Kalecki's political business cycle

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at Princeton.EDU
Sat Mar 18 09:02:19 PST 2000



>kelley wrote:
>
>> wow. nothing like removing human beings entirely from the picture.

Like Carrol, I don't have a klew as to what Kelley is saying, that I suspect it is a response to my last post.

At any rate, Marx did not eliminate the human subject from history, but considered that it is transformed, embodied in capital in the form of the capitalist, who is capital personified. This invented person enters into history and *really* does reduce the natural limits of human capacity to the point of least resistance for the purpose of increased profit.

The person thus manufactured is a class-person, a human being as though. The capitalist as an individual is robbed of his humanity. In what way is he different from a corporation? The corp. does not know human sentiments of mercy or charity. If he makes a charitable contribution, it is in order to gain tax relief, or because it will sit with well with the public, it is good publicity. The corp. is not imperisonal, it is ap erson, but an inhuan person. All capitalists, human or not, cause their behavior and their rlatins to conform to that of the vorporation, which is the ideal type of capitalist: it is that person toward which the capitalist tends. Thereby the subjectivity is entirely eliminated from the picture, as Kelley would have it. After all the human individual is liable to hman weakness of mercy, charity and pity; it is deposited in the corp, where it is endowed with will and consciousness. The corporation is inhuman and eliminates the individual. The form absorbs the content and makes of it something else. The formal side of the individual is all that is left. If the capitalist shows that he has human qualities, these are called weakness, and he will go under. It is best to leave affairs to inhuman corporate persons.
>From Lawrence Krader, The Dialectic of Anthropology, p. 238

rb



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