[lbo-talk] Marx on the credit crunch?

[Eric]

>Nor is "new form of production" equivalent to new forms of property
>and contract that would, presumably, be partly constitutive of
>socialism-communism; KM could simply be talking about new ways of
>making new types of commodities.............technological change and
>the like.

Yes, and this seems to me essential. Contra Winslowian opinions, I 
don't think Marx -- at least the late Marx -- intended to say (and 
certainly we are under no obligation to read him as saying) that 
capital's "creation of ... new forms of production" was the 
expression of a stagist, progressive development of Gattungswesen. 
Instead, this quote, and many others like it, should be read as 
describing capital's ability to continually go beyond its own limits, 
to produce, among other things, "new ways of making new types of 
commodities." Marx is not positing an end here, but a limit.