excerpt, Roth also argues along these lines. He thus criticizes Marxs concept of the doubly free worker. The workers, according to Marx, must be juristically free in order to sell their labor power to capital, but must also be free from ownership of the means of production and subsistence, so that they are compelled to do so. Roth establishes that these circumstances at most exist in the capitalist metropolis, whereas they were never dominant in the periphery, as many capitalist relations of exploitation are based upon not free, but violently compulsive labor. What Marx depicts in Capital are the capitalistic aspects of capitalism, that is, that what differentiates this mode of production from all pre-capitalist modes of production. One of these is that exploitation can be brought off without a direct relationship of force having to exist between those who exploit and those who are exploited. Force can confine itself to the force without a subject (cf. Heide Gerstenberger) of the bourgeois state, which forces bourgeoisie as well as proletariat to obey the same rules: every person is free and equal, property is secured, the usual form of association is the contract, and a failure to observe it is threatened with sanctions. Relations of exploitation between unequal parties and exploitation of the non-free exist in all pre-capitalist modes of production. But the fact that there is no necessary contradiction between personal freedom and juridical equality on the one hand and exploitation on the other is principally new. But historical capitalism does not coincide with this ideal average, and is rather an agglomeration of capitalistic and non-capitalistic elements. But in order to analyze these connections, rather than merely describe them, one must have a concept of that which is capitalistic. [...] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! 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