----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org>
CB:
Fetters , as in chains binding:
The best current reading of "productive forces" might be with respect to the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation under capitalism *. Globalization, Monopolization and "centralizing"" ( i.e. the "center of the circle" metaphor, which is a way of referring to the whole; the whole circle is equidistant from its center and so the center of the circle represents the whole) of capital are the ultimate or limit of private appropriation. At the same time, the most recent scattering of the points of production / productive forces around the globe is the furthest step yet in history of the socialization of labor, the division of labor into a more fully world wide web. Marx predicts that the world wide web of labor will burst asunder the integument, the fetters binding it for the private expropriators.
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What is private about Microsoft or Toyota or Google?
Indeed, after Morris Cohen and some of the Legal Realists' redescriptions of property, let alone the actual juridical changes in the structuring of corporations, what is private about capitalism?
When terms like State and collective are as polysemous and vague as they are despite the articulations of legal theorists, economists, sociologists, philosophers etc. over the last 20 decades, why should any one engage in obeisance to the utterly unstable and subsequently destabilized binary of public/private as it existed when Marx wrote up his various hypotheses?
Recommended:
All Organizations Are Public: Comparing Public And Private Organizations by Barry Bozeman