I don't know how to respond to that. It would appear from your
>earlier remark (to the effect that a capitalist who doesn't work is
>a rentier) that you distinguish the two according to whether the
>individual voluntarily chooses to work or performs some useful
>occupation in society. So a capitalist would be more moral as
>measured against the Protestant Work Ethic than a rentier.---??
No. Just different, with different material interests. Just to pick one: a rentier is more concerned with keeping inflation down, while an industrial capitalist would prefer (if given a choice) a higher rate of growth. A rentier would prefer a high currency value, and a capitalist a lower one. But since these are intra-family quarrels, the differences are rarely profound. --Doug
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In fact, the rentier and industrial capitalist are often one and the same. GM just announced its intention to sell its most reliably profitable division, GMAC, a financial services operation.
On the productive/unproductive thing, the gospel according to Marx, as I understand him, is that capital is a self-expanding sum of values. At the end of the story, the successful capitalist must end up with a sum of values greater than the one s/he initially put in. Whether the increment to the initial capital invested comes from manufacture, banking or real estate makes no diiference to the capitalist--or to the definition of one. The "productive" capitalist doesn't necessarily work or make any contribution to society.S/he simply owns capital that is deployed in production. Managerial functions can be left to hirelings.
The productive/unproductive distinction is theoretically important, however. The profits of unproductive capitalists--bankers, landlords, merchants--come from the sum of already existing values. These values are simply transferred from the pockets of creditors, tenants, customers, into theirs. The increment of value realized by the owner of an auto plant, on the other hand, represents newly created value. Its creation requires the purchase of labor power, the only commodity capable of generating more value than that required for its reproduction. Marx says that capitalism is never fully established until it seizes hold of the sphere of production, the sphere in which comodities and hence value and surplus value, are created. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20051018/7f8b3810/attachment.htm>