Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] responses to law of value and meaning of proletariat fro...
In a message dated 7/13/2010 9:23:23 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB; Doesn't Marx consider that capitalism _emerges_ in the manufacturing system ? _http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm#S5_ (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm#S5) Reply What is Man-U-Facture? It is not handicraft. By stating that capitalism roots are remotes is to say it is a form of private property. Capitalism emerges as part of a long line of private property. All property forms emerged in some kind of system of production and distribution. Capitalism as a property relations or as a mode of accumulation stands and gains universality - as a system, on the basis of the industrial revolution. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Banksters
IOU - Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John
Lanchester (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
by Dwight Garner
nytimes.com (January 05 2010)
If you wanted to try to make sense of the global banking crisis,
instead of merely weeping openly at your ATM balance, 2009 was a
very good year. Bookstores were filled with volumes that, with
expert twenty twenty hindsight, explained how capitalism went to
hell. The blame was spread around: to politicians (for deregulating
financial markets), to bankers (for gambling with exotic
derivatives they barely understood) and to the rest of us (for
living beyond our means, like insatiate zombie piglets).
This nightmare isn't over. We'll be living with the fallout from the
banking crisis for decades and devouring plenty more books about it
too. The whole episode is a kind of intellectual and moral
Superfund site, an oozing gift that will keep giving. But here's a
prediction: Few if any of these books will be as pleasurable - and
by that I mean as literate or as wickedly funny - as John
Lanchester's IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.
Mr Lanchester, who is British, isn't an economist or a business
journalist. He's a novelist (and a talented one; try The Debt to
Pleasure, 1997), a man with no special financial expertise
whatsoever. A few years ago he began following the financial
meltdown for research purposes, as background for a novel he was
writing. He soon realized, he says, "that I had stumbled across the
most interesting story I've ever found".
It's a story that begins, as these stories are wont to do, with the
fall of the Berlin Wall. The capitalist West won its "ideological
beauty contest" with the communist East, Mr Lanchester writes,
which was good news except for this: Suddenly "there was no global
antagonist to point at and jeer at the rise in the number and size
of the fat cats; there was no embarrassment about allowing the rich
to get so much richer so very quickly".
Once upon a time in America and Britain, he observes, "the jet
engine of capitalism was harnessed to the ox cart of social
justice, to much bleating from the advocates of pure capitalism,
but with the effect that the Western liberal democracies became the
most admired societies that the world had ever seen".
Then the Wall crumbled, and "the jet engine was unhooked from the
ox cart and allowed to roar off at its own speed. The result was an
unprecedented boom, which had two big things wrong with it: It
wasn't fair, and it wasn't sustainable".
The snidest villains and the greediest buffoons in the narrative
are the bankers and other financial wizards who began recklessly
playing with new, risky, little-understood tools to get richer
faster - tools that ostensibly hedge against risk but also
dramatically increase it. If you don't know how derivatives or
credit default swaps work, or what securitization is, or why
futures are riskier than options, this is a book for you. Mr
Lanchester explains these things methodically, with mathematical
rigor, but he is also, crucially, guided as much by perception and
feel.
"We are a long, long way from a single quote for next season's wheat
crop", he notes. "The contemporary derivative is likely to involve
a mix of options, futures, currencies and debt, structured and
priced in ways which are the closest extant thing to rocket
science. Mathematics PhD's are all over the place in this business."
Mr Lanchester finds loads of bleak humor here. "Warren Buffett was
doubly right to compare the new financial products to 'weapons of
mass destruction' - first, because they are lethal, and, second,
because no one knows how to track them down", he writes.
He also compares the banking crisis to the birth of postmodernism.
"For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few
decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis", he
says. "Value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the
elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism".
IOU crosses over into black satire when Mr Lanchester describes how
bankers used their new tools to make money from poor people, the
worst credit risks, by prying their cash loose through predatory
lending, then pooling this money and selling it off. Who cared if
these people defaulted on their mortgages? The risk had already
been passed along to others, and ultimately, when banks failed, to
taxpayers. Mr Lanchester calls this "a 100 percent pure form of
socialism for the rich".
With steam shooting from his ears, he summarizes:
So: a huge, unregulated boom in which almost all the upside
went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in
which the losses were socialized. That is literally nobody's idea
of how the world is supposed to work.
Mr Lanchester's history lesson is peppered with dead-on references
to everything, including "Annie Hall", "The Simpsons", "The Wire",
Hemingway and Jacques Derrida. He is effortlessly epigrammatical.
("In a sense, credit isn't just an as
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] responses to law of value and meaning of proletariat fro...
wrote: > > > CB: Is the BP oil catastrophe the beginning of the conflict and > then antagonism you refer to ? > > Reply > > No. > > The material quoted states: > > "At a certain stage in their development means of production - instruments, > machinery and energy sources, come into conflict and then antagonism with > the existing social relations and their political expression as political > laws of society." > > Although its roots are remote, capitalism emerged as a system based on the > industrial revolution. ^^^ CB; Doesn't Marx consider that capitalism _emerges_ in the manufacturing system ? http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm#S5 SECTION 5 THE CAPITALISTIC CHARACTER OF MANUFACTURE An increased number of labourers under the control of one capitalist is the natural starting-point, as well of co-operation generally, as of manufacture in particular. But the division of labour in manufacture makes this increase in the number of workmen a technical necessity. The minimum number that any given capitalist is bound to employ is here prescribed by the previously established division of labour. On the other hand, the advantages of further division are obtainable only by adding to the number of workmen, and this can be done only by adding multiples of the various detail groups. But an increase in the variable component of the capital employed necessitates an increase in its constant component, too, in the workshops, implements, &c., and, in particular, in the raw material, the call for which grows quicker than the number of workmen. The quantity of it consumed in a given time, by a given amount of labour, increases in the same ratio as does the productive power of that labour in consequence of its division. Hence, it is a law, based on the very nature of manufacture, that the minimum amount of capital, which is bound to be in the hands of each capitalist, must keep increasing; in other words, that the transformation into capital of the social means of production and subsistence must keep extending. [39] In manufacture, as well as in simple co-operation, the collective working organism is a form of existence of capital. The mechanism that is made up of numerous individual detail labourers belongs to the capitalist. Hence, the productive power resulting from a combination of labours appears to be the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent workman to the discipline and command of capital, but, in addition, creates a hierarchic gradation of the workmen themselves. While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionises it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation, [40] and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised. [41] If, at first, the workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity fail him, now his very labour-power refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing labourer develops productive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop. [42] As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. Capitalism is not the economy but a political regime > or mode of accumulation. The economy is made up of two aspects: production > and distribution. Upon this base of society arises a political > superstructure expressing the nature of the base, and in turn acts back upon > that > base. > > The displacement of the universality of the manual labor process by the > industrial revolution, as the qualifying character of productive forces, took > place though the life activity of new classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. > Industrial implements evolve in conflict and then enter antagonism with > the manual labor process, due to private property. > > It is property or classes as conveyor of property that is the source and > genesis of antagonism. Antagonism is not rooted in means of production > development. That is, qualitative changes in means of production express the > conflict in developing from one kind of social organization of labor to
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Scope and Limits of Theory
In a message dated 7/12/2010 11:11:52 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, _cb31...@gmail.com_ (mailto:cb31...@gmail.com) writes: In the context of _What is to be done_, I think Lenin's "revolutionary theory" is a synonym for Marxism. More specifcally, a revolutionary movement had to be based on a concrete assessment of the classes and class struggle, relative strengths and levels of class consciousness in 1903 Russia. So, Lenin's reference to theory is not so "sexy" there. Comment Sure, but this pretty general. One cannot effectively combat and/or defeat their class opponent based on a general theory. A concrete assessment of contending forces means formulating a line of march and doctrine of combat. In China the theory of "political revolution" or insurrection was based on a military doctrine of standing armies, winning the peasant masses to the cause of revolution and against imperial control of China. In Russia the doctrine of political revolution - insurrection, was based on "the party of a new type" rather than building an army. In America we are discovering the form of our third political revolution. Mao’s theory of political revolution had more to do with doctrines dealing with the art of war, rather than anything specific to Marxism. Actually, Lenin’s concept of a "party of a new type" has more to do with doctrine of insurrection, than anything specific to the writings of Marx, although Engels calls insurrection an art. We - where I grew up, say "science knows" and "doctrine does." Marxism as the study of the science of society change - in general, is different from that aspect of Marxism focused on doctrine of combat. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] responses to law of value and meaning of proletariat fro...
In a message dated 7/12/2010 10:53:56 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: CB: Is the BP oil catastrophe the beginning of the conflict and then antagonism you refer to ? Reply No. The material quoted states: "At a certain stage in their development means of production - instruments, machinery and energy sources, come into conflict and then antagonism with the existing social relations and their political expression as political laws of society." Although its roots are remote, capitalism emerged as a system based on the industrial revolution. Capitalism is not the economy but a political regime or mode of accumulation. The economy is made up of two aspects: production and distribution. Upon this base of society arises a political superstructure expressing the nature of the base, and in turn acts back upon that base. The displacement of the universality of the manual labor process by the industrial revolution, as the qualifying character of productive forces, took place though the life activity of new classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Industrial implements evolve in conflict and then enter antagonism with the manual labor process, due to private property. It is property or classes as conveyor of property that is the source and genesis of antagonism. Antagonism is not rooted in means of production development. That is, qualitative changes in means of production express the conflict in developing from one kind of social organization of labor to another. At a certain stage in the growing universality of a qualitatively new social organization of labor, antagonism appears as a form of resolution between old classes and new classes. Serf evolves for thousands of years in conflict - (not antagonism) with the nobility as both are riveted to the manual labor process. The appearance of new classes - (bourgeois and proletariat), emerge and evolve in antagonism with serf and nobility. The former express new productive forces and vanquish the latter (expressing old means of production), from history. Society evolves in class antagonism. WL. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
