[lbo-talk] Marx on the credit crunch?

Eric rayrena at realtime.net
Tue Apr 1 10:05:29 PDT 2008



>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.



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