> Capitalism inevitably generates
> racialization* are intertwined from teh very beginning. (This is
> obvious
> if you read at all carefully Wood's _Origin of Capitalistm: An
> Extended
> View_.
But Ellen ignores the role Marx assigns to the development of "new passions" (in Hegel's sense) in his account of the transition from feudalism (a form of "wealth" ""for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth itself") to capitalism (a form of "wealth" in which, in contrast and even in its mature industrial form, "the pleasure taking individual" is subsumed "under the capital accumulating individual"), of "primitive accumulation" and of the development within capitalism from the "monetary system" to "industrial capitalism".
For her, "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!" is explained entirely by the fact that capitalist "social property relations generated new economic imperatives, especially the compulsions of competition, a systematic need to develop the productive forces, leading to new laws of motion such as the world had never seen before." (The Origin of Capitalism, p. 37)
For this reason, she misses a key continuity between earlier writings (she names The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto) and later ones (she names "the Grundrisse and Capital"), a continuity that has the "self-estrangement" (again, in Hegel's sense) characteristic of wage labour both as requiring the "new passions" of capitalism for its creation and as an "educative" process contributing to "the integral development of every individual producer". The wider context is the conception of human history as a set of "different stages in the development of the human mind" in which the "passions" and "self- estrangement" play key roles as they do in Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception".
A "process" that not only doesn't facilitate "the integral development of every individual producer", but instead exacerbates "superstition" and "prejudice" can't lead to what Marx means by "socialism".
"There is a form of inactive, extravagant wealth given over wholly to pleasure, the enjoyer of which on the one hand behaves as a mere ephemeral individual frantically spending himself to no purpose, and also regards the slave-labour of others (human sweat and blood) as the prey of his cupidity. He therefore knows man himself, and hence also his own self, as a sacrificed and futile being. With such wealth contempt of man makes its appearance, partly as arrogance and as squandering of what can give sustenance to a hundred human lives, and partly as the infamous illusion that his own unbridled extravagance and ceaseless, unproductive consumption is the condition of the other’s labour and therefore of his subsistence. He regards the realisation of the essential powers of man only as the realisation of his own excesses, his whims and capricious, bizarre notions. This wealth which, on the other hand, again knows wealth as a mere means, as something that is good for nothing but to be annihilated and which is therefore at once slave and master, at once magnanimous and base, capricious, presumptuous, conceited, refined, cultured and witty – this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an utterly alien power over itself: it sees in it, rather, only its own power, and (not)a wealth but enjoyment (is its final) aim.
"This [...] ||XXI| and the glittering illusion about the nature of wealth, blinded by sensuous appearances, is confronted by the working, sober, prosaic, economical industrialist who is quite enlightened about the nature of wealth, and who, while providing a wider sphere for the other’s self – indulgence and paying fulsome flatteries to him in his products (for his products are just so many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift), knows how to appropriate for himself in the only useful way the other’s waning power. If, therefore, industrial wealth appears at first to be the result of extravagant, fantastic wealth, yet its motion, the motion inherent in it, ousts the latter also in an active way. For the fall in the rate of interest is a necessary consequence and result of industrial development. The extravagant rentier’s means therefore dwindle day by day in inverse proportion to the increasing possibilities and pitfalls of pleasure. Consequently, he must either consume his capital, thus ruining himself, or must become an industrial capitalist.... In the other hand, there is a direct, constant rise in the rent of land as a result of the course of industrial development; nevertheless, as we have already seen, there must come a time when landed property, like every other kind of property, is bound to fall within the category of profitably self- reproducing capital – and this in fact results from the same industrial development. Thus the squandering landowner, too, must either consume his capital, and thus be ruined, or himself become the farmer of his own estate – an agricultural industrialist.
"The diminution in the interest on money, which Proudhon regards as the annulling of capital and as a tendency to socialise capital, is therefore in fact rather only a symptom of the total victory of working capital over squandering wealth – i.e., the transformation of all private property into industrial capital. It is a total victory of private property over all those of its qualities which are still in appearance human, and the complete subjection of the owner of private property to the essence of private property – labour. To be sure, the industrial capitalist also takes his pleasures. He does not by any means return to the unnatural simplicity of need; but his pleasure is only a side-issue – recreation – something subordinated to production; at the same time it is a calculated and, therefore, itself an economical pleasure. For he debits it to his capital’s expense account, and what is squandered on his pleasure must therefore amount to no more than will be replaced with profit through the reproduction of capital. Pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-taking individual under the capital-accumulating individual, whilst formerly the contrary was the case. The decrease in the interest rate is therefore a symptom of the annulment of capital only inasmuch as it is a symptom of the growing domination of capital – of the estrangement which is growing and therefore hastening to its annulment. This is indeed the only way in which that which exists affirms its opposite." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
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This 1844 EPM account of the "passions" of "the industrial capitalist" is repeated in Capital where it's contrasted both with "the open- handed feudal lord's prodigality" and with the "ruling passions" "at the historical dawn of capitalist production".
"At the historical dawn of capitalist production, — and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage — avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the “unfortunate” capitalist. Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses the bonâ-fide character of the open-handed feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ch24.htm>
The "passions" dominant at "the historical dawn of capitalist production" – “passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious” – motivate “primitive accumulation”.
"This mode of production ['petty industry' - 'the private property of the laborer in his means of production'] pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring- individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
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Ted