[lbo-talk] The State and Capitalism

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Fri Mar 14 00:04:59 PDT 2008


On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:02:07 +1100 (EST), Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:


> Dmytri...could you please provide us with a quote or two to back this
> claim up?

Hi Mike, unfortunately I don't have the time to keep up with this list. This is a very interesting thread, and I will read what I can of it. In brief, I am not a Marx scholar, so I am no so interested in taking further any discussion of what Marx did or did not believe. ************

Oh sorry, Dmyiti. I thought you were making claims about what Marx had written about what money was and I had just read this from CAPITAL VOLUME I:

In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm

Nevermind, Mike B)

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