On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
>
> Oh, it's simple. I have the Marxian Old Testament engraved on this
> silicon chip here, and it reads: (1) capital is useful but capitalism
> sucks, (2) soak the rich and spend on the rest of us, and (3) free and
> equal exchange with other members of the world-system (birds and
> bunny-rabbits included). All the rest is, you know, technique. You know,
> things like Clause 2.A.1.4, which says, a euro in the hand is worth two
> bubble-dollars in the bush. The Mephistophelean state-developmental devil
> is always in the details!
What is this? Caricature Marx day. Dennis, surely you are joking, right? The whole point of Marx's endeavors is to show that capital is not simply means of production or heterogeneous instruments of production or a quantative increase in roundabout methods--a simple development from the use of flint and other useful things by prehistoric man (I haven't read Veblen's mocking essays on bourgeois capital theory but they seem right on).
Capital is the historically specific social relation in which labor finds itself completely alienated from the conditions of production. Capital is not a useful thing, it is a social relation--an exploitative relation of production operating in and through value relations, as Murray Smith puts (I think) in Invisible Leviathan. The point is developed with stunning success in the latest issue of Science and Society by Paresh Chattopadyay (see also John Weeks, Geoffrey Pilling, Lawrence Krader--treatise of social labour); other theorists who have understood this include the contributors (especially Backhaus) to the three volumes of Open Marxism, ed. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway and Moishe Postone in his magnum opus.
Moreover, Marx's whole politics aims to discontent the working class with simply a better distribution of income (tax the rich). Once the true relation is understood, why be happy as a better paid slave, Marx asks in the Critique of the Gotha Program.
best, rakesh