Very happy to see you on this list Rakesh!
--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Hi Angelus and others,
> Noted the favorable reference to Polanyi; do you
> know the critiques
> by John Lie and Maurice Godelier?
I am not aware of those criticisms. Are they available online?
> Once the nature of value is understood, all belief
> in the necessity of the
> bourgeois mode of production vanishes.
The difficult part is getting people to grasp the nature of value. Especially among Marxists, value tends to be reified into an eternal feature of human productive activity. I have even heard such an argument made by a poster on this list. But Marx is concerned with the forms that certain relationships between humans take in capitalism. The Value form is at the core of what makes capitalism. To see value as an anthropological constant is to succumb to and reproduce the fetish.
Too long the left has seens capitalism as being defined by the domination of a particular social class, or an inegalitarian distribution of property. But Marx himself notes that social classes as they appear in the account of Capital are character masks. I don't think this is an idiosyncrasy of Marx's account. If classes as they appear in Capital are merely character masks, it is because for Marx the imperatives of the value form are central.
Richard Harris wrote:
>I'm not sure I even understand what we need to
reverse >this separation, i.e. to end capitalism.
What is our >political project in the world as it now
is, except as >a saying no to the institutions of
capital?
This is a question that plagues me constantly. I liked some of what John Holloway has to say in his book Change the World Without Taking Power, but I think many of the criticisms made by Daniel Bensaid in Un monde à changer (German title: Eine Welt zu Verändern) are very pertinent. But as eloquent as his critique of Holloway is, I don't see that he has much to offer other than a post-modernized Leninism.
I am intriqued by attempts at de-valorization in everyday life, like free software, squatted housing, communal kitchens, the "umsonst" campaigns in some German cities but ultimately these kind of projects are damned to live as anamolous phenomena at the margins of commodity society without a wider movement for communism.
And how do we get that wider movement for communism?
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