First: potaTOES. If that's the only typo, mistake, malfunction in
any of my emails, then I have improved greatly, and am rolling
back the borders of accelerated decrepitude ("Same problem you have."
"What's that?" "Accelerated decrepitude."-- Blade Runner).
Interesting question about Brenner and passions. Not surprisingly,
Brenner finds those passions dictated by the end of subsistence
agriculture, and the end of the lords political/military "rights" to
the peasants' surpluses.
The passions are products of market dependence, with the markets
themselves transformed from simply arenas of consumption to the
circuits essential for the realizaton and reproduction of exchange
value.
The "industrious" "innovative" "efficient" yeoman, land leaser, merchant
is driven to be industrious, innovative, efficient, not to mention greedy,
fearful, suspicious, dishonest, malevolent, spiteful, and of course, a
political economist, by the inability to provide for his/her own needs
through simple direct production and consumption. And that was a
product of dispossession of the direct producers.
Please, I hope nobody takes offense at my use of the term "political
economist," as political economy was to Marx (and still is in my opinion)
simply the justification and obfuscation of the social relations
that define capitalism.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Ted Winslow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: May 15, 2007 10:26 AM
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: [PEN-L] I say po-tay-to, you say po-tah-to
>
>
>What role does Brenner give to the "passions" in this sense in the
>transition?
>
>Ted
