>It just struck me that one reason for this is that they're not
>offended by the social hierarchies of capitalism themselves, but just
the
>turbulent bits, which often disturb those hierarchies.
yeah, a positive dialectics for bedtime.
yoshie wrote:
>The oppositions between 'modernity' and 'tradition,' 'nature' and
>'artifice,' etc. have been frequently used to advance conservative
>criticisms of some effects of capitalism, while leaving capitalism
itself
>off the hook; at the same time, women have usually been cast as
bearers of
>'tradition,'
and, it has recently struck me that there are marxists for whom the category 'use value' works precisely as this natural element, this foundational real which somehow operates outside the terms of capitalism, which is defined as consisting of exchange values. someone went so far as to define sexism and racism as the production of use values; which are somehow distinguishable (historically and analytically) from exchange values, and which are not inherent to the social organisation of capitalism. here then, the (anti--capitalist, but not anti-racist or anti-sexist) solution would be to drop those unnatural exchange values and commit ourselves to use values as the real expression of a human ontology - distinguish between the bad bits and the good bits of the commodity form.... if i believed this, i would believe baudrillard's _mirror of production_.
chaz asked:
>Private property is a certain form of relation of among people
regarding ownership >of the means of production. Technology is MEANS
of production. By Marxism, >socialism comes when the working class, a
group of people, make it not when it is >"automatically caused" by
somekind of technology or means of production.
my reservations are these: until such time as someone can convince me that the phrase 'private property' does not entail a specific moment in capitalist society -- ie., one in which the degrees of personalised command and ownership by capitalists over/of labourers was still not only operative but decisive -- as distinct from capitalism defined as the law of value (both exchange and use values as double moments of the value form) then i prefer to distinguish it as such, if only to distinguish communism from social democracy and socialism. where the latter are defined as more or less by changes in the distribution and ownership of exchange values.
angela