In what sense is Paris Hilton a machine for the conversion of surplus-value into additional capital? She spends money made (surplus value expropriated) by other people, end of story. Capitalists are parasites because an alternative society could be organized in which workers perform all the productive functions they happen to perform by virtue of their ownership of productive assets. They would not be required in socialism. However, capitalism itself could not function without them. It could function happily without Paris Hilton, who contributes nothing in capitalism itself other than cheesy home sex videos and celeb headlines. She might indeed go to work, if she had the ability, as a capitalist. But if she doesn't, she's a rentier. K.M. himself has a long discussion of rent in Capital III, well worth careful study. I doubt if he ever imagined anything quite so degraded as Paris Hilton, however, something he would most definitely see as definitive proof of the necessity for social revolution.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the
> > prophets! . . . But what avails lamentation in
> the
> > face of historical necessity? If to classical
> economy,
> > the proletarian is but a machine for the
> production of
> > surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist
> is in
> > its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this
> > surplus-value into additional capital.
> >
> > Karl Marx, Capital, vol I, Ch. 24, sec. 3.
> >
> > But Paris Hilton is a rentier, not a capitalist.
>
> I've never agreed with this division. Rentiers are a
> subsection of the
> capitalist class, not another class. They do own
> capital, and their use
> of it may always shift. Surely David Rockefeller and
> John D. Rockefeller
> III wre not in different classes. And surely spouses
> of active
> capitalists are part of that class. No analytic
> power is gained, and
> some is lost, by making a sharp distinction between
> rentiers and other
> capitalists.
>
> Carrol
>
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