Re: Regulation, state, economy
Somepossible sourcesof original
accumulation within a society based on the capitalist mode of production (I note
explicitly this is not intended asa completelist):
1) setting up alegal or illegalnew
business venture or entrepreneurial activityfrom scratch ("business
start-ups") with loan capital
2) prostitution or slavery, legal or illegal,
formal or informal,and live performances of any sort which earn
money
3) legal foreign trade, on the basis of unequal
exchange (buy cheap, sell dear) with loaned capital
4) invading another country in order to expropriate
people there
5) playing the stock market, the futures market,
the money market or the lotterywith loaned capital
6) theft, robbery, fraud, scams, hedge funds,
smuggling, espionage and other forms of crime leading to the acquisition of
intellectual, material or human property by illegal means
7) expropriationof one capitalist by another
capitalist, via legally permissible procedures or illegal ones
8) privatisation of publicly-owned assets which
were/are paid for, or maintained by, taxpayers or rate-paying residents, or
making money from helping that privatisation process along, legally or
illegally
9) loaning money legally or illegallyin order
to loan more money, to lend it out again or invest it,legally or
illegally,in order to make money from the discrepancy in the
financialreturn or interest rate
10) legal or illegalmediation between people,
on the basis of superior knowledge, obtained legally or illegally
In his book Late Capitalism, which I first read in
1980,Ernest Mandel therefore notes explicitlythat primitive
accumulation is an "ongoing process" within a society where capitalism is the
dominant mode of production. It may be done legally or illegally, and may
involve expropriation or no expropriation at all, it may involve unequal
exchange or no unequal exchange.
Special note: One of the problems in the field of
intellectual property is, that if this is to be a source of original
accumulation, then it must be possible to effect an "enclosure" of the
intellectual asset, such that private property rights can be asserted and
maintained ("it's mine, it belongs to me, and I am using it to accumulate
capital via the exchange of that asset, hands off my private property"). But a
conditionfor this might be privacy. The attitude of the bourgeoisie is
perfectly clear here: if it is a question of defending the private property I
already have, I am in favour of the ability to assert and maintain my privacy.
If it is a question of accumulating more property or wealth, I am sometimes in
favour of the ability to assert and maintain privacy (to protect my accumulation
strategy and defend it against interference) and sometimes against privacy
(because I need to access the property of somebody else, legally or
illegally,in order to appropriate, produceor alienate the
newextra wealth, otherwise I do not get anywhere). Ultimately this boils
down to theidea of "I want privacy when I want privacy, andI want
publicity when I want publicity", but since markets require communication
patterns which are not arbitrary in order to conclude a transaction, a "culture"
isrequired, in whichindispensable meanings are kept stable and
comprehensible, in which private property can be maintained, and primitive
accumulation can occur, by legal or illegal means.
The problem with intellectual property legislation
is, that it requires a theory of private property which is compatible with
capitalism, therefore it requires a theory of capitalism. But this theory would
have todistinguish legitimate from illegitimate sources of intellectual
property, and it cannot really do so, except by resorting to moral notions which
are perpetually contestable and contested, resulting in litigation and
counterclaims. At best, this theory canconclude, that people who already
possess intellectualassets are in a stronger position to expropriate the
intellectual assets of others, on the basis of "it takes one to know one".
For example, a teacher is an intellectual property
owner, who, when he is teaching, is engaging in a transaction, which involves
the transmission of knowledge, which the student buys as a durable consumer
good, a capital good,a casual commodity or a service. The problem
ishere isthat the value of knowledge can change instantly, and
basically depends on what the buyer is prepared to pay, in his/her
circumstances, creating uncertainty. Buying extra knowledge may reduce
uncertainty, but it may also increase uncertainty, but we may not know in
advance if it will do either of those or not, precisely because we do not have
the knowledge.
In which case, intellectual property is withdrawn
from the market (access denied) to drive up the cost. In the end, it could be
that nobody knows anything anymore, in which case uncertainty increases.
The emphasis in bourgeois culture today is to
attach special value to personal
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Do you want me to explain to you how to do it ? Jurriaan - Original Message - From: andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 9:24 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Regulation, state, economy I don't see how this has anything to do with whether stateless capitalism is possible. jks
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Yes please! Not the seeing part but how to do a stateless capitalism, whatever that means. Sabri Do you want me to explain to you how to do it? Jurriaan I don't see how this has anything to do with whether stateless capitalism is possible. jks
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Let's you and me talk about it in LA, when I get there, because really you know, I think that as socialists we ought to be talking more about how to do our socialism. My argument is that capitalism is ultimately the problem, and socialism is ultimately the solution. Now if anybody wants to say that a different capitalism is a solution, I am prepared to consider it, weigh its merits and argue about it, but really I consider this more an argument between the owners of capital, not very relevant to those who own little or none at all, except if they are interested in accumulation. I could go and start a whole discussion about re-institutionalising semiotic and transactional arbitration, but I do not really see the point in that just now, and I have other problems on my plate. I don't mean to be unfriendly but this is a public list. First you would have to persuade me that an analysis of stateless capitalism is conducive to the advancement of socialism or at any rate an egalitarian society. All the best, Jurriaan - Original Message - From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 2:02 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Regulation, state, economy Yes please! Not the seeing part but how to do a stateless capitalism, whatever that means.
Re: Regulation, state, economy
First you would have to persuade me that an analysis of stateless capitalism is conducive to the advancement of socialism or at any rate an egalitarian society. All the best, Jurriaan As far as the eye can see, there is no stateless capitalism in existence, so I think it is pointless to analyze a non-existing entity. Being not so smart, I was simply confused about this high level discussion, like that grandfather at the end of the movie Moonstrike. Hence, my previous question. What was it Ian once said: Moses, Moses! Come down from the mountain and eat your supper... Or something like that. Best, Sabri
Re: Regulation, state, economy-Mandel versus Marx
I of course take Marx over Mr. Mandel any day on every question of political economy.
"But before doing so, we might ask, how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood? The inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call "previous or original accumulation," but which ought to be called orginial expropriation. We should find that this so-called original accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour. Such an inquiry, however, lies beyond the pale of my present subject. The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.
What, then, is the value of labouring power? (Karl Marx Value, Price and Profit.)
"original accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour."
Apparently, the Trotskyite theoretician Ernest Mandel rendered Marx more profound. In Marx hands the primitive or original accumulation precedes the formation of the capitalist class. But, then again what does Marx know.:-) I guess hitting the lottery is the social process "resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour," along with armed robbery of ones neighbor, prostitution and playing the stock market.
In my dogmatic way of thinking hitting the lottery seem to be separating the state government from the money it collects from players and in turn the winners money "reenter" the reproduction process - long underway, and does not on any level lead to the formation of the capitalist class. This probably is the "dogmatic" way of viewing things.
Marx of course chooses to place primitive accumulation in a specific historical period "because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it." And is "the historical process of . . .the capital class in course of formation;"
One can define anything anyway one chooses and the Trotskyite theoretician Ernest Mandel is no Marx by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone know a good lottery number?
Melvin P :-)
Some possible sources of original accumulation within a society based on the capitalist mode of production (I note explicitly this is not intended as a complete list):
1) setting up a legal or illegal new business venture or entrepreneurial activity from scratch ("business start-ups") with loan capital
2) prostitution or slavery, legal or illegal, formal or informal, and live performances of any sort which earn money
3) legal foreign trade, on the basis of unequal exchange (buy cheap, sell dear) with loaned capital
4) invading another country in order to expropriate people there
5) playing the stock market, the futures market, the money market or the lottery with loaned capital
6) theft, robbery, fraud, scams, hedge funds, smuggling, espionage and other forms of crime leading to the acquisition of intellectual, material or human property by illegal means
7) expropriation of one capitalist by another capitalist, via legally permissible procedures or illegal ones
8) privatisation of publicly-owned assets which were/are paid for, or maintained by, taxpayers or rate-paying residents, or making money from helping that privatisation process along, legally or illegally
9) loaning money legally or illegally in order to loan more money, to lend it out again or invest it, legally or illegally, in order to make money from the discrepancy in the financial return or interest rate
10) legal or illegal mediation between people, on the basis of superior knowledge, obtained legally or illegally
In his book Late Capitalism, which I first read in 1980, Ernest Mandel therefore notes explicitly that primitive accumulation is an "ongoing process" within a society where capitalism is the dominant mode of production.
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Hi Ian, But didn't they offload these costs [create a beneficial set of externalities-for them] precisely because using their own security became a drain on their cash? Armies/Navies as the vanguard of socialism due to economies of scale? This was Frederic Lane's thesis in Profits from Power from which the notion of protection rents flows, Charles Tilly scooped up the idea and put it to mischievous uses. If it helps, see I. Wallerstein's essay in States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy [ Ed. by David Smith, Dorothy Solinger and Steven Topik] as his analysis is similar to yours regarding the possible future of 'the new mercenarism. Thanks for the references. The main point I am making is that whether or not security costs become a drain and who pays for those costs is not something structurally given by the capitalist mode of production in Marx's view. This is important to understand in these debates about state regulation. Doug argues capitalism is inconceivable without state regulation, I am saying it is conceivable, it is happening, and it happened already in history. If you think that the Dutch East India Company was simply a mercantile outfit you are wrong, because they established factories and plantations, and traded in slaves, in South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Admittedly this early multinational gained its franchise from the Dutch state, but having obtained it, it was more or less a law onto itself. That is, there is no structural reason inherent in the capitalist mode of production, why security must necessarily be organised by the state, and funded through taxes. I am not trying to be dogmatically Marxist here, by referring to Marx, I am just saying that Marx was well aware of the phenomena of mercantilism, he studied a lot of history. When you look at the Dutch, English, French, German etc. bourgeois revolutions, then the striking thing is that the bourgeoisie takes over the absolutist state apparatus, and then modifies it in line with its requirements, for the rest the state stays more or less the same for quite a while. You can even discover this in legal codifications, which date back to precapitalist times. Thus, even today, the bourgeois state combines feudal institutional principles with capitalist ones. The basic class priorities of the bourgeoisie were (1) defence of private property, (2) control over the levying of tax funds and the utilisation of those funds, (3) the unification of the national market, (4) privatisation of commonly held assets, usually in that order. Obviously, the state in settler colonies emerged in a somewhat different way, even so, it modelled itself on the home country. Accumulation of private capital occurred for centuries prior to industrialisation, just as wage labour did, but if private capital could be confiscated by feudal lords or by a state, through debt, robbery or overtaxing, as frequently happened, then a cumulative dynamic of economic growth obviously could not occur. The protection of private property is therefore the most fundamental interest of the bourgeoisie, deeply rooted in its history. In Europe, there was something like an academic Marxist state derivation debate which sought to derive state forms from the logic of capital but this debate has more in common with Parsonian structural-functionalism than with Marx, because it is woefully ahistorical in its approach. It ignores what I have just said, and lacks a real understanding of primitive (more correctly, as Marx himself calls it, original) accumulation processes, and therefore is mystified by the bourgeois character of bourgeois revolutions. In their cartoon Marxism, a bourgeois revolution would be a revolution which inaugurs capitalist industrialisation, but this has nothing to do with reality, or with the real history of the bourgeoisie as a class, hence they doubt the validity of the concept again. Similar fallacies are perpetrated by the regulationist schools in France even today, in analysing structural requirements of a regime of accumulation in an ahistorical way (which often abstracts from politics or class conflicts). So anyway the capitalist mode of production (capitalism) doesn't imply any specific state form in particular, as a distinctive inherent characteristic, with a specific legal system of rights and obligations. It is the other way round: the state form is adapted to the historically contingent requirements of capital accumulation, i.e. it is an outcome of class struggles in which different fractions of the possessing classes with different interests search for a modus vivendi that happens to suit them, and this form can mutate with new organisational forms. There are security costs, faux frais of production, externalities and external costs to consider, but there is no natural law which says that those costs must be offloaded onto the state. It is just a question of what is cheaper, who has power at the time, what the development needs and
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Doug argues capitalism is inconceivable without state regulation, I am saying it is conceivable, it is happening, and it happened already in history. If you think that the Dutch East India Company was simply a mercantile outfit you are wrong, because they established factories and plantations, and traded in slaves, in South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Admittedly this early multinational gained its franchise from the Dutch state, but having obtained it, it was more or less a law onto itself. No. You confuse primitive accumulation -- the nakedtaking by force of labor and raw materials -- with its product in the world system, capital. What makes that stuff capitsl is its relation, primarily legal relations, in a web of connections establishing rights and obligations. What makes a bunch of people a company? What makes this stuff here made by the workers its assets? What makes this gold its profits? What makes that gold (or scrip) the wages? How do these papers with marks on them constitute a note payable on demand or ata specific time? None of that is even conceivable -- Doug is right -- without a social system, a state of some sort to constitute and enforce those obligations and rights, and laws and rules saying what they are. You make the same mistake that David Shemano makes, _the_ fundamental error of ideology, in treating all this as natural. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Jurriaan Bendien wrote: Doug argues capitalism is inconceivable without state regulation, I am saying it is conceivable, it is happening, and it happened already in history. If you think that the Dutch East India Company was simply a mercantile outfit you are wrong, because they established factories and plantations, and traded in slaves, in South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Admittedly this early multinational gained its franchise from the Dutch state, but having obtained it, it was more or less a law onto itself. Yes, but that was long long ago. Think of Enron trading on political connections - via George Bush in Argentina or Bill Clinton in india - to cut nice deals. These days, even the most pious free marketeer needs friends in high places. And that's leaving aside all the macro stuff the World Bank and IMF have done in the interests of imperialism in recent decades. Doug
Re: Regulation, state, economy
- Original Message - From: andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 5:41 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Regulation, state, economy Doug argues capitalism is inconceivable without state regulation, I am saying it is conceivable, it is happening, and it happened already in history. If you think that the Dutch East India Company was simply a mercantile outfit you are wrong, because they established factories and plantations, and traded in slaves, in South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Admittedly this early multinational gained its franchise from the Dutch state, but having obtained it, it was more or less a law onto itself. No. You confuse primitive accumulation -- the nakedtaking by force of labor and raw materials -- with its product in the world system, capital. What makes that stuff capitsl is its relation, primarily legal relations, in a web of connections establishing rights and obligations. What makes a bunch of people a company? What makes this stuff here made by the workers its assets? What makes this gold its profits? What makes that gold (or scrip) the wages? How do these papers with marks on them constitute a note payable on demand or ata specific time? None of that is even conceivable -- Doug is right -- without a social system, a state of some sort to constitute and enforce those obligations and rights, and laws and rules saying what they are. You make the same mistake that David Shemano makes, _the_ fundamental error of ideology, in treating all this as natural. === Could it not have been, [sorry, thinking through counterfactuals can be fun :-)] regarding the legal revolution[s] that occurred, which really just needed an enforcer/adjudicator of last resort, very different as Heinrich Spruyt and, to a lesser extent, Janice Thomson have asserted? The Westphalian system was by no means a 'big bang' kind of deal, no? The commodification of law, esp. commercial and private law make trouble for Realist theories of the State and interState system which has been co-evolving for some 400 years and is morphing in weird ways even now under a hopefully growing, cohering web of social movements that need to confront the contradictions of 'the best governments money can buy.' The DEIC and it's correlatives from England etc.blurred the State-Capital binary in bizarre ways if one looks at them from a 'delegative' theory of property rights pov. Once they started to explore, extract, expropriate and enslave, they did have endogenous enforcement powers out 'on the periphery.' They created Cities Without Citizens as Engin Isin puts it and were de facto sovereigns. When I try to think through that binary I visualize a Necker Cube to break out of the State centric ontologies we have internalized. When legal adjudication didn't work the guns and cannon were fired, the costs going up with each conflict, hence the struggle today to replace warfare with lawfare and legal theorists like Guenther Teubner etc. wondering about convergences and divergences in contract law etc. even as we still have lots of vestiges of mercantilism scattered throughout the polities of the planet, CEOs dream of having islands/continents where the Corps. are the sovereigns and the Economist magazine brings up the issue of City-States as a possible future every now and then on its pages. Law and State are contingently co-evolved performances and there is no reason they cannot part ways in the future. *** http://www.versobooks.com The Myth of 1648 Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations Benno Teschke The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is widely interpreted as the foundation of modern international relations. Benno Teschke exposes this as a myth. In the process he provides a fresh re-interpretation of the making of modern international relations from the eighth to the eighteenth century. Inspired by the groundbreaking historical work of Robert Brenner, Teschke argues that social property relations provide the key to unlocking the changing meaning of international across the medieval, early modern, and modern periods. He traces how the long-term interaction of class conflict, economic development, and international rivalry effected the formation of the modern system of states. Yet instead of identifying a breakthrough to interstate modernity in the so-called long sixteenth century or in the period of intensified geopolitical competition during the seventeenth century, Teschke shows that geopolitics remained governed by dynastic and absolutist political communities, rooted in feudal property regimes. The Myth of 1648 argues that the onset of specifically modern international relations only began with the conjunction of the rise of capitalism and modern state-formation in England. Thereafter, the English model caused the restructuring of the old regimes of the Continent. This was
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Justin wrote: You confuse primitive accumulation -- the naked taking by force of labor and raw materials -- with its product in the world system, capital. You must think I am thick or something ! I am not confusing this at all, it is 95 percent of Marxists who confuse it, by identifying primitive accumulation (a bad translation of Marx's ursprungliche Akkumulation, relying on the German Ur [=primordial, ancestral], whereas ursprunglich really means simply initial or original or primary in English) exclusively with the taking by force of labour and raw materials. I have not yet written my book about this, in fact I have had to spend much more time trying to defend my mental health against Dutch predators. But anyway original accumulation do not simply mean the taking by force of labour and raw materials, and Marx makes this perfectly clear in considering forms of unequal exchange, usury capital etc. I distinguish very carefully between original accumulation and its result, in fact I wrote a long mail on it recently, I think Jim Devine has it. Most Marxists just don't know any history, or very little, and they have a primitive idea of original capital accumulation, that is the real problem, their primitivism about primitive accumulation. They think Marx exhaustively discussed this, whereas just about every chapter of Marx's book could be expanded into a book in its own right, discussing many more variations than Marx could, in taking Britain as the locus classicus of capitalist industry. The establishment of the capital-relation can occur in all sorts of ways, and modern technology creates even more options. Long before Immanuel Wallerstein invented his theory of the world system (a dubious construct, since he fails to specify what is systematic about it), Leon Trotsky, Ernest Mandel and to some extent Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin had already examined this whole problem, and provided the basic concepts for understanding it. Mandel's own Traite d'Economie Marxiste was completed in 1960 (ironically, if he had not been so preoccupied with this book, he would have been able to intervene better in the great Belgian general strike which happened just when he had finished it !). What makes that stuff capital is its relation, primarily legal relations, in a web of connections establishing rights and obligations. No. Capital is primarily a SOCIAL relation, ultimately, summed up in the phrase capital buys labour. Whether the labour is slave labour, semi-free labour, indentured labour, free labour, serf labour etc. is not essential to the definition. This is a class relationship of power and force, and the precise way in which this is established and legally institutionalised can vary, this legal institutionalisation is moreover not essential to the definition of it, and Marx himself nowhere suggests that any specific legal form is required, even although property rights of some type are normally codified in law. A robber baron operating some kind of mafia empire, or a military general operating some kind of military empire, can regulate the capital relation without much resort to legality at all - step out of line and you're dead, that is the law in that case. An exceedingly simple example of a modality of original accumulation not mentioned by Marx explicitly as such, is debt: if owners of capital lend out money which the borrower cannot pay back, then the borrower is reduced to destitution and may be forced to work for the owner of capital because there is no other option for survival. Susan George gives many examples of how just exactly this works. Another simple example of primitive accumulation is development aid. Teresa Hayes gives many examples of just how this works. Another example of primitive accumulation is the violation of privacy so that you can rob somebody's ideas through espionage, if those ideas are worth cash. And so on. Marx just says that free wage labour is typical of the capitalist mode of production, but even the modalities of free wage labour itself are historically relative and should not be narrowly conceived, as Prof. Marcel van der Linden has pointed out with reference to a great detail of research done internationally. The inability to understand the full range of modalities of original accumulation leads directly to the inability to understand the meaning of imperialism and its historical dynamics. Many Marxists want to say that imperialism is the result of capitalist industrialisation, whereas, in historical reality, the development of industrial capitalism is PREDICATED upon imperialism, and imperialism is strongly implicated in the very origins of capitalist industrialisation, i.e. this industrialisation is a result BOTH from internal causes (technological inventions, changing class relations, indigenous processes of original accumulation, etc.) AND external causes (trade in the world market, the plunder and enslavement of other
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Jurriaan Bendien wrote: Doug argues capitalism is inconceivable without state regulation, I am saying it is conceivable, it is happening, and it happened already in history. If you think that the Dutch East India Company was simply a mercantile outfit you are wrong, because they established factories and plantations, and traded in slaves, in South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Admittedly this early multinational gained its franchise from the Dutch state, but having obtained it, it was more or less a law onto itself. Doug writes: Yes, but that was long long ago... also, the Dutch East India Company and similar organizations _merged_ the functions of a privately-owned enterprise with those of a state (a monopoly of force within the geographical area). So the DEIC didn't need state regulation since it was a state. Just as procounsel Bremer is sponsored by the US state, the DEIC was sponsored by the Dutch state. That kind of organization fits with the general trend in the period of Absolutism/Mercantilism from feudalism to liberal capitalism: under the former, state force and economic enterprise were merged (as when the feudal lord applied direct coercion to the serf), while under the latter, they were largely separated (except when the boss hires goons to beat up striking workers, etc.) since the threat of the reserve army of labor and the separation of workers from the means of production and subsistence made direct coercion much less necessary. (The latter, of course, was the result of primitive accumulation.) Jim
Re: Regulation, state, economy
In a message dated 8/28/03 4:35:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Justin wrote: You confuse primitive accumulation -- the naked taking by force of labor and raw materials -- with its product in the world system, capital. You must think I am thick or something ! I am not confusing this at all, it is 95 percent of Marxists who confuse it, by identifying "primitive accumulation" (a bad translation of Marx's ursprungliche Akkumulation, relying on the German "Ur" [=primordial, ancestral], whereas "ursprunglich" really means simply initial or original or primary in English) exclusively with the "taking by force of labour and raw materials". "The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it." "In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and "unattached" proletarians on the labor market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods." (Capital Volume 1) "primitive accumulation . . .is . . . the historical process of . . .the capital class in course of formation; . . .expropriation of the agricultural producer, . . .from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. ' "But the accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus-value pre-supposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labor-power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point." (Capital Volume 1) In America and for the Americas this meant the slaughter of the Native Bands - peoples, the taking of their land and the early slave trade or rather New World slavery from roughly the 14th century to the early 17th century or so.
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Okay then, I will post my original letter to Paul (22 August 2003): Hi Paul,How's things ? I was reading some more discussion about primitiveaccumulation on OPE list, and I have a question. When I read Marx's Capitalin German, I never found any place in which he uses the term "primitiveaccumulation", rather, he uses the term "ursprungliche Akkumulation", thatis to say, the initial or original accumulation.Do you have any source or evidence, which proves that Marx uses the specificwords "primitive accumulation" himself, rather than original accumulation ?As far as I am am concerned, in these type of discussions, several differentissues are continually theoretically confused and conflated, maybe becauseof some metaphorical motive, I don't know, but anyway, little sense comesout of it.The issues concerning "ursprungliche Akkumulation" are:(1) The origins of capital as such(2) The historical evolution of the forms of capital, prior to, up to, andwithin the capitalist mode of production(3) The origins of the capitalist mode of production itself(4) The initial accumulation of capital, within the capitalist mode ofproduction itself, as an ongoing processMainly what is conflated in the discussion I think is the origins of capitalas such, and the gradual subordination of the entire production process of asociety or economic community under the laws of capital (which of courserequires the separation of labour power from the means of production, andthe privatisation and trade in means of production, leaving asidesuperstructural requirements). This leads to schoolboy errors, such as thatMarx's value theory applies only to the capitalist mode of production, andso on.In each of these 4 "moments" I mention, capital may originate from unequalexchange, legitimate merchant trade, capitalist or non-capitalistproduction, usury, plunder, piracy, conquest, theft, enslavement, credit andindebtedness or other forms of expropriation, etc. but all moments assumethe existence of trade and money.In his chapter on original accumulation (part 8, chapter 26), the problemthat Marx is actually dealing with is the initial conditions of thecapitalist MODE OF PRODUCTION, and not of capital as such. He says, Ialready have shown in my earlier discussion of the pure economic forms, andabstracting from unequal exchange, how "money is changed into capital" and"how capital generates surplus-value" which forms more capital. But he says,in discussing the forms of capital and surplus-value with reference toproduction, I have assumed that there already exists a mass of capital, andthere already exists exploitable labour-power (he had referred to usurycapital and merchant capital as sources of investment capital, and so on).Likewise, in discussing simple and expanded reproduction, he says, I haveshown how capitalist production can itself reproduce the conditions for itsown existence and perpetuation on an ever broader scale; in other words,how, in the production of surplus-value, the capitalistic social relationsof production themselves are simultaneously reproduced. That is WHY "thewhole movement seems to turn into a vicious circle" and to explain theorigins of the CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION as an historically separatemode of production, we can only get out of the vicious circle, by supposingan original accumulation, or what Adam Smith calls "previous accumulation",which is not the result of the CMP, but an external starting point.What you have to explain, is how the growth of trade can transform theproduction process into a capitalist production process, and Marx says, thatis something I have not done so far, because I assumed the existence ofexploitable labour-power, and I assumed a stock of money which could beinvested in means of production and labour-power. I have examined the socialrelations and property relations which allow this to happen, but I have notexplained where those social relations originate from (a requirement of thematerialist conception of history).Marx's basic concern is to dissociate the concept of Smithian "previousaccumulation" from the concept of "saving up money", such as occurs here andthere on an ongoing basis, and delineate the origins of the CMP firmly inEXPROPRIATION of one sort or another (of which the current conquest of Iraqprovides a striking example). And it is this, which sets the theme for theremaining chapters of Volume 1. And by that very fact, the capitalisticsocial relations of production are intrinsically class relations, involvingthe domination of the possessing classes over the other classes in thepopulation, and the extension of this domination; moreover theyintrinsically involve crime, not just in the sense of the violation ofprivate property (expropriation of capital by other capital, or by thepropertyless), but the forcible privatisation of public or foreign property(resources of any kind) through expropriation in some or other
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Hi Jim, The LORD is my shepherd, isn't that what they say ? Check out Estelle Reyna. also, the Dutch East India Company and similar organizations _merged_ the functions of a privately-owned enterprise with those of a state (a monopoly of force within the geographical area). So the DEIC didn't need state regulation since it was a state. Just as procounsel Bremer is sponsored by the US state, the DEIC was sponsored by the Dutch state. Well, that is just to say that it is sometimes mighty difficult to tell the difference between a corporation and a state. The point is that the corporations established the initial conditions for subsequent colonial administrations, and formal annexation by another state. Incidentally, Ernest Mandel estimated from a bit of quick additive arithmetic that the capital represented by the gold, silver, slaves etc. robbed from foreign lands by European adventurers exceeded the entire capital invested in manufactories in Western Europe around the year 1800 AD. That kind of organization fits with the general trend in the period of Absolutism/Mercantilism from feudalism to liberal capitalism: under the former, state force and economic enterprise were merged (as when the feudal lord applied direct coercion to the serf), while under the latter, they were largely separated (except when the boss hires goons to beat up striking workers, etc.) since the threat of the reserve army of labor and the separation of workers from the means of production and subsistence made direct coercion much less necessary. (The latter, of course, was the result of primitive accumulation.) Yep, indeed in certain cases, Dutch, English and French sea captains could get contracts from the bourgeois state legalising piracy... flying the national flag, not the skull-and-bones. I came across that in my youth, because I took a lively interest in naval history. Your remark relates really to the power relations to which I summarily referred, which partly influence, and partly are influenced by, the actual equilibrium situation that is established (As Freeman, Carchedi, Giussani and others pointed out, the neo-classical economics notion of equilbrium relies on a static, unwarranted view of economic stability or economic balance, in which not many real captains of industry would follow them). Jurriaan
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Title: Re: Regulation, state, economy Jurriaan wrote: ...When I read Marx's Capital in German, I never found any place in which he uses the term primitive accumulation, rather, he uses the term ursprungliche Akkumulation, that is to say, the initial or original accumulation. Do you have any source or evidence, which proves that Marx uses the specific words primitive accumulation himself, rather than original accumulation ? In English, primitive and original, in the strictest sense of both words, are synonymous. In Cassel's German-English dictionary, the preferred equivalent of ursprunglich is primitive, followed by primordial. original comes fifth. Shane
Re: Regulation, state, economy
I don't see how this has anything to do with whether stateless capitalism is possible. jks --- Shane Mage [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jurriaan wrote: ...When I read Marx's Capital in German, I never found any place in which he uses the term primitive accumulation, rather, he uses the term ursprungliche Akkumulation, that is to say, the initial or original accumulation. Do you have any source or evidence, which proves that Marx uses the specific words primitive accumulation himself, rather than original accumulation ? In English, primitive and original, in the strictest sense of both words, are synonymous. In Cassel's German-English dictionary, the preferred equivalent of ursprunglich is primitive, followed by primordial. original comes fifth. Shane __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Regulation, state, economy
In a message dated 8/28/03 10:08:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi Paul, How's things ? I was reading some more discussion about primitive accumulation on OPE list, and I have a question. When I read Marx's Capital in German, I never found any place in which he uses the term "primitive accumulation", rather, he uses the term "ursprungliche Akkumulation", that is to say, the initial or original accumulation. Do you have any source or evidence, which proves that Marx uses the specific words "primitive accumulation" himself, rather than original accumulation ? As far as I am concerned, in these type of discussions, several different issues are continually theoretically confused and conflated, maybe because of some metaphorical motive, I don't know, but anyway, little sense comes out of it. The issues concerning "ursprungliche Akkumulation" are: (1) The origins of capital as such (2) The historical evolution of the forms of capital, prior to, up to, and within the capitalist mode of production (3) The origins of the capitalist mode of production itself (4) The initial accumulation of capital, within the capitalist mode of production itself, as an ongoing process Mainly what is conflated in the discussion I think is the origins of capital as such, and the gradual subordination of the entire production process of a society or economic community under the laws of capital (which of course requires the separation of labour power from the means of production, and the privatisation and trade in means of production, leaving aside superstructural requirements). This leads to schoolboy errors, such as that Marx's value theory applies only to the capitalist mode of production, and so on. Comment It is interesting how one can arrive at the same propositions using different languages and approaches. I concur that primitive - in the context of this discussion, mean "initial" and never understood it different. The brand of Marxism I evolved from stated this as such in several documents outlining the evolution of American history roughly thirty years ago. Your insight on the various forms of labor that enter the sphere of commodity production has always been a sore point for American Marxism and is refreshing. I most certainly agree with the base of the propositions in your additional comments on this matter, especially the important you attract to gold as it became a level, indicator and _expression_ of the transformation in the form of wealth that accelerates universal exchange - commodity exchange, or what was simply scattered products being exchange assuming the commodity form, but not yet on a universal scale. I further agree that it is a serious mistake to proceed from a point of view that the value form or what is or was the same - the commodity form of the products, is limited to that identified as the capitalist mode of production or the bourgeois property relations - "Marx's value theory applies only to the capitalist mode of production." Perhaps, one of the most classic or rather popular book that deals wtith the state and trade and the bourgeois property relations, that influenced a generation of Marxist in America is Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time." As such it has remained a fixture in my personal library. For several years these theory terms were used but no one in American agree on the concept of the "market pattern" - or anything else, including who is going to win the next football game. For reasons of my own personal history I was lead t- choose, to approach history from the evolution of the value form - the development of commodity production (form) as distinct from its interactivity with the bourgeois property relations, as it was impacted and accelerated by the transitions in the form of wealth and the universal rise of gold as a medium of money and money/capital. In my opinion these question and issues concerning the evolution of the value form and the commodity form that apparently arose together as a unity, which overlap but are not identical and become separate and antagonistic aspects of the same process - only at a certain point in the development of the means of production, is timely and necessary in light of the current changes taking place in our world. I must admit that digital money - or rather digital currency, has me stumped in terms of its impact on the commodity form. Several months of work on this have yielded zero results. On another list, brother Henry Lieu will be consulted. I do admint that number four: "The initial accumulation of capital, within the capitalist mode of production itself, as an ongoing process" caused my right eyebrow to rise slightly. An initial process can no longer reproduce itself within the framework of the process it gives rise to one the new law system becomes operational on its own basis, even if it appears so. This is so because it acquires a new
Re: Regulation, state, economy
In a message dated 8/28/03 12:25:29 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I don't see how this has anything to do with whether stateless capitalism is possible. jks A stateless property relations is not possible and this includes public property. There is a real question as to whether a classless society is possible without being stateless. From here we go into the meaning of class and the meaning of "the state" and armed bodies of men and women versus government functions and how the societal infrastructure is administered and the role of computers and the form of democracy. Marxism and socialism as theory and doctrine has been pigeoned holed by the legacy of its birth. What about us - at the apex of world power? What of the most imperial peoples of all peoples who in the last instance are going to impact earth in a big way? Peace Melvin P.
Re: Regulation, state, economy
this discussion of terms is missing the key distinction between two types of primitive accumulation or whatever you want to call it: 1) the sort emphasized by the bourgeois economists, in which today's inequality of wealth is a result of some people being more thrifty than others at some point in the past. 2) that of Marx, in which the structure of inequality (class relations) are result of a violent process of expropriation of the direct producers by the post-feudal/early-Absolutist ruling classes. whether or not primitive accumulation continues or can continue after the period discussed by Marx is another issue. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 1:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Regulation, state, economy Thanks for your comment, Shane. I do not want to get into a drawnout semantic dispute about this (statistically, I guess that a word - especially a noun or concept - in the German language, on average just has a somewhat larger number of conventionally used meanings or nuances than in English, and the intended meaning thus tends to depend on context more, at least traditionally or in scholarship). Point is that ursprunglich is used in German to refer to the initial situation, initial cause, the original source (Ursprung) and usually carries a connotation of a time sequence, hence also the connection with primordial, so that Ursprunglichkeit could refer to primordiality, genuinely pristine creativity and so forth. My claim is not that the term primitive accumulation is not necessarily wrong formally speaking, but misleading, suggesting a counterposition of primitive and developed, complex, sophisticated and so on, whereas primitive accumulation processes are often not primitive at all, of course. But more importantly, I consider that ursprungliche Akkumulation in Marx's critique of political economy ought to refer to ALL TYPES of original accumulation, and not merely to the separation of people from their means of production (privatisation processes). The suggestion of Marxists is that first you have primitive accumulation and then you have capitalism and after that the primitive accumulation is finished; and this is just nonsense, no serious analyst believes that. Original accumulation can occur without any wage-labour being involved, for example, even although, if this is the case, it is still possible for capital to buy labour services, i.e. in virtue of this property ownership it is still possible to effect some form of unequal exchange or appropriation or alienation of labour, de facto or explicitly. Part of the critique of modern corporate capitalism would be, for example, that it simply blocks original accumulation for many people, notwithstanding all the odes to competition as a stimulant for innovation. Jurriaan In English, primitive and original, in the strictest sense of both words, are synonymous. In Cassel's German-English dictionary, the preferred equivalent of ursprunglich is primitive, followed by primordial. original comes fifth. Shane
Re: Regulation, state, economy
In a message dated 8/28/03 1:26:55 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The suggestion of Marxists is that first you have primitive accumulation and then you have capitalism and after that the primitive accumulation is finished; and this is just nonsense, no serious analyst believes that. Original accumulation can occur without any wage-labour being involved, for example, even although, if this is the case, it is still possible for capital to buy labour services, i.e. in virtue of this property ownership it is still possible to effect some form of unequal exchange or appropriation or alienation of labour, de facto or explicitly. Part of the critique of modern corporate capitalism would be, for example, that it simply blocks original accumulation for many people, notwithstanding all the odes to competition as a stimulant for innovation. Actually Marx coinded the term Primitive acculations as translated by Engels - according to my edition and he states its meaning. "But the accumulation of capital pre-supposes surplus-value; surplus-value pre-supposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labor-power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point." Capital Volume 1 You of course raise the profound question of transition or "the big man" against the "little man," or the less economically developed in terms of the commodity form verus the more developed man with a more developed commodity form. As I understand matters, original or primitive accumulation by definition occurs without or rather in front - as a change wave, of the emergence of wage labor as a universal systematic relations, and is accelerated in the person of the merchant or merchant capital. Aye, the merchant - this man with acceptable means of exchange taking place primitively - originally, amongst the ruling class, who as an abstraction and in real life purchased items from scattered producers across the land - spices and fabric, and present them for sell to the most noble ones. No superior knowledge is claimed of Marx Capital Volume 3 on the system of credit capital and the role of the merchant or in my readings of history and the evolution and emergence of exchange five thousand years ago. Part of the critique of modern capitalism is how the corporation - not its form, but its actual organizations of production and production of material wealth and commodities on the basis of the bourgeois property relations is impacted and affected by the revolution now underway in the means of production. Don''t get me wrong, the changes in the technology cannot - not, affect the form of the corporations and the form of the state. To a rather large degree are we not fighting over the form - politics and superstructure relations of something that has arisen "new?" The suggestion of Marxists where I grew up (it is understood that we all grow up in different neighborhoods, cites and regions and countries) is that first you have an initial - "primitive," accumulation of capital and then the emergence of the bourgeois property relations. Because change takes place by definition in a wave, the biggest wave hits those who are located closest of the beach on which the wave is traveling. Change waves are waves because they rise and fall only to emerge again and further change the sands on the beaches of history. Nothing ever happens all at one time. T he Marxists you accused of saying that all "things basically happen all at one time" did not live in my neighborhood. None of them said that an original - primitive, acccumualtion of capital in a remote area was not overcome and defeated by an older system of capital reproduction that had an army to implement its rule and meaning. This meaning was basically, you will buy from me and in the last instance work to buy from me which is to work for me. In America the slave was owned by the slave master but produced cotton of the English industry . . . hery .. . my brother just came over and I would rather hang out with him right now. It is 5:05 Detroit and I am out. Peace. Melvin P.
Re: Regulation, state, economy
- Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Doug Henwood wrote: An unregulated capitalist economy would quickly destroy itself. Capital needs the state to discipline and rescue it. The idea of bourgeois regulation is to preserve the system, not transform it, which was what ME were all about. This is basically correct in practice I think, but - if you keep deregulating and privatising in the neo-liberal fashion, then is the state ultimately able to regulate anything much, other than through military and security forces ? Many corporations today already have budgets and turnovers which are larger than the budgets and turnovers of medium-sized economies. This suggests that at some future date, other things remaining equal, governments could become uneconomic, from the corporate viewpoint, since it is cheaper to protect your own assets with your own security forces, as happened with trading houses in the epoch of merchant capital within late-feudal and early-bourgeois society. = But didn't they offload these costs [create a beneficial set of externalities-for them] precisely because using their own security became a drain on their cash? Armies/Navies as the vanguard of socialism due to economies of scale? This was Frederic Lane's thesis in Profits from Power from which the notion of protection rents flows, Charles Tilly scooped up the idea and put it to mischievous uses. If it helps, see I. Wallerstein's essay in States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy [ Ed. by David Smith, Dorothy Solinger and Steven Topik] as his analysis is similar to yours regarding the possible future of 'the new mercenarism. Ian Ian
Re: Regulation, state, economy
Jurriaan Bendien wrote: This is basically correct in practice I think, but - if you keep deregulating and privatising in the neo-liberal fashion, then is the state ultimately able to regulate anything much, other than through military and security forces ? Many corporations today already have budgets and turnovers which are larger than the budgets and turnovers of medium-sized economies. This suggests that at some future date, other things remaining equal, governments could become uneconomic, from the corporate viewpoint, since it is cheaper to protect your own assets with your own security forces, as happened with trading houses in the epoch of merchant capital within late-feudal and early-bourgeois society. I really doubt that. The bourgeoisie needs its executive committe to stand above intra-family disputes, to think beyond the next quarter, and to act as a rescue squad when things go bad. Despite 20 years of dereg, governments worldwide aren't any smaller than they were when the current policy thrust began. Doug
