--- abu hartal <abuhartal at hotmail.com> wrote:
> But if class power is organized precisely through
> the value form
I would say rather that class power is constituted *by* the value form.
"The functions performed by the capitalist are only the functions of capital itself performed with consciousness and will — the functions of value valorising itself through the absorption of living labour. The capitalist functions only as capital personified, capital as a person, just as the worker only functions as the personification of labour, which belongs to him as torment, as exertion, while it belongs to the capitalist as the substance that creates and increases wealth; and in fact it appears as such an element incorporated into capital in the production process, as its living, variable, factor. The rule of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer, since in fact the commodities which become means of domination over the worker (but purely as means of the rule of capital itself) are mere results of the production process, the products of the production process. This is exactly the same relation in the sphere of material production, in the real social life process — for this is the production process — as is represented by religion in the ideological sphere: the inversion of the subject into the object and vice versa."
- Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process
> I would not want to dissolve the realties of class
> power in the mist of the
> so
> called imperatives of a demiurgical value form.
But that Demiurge, however mystical, is a really existing social relationship. Far more of a "mist" to me would be to attribute capitalism to the subjective will of individual human beings. Too many Marxists that emphasize "class struggle" seem to do so. That seems to have more in common with conspiracy theory than with what Marx is getting at.
Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: Marx's ideas on this are in _The Manifesto of
the > Communist Party_
I am not so sure about this. I think perhaps it is not necessarily correct to view Marx's various writings as forming an ouevre. As the Manifesto was written years before Marx's mature critique of political economy, one cannot assume that the political intentions in it reflect Marx's mature social theory.
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