--- Michael McIntyre <mcintyremichael at mac.com> wrote:
> My German is less than rudimentary. Is the Gruppe
> Krisis' Manifesto
> against Labour
> (http://members.blackbox.net/oebgdk/krisis_manifest-
>
> englisch.html) a fair summary of your tendency.
I should note that I have serious reservations about the "collapse" theory advocated by Exit! and Krisis. I share Michael Heinrich's criticism that it rests upon a misunderstanding about a certain passage in the Grundrisse. Basically, the Krisis people derive a theory of automatic capitalist collapse because they view the growth in the organic composition of capital as undermining the substance of value.
But as Heinrich correctly points out, that is merely the basis of the production of relative surplus value.
But what is important about the "Wertkritiker" (the name that Exit! and Krisis give to themselves) and what they share in common with both Heinrich and Postone, is their emphasis on the commodity form as the defining element of capitalist domination and its centrality in Marx's mature critique of political economy.
>I'm
> guessing that if
> I want to understand more I should look at Moishe
> Postone's Time,
> Labour and Social Domination?
There are certainly worse books you could spend your time with! :-)
Postone's roots are in the "new reading" of Capital that emerged in West Germany in the 1970s as the result of the work of thinkers like Roman Rosdolsky, Hans-Georg Backhaus, and Helmut Reichelt (the latter two were students of Adorno's).
Interestingly enough, John Holloway is another who has been influenced by Backhaus and Reichelt (and two of their essays have been translated to English for the "Open Marxism" books), and who attempts to reconcile this area of thought with Italian Operaismo! I really enjoyed Holloway's book, though I'm still not quite sure what to think of this attempt, and I know many view these two areas of thought as irreconcilable, but I wonder if that is simply the narcissism of small differences.
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