Philp Pilkington wrote:
>
>
> "This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after
> exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the
> miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
> The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives
> after, by seeking to
> save<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm#n10>his
> money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by
> constantly throwing it afresh into circulation."
>
> The latter seems to attribute agency to the capitalists passions as a sort
> of psychopathology rather than claiming that they were constructed by the
> mode of production. (I think someone discussed this a while ago in relation
> to Freud and Keynes...).
No.
The latter should be seen as merely a gloss on the earlier passage from 18th Brumaire.
There is no contradiction, nor does this offer any support for seeing Marx as offering ethical judgments (i.e., judgments of human conduct from a basis prior to practice.
Wherever and whenever we find ourselves we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations; we _never_ start from scratch or from a 'foundation' ouside of and independent of those relations. There exists no platfrom from which the ethicist can make his/her pronouncements.
That we find ourselves in a position (ensemble of relations; history) resisting capitalism is a fact, not a deduction from any independent moral principle or "value." Our condemnation of murder is an historical fact, not a universal principle that we can appeal to in abstraction from history. That historical fact gives a far firmer basis for the condemnation than would any abstract moral principle.
Carrol