[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Mon Jul 12 14:47:19 PDT 2010


On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Angelus Novus < fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> Eric Beck:
>
> > Carrol's insistent recitations of Marxist cant about the absolute
> > separation of private and capitalist economies are almost enough to make
> > me flee into the arms of Hardt and Negri.
>
> Marx's categories are by their very nature only applicable to capitalism.
> This is a tautology. Attempts to apply them to spheres they are by
> definition meant to exclude is trying to square the circle. If you want to
> argue that housework creates "value", then have a ball, but it no longer has
> anything to do with Marx's use of the word.
>
> So Carrol is absolutely right to insist on such distinctions. Otherwise we
> enter Andre Gunder Frank territory and there is no such thing as
> "capitalism".
>
>
I assume you must be referring to Value, to abstract value... there are other values (use, exchange, others?) in Marx which apply to modes, forms and spheres non-capitalist, no? It is the abstraction, Value, which doesn't exist without capitalism that does not apply elsewhere, not all of Marx's categories. Perhaps you didn't mean "categories"? The problem is when Marx's theory of capitalism is brought to bear on non-capitalist modes of production, generally. At the same time, however, capitalism constructs its non-capitalist others in the process of its own making so writing about strong separations of ecological, personal and communal reproduction, on the one hand, and the expanded reproduction of capital (and its political regulation) is kinda weird.

A



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