Here's a short explanation of M-C-M':
***** Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 05:31:33 -0800 To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu From: Jim Devine <jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu> Subject: [PEN-L:4996] Re: expression meaning?
At 08:04 AM 11/27/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>can someone out there explain meaning of: M-C-M'?
It refers to the capitalist process of exploitation. The representative capitalist lays out money (M) in order to get more money (M' > M). The difference between the two is what Marx calls surplus-value. In order to do this, the capitalist must use the M to buy commodities (C), which must include the commodity labor-power (people's ability to work), since it is labor-power that can be put to do actual work so as to more than pay for the cost of hiring labor-power. This is more than simply exchange, since the labor-power must be used in an actual production process, the transformation of nature and of previous products of labor to produce new commodities.
M-C-M' is thus short-hand for M-C (MP, LP) ... P ... C' - M' where MP are the means (or objects) of production, LP is labor-power, P is the production process, and C' is a new commodity.
It often happens that an capitalist (e.g., a money-lender) can simply make money by using money (M - M'). But Marx's theory is an aggregate one: this capitalist is capturing some of the surplus-value produced by some industrial capitalist. This can be seen by the fact that an individual capitalist can make a profit by buying means of production, but that these profits correspond to losses (or below-average profits) of other capitalists. In simple terms, if one capitalist is buying low and selling high, others are selling low and buying high.
Jim Devine jdevine at lmu.edu & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine *****
For a longer one, read Marx's _Capital_.
> >Here's an entry from Samuel Pepys' diary to confirm your thought on
>>the prohibition being constitutive of pornography as genre:
>
>Now, I don't know if this is jargon or just bad writing. But the meaning is
>lost on me. Call me Rube.
What is pornography? Pornography cannot be defined in and of itself, with no reference to the laws & customs that prohibit certain kinds of sexual representation. The prohibition thus creates a genre called pornography, or "the prohibition is constitutive of pornography as genre."
What is commonly called "jargon" is, more often than not, "shorthand" -- a way of expressing thought with an expectation that the audience shares the same framework of interpretation as the writer. Therefore, those who have not learned the said framework yet may not understand the shorthand dependent on the mastery of it (though sometimes meanings of hitherto unfamiliar terms can be inferred from their context). When you don't understand what someone says, you simply need to ask for clarification (as Norm, to whom Jim Devine replied on PEN-l, asked). It happens all the time, in & out of academia. Learning a new trade, a new social theory, etc. is akin to learning a foreign language. You can't learn it without asking questions.
What you think of "academic jargon" in my posts probably has little to do with academia; my shorthand which may baffle you comes from the Marxist tradition. I wouldn't use M-C-M' as shorthand on my department's e-lists, for instance, since most of my colleagues are not Marxists.
As you know, Marxism is a foreign language in America, including most parts of American universities.
Yoshie
Postscript:
At 8:07 PM -0400 12/16/00, Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer wrote:
>I know Yoshie's parents were working-class; but did
>they talk this way?
Of course they don't. They speak Japanese, not English. English is my second language, too. I grew up in Japan, and I came to the States only for grad school education.