[lbo-talk] value form

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 9/25/06, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?

Communists ought to keep in mind: criticism of commodity fetishism
might itself become a fetishism, a post-modernized Critical
Criticism*, as it were.

Once we understand that the value form isn't an anthropological
constant, we have to come down to the real world and understand and
struggle through its facts and fantasies.

* Cf. The Holy Family, Chapter V "'Critical Criticism' As a
Mystery-Monger, Or 'Critical Criticism' As Herr Szeliga,"
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch05.htm>
-- 
Yoshie
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