Eric wrote:
> thinking of Principia Dialectica and some
> other Postone acolytes -- what you write here > is irrelevant because for them capital is
> *the* subject.
I should clarify here, I respect Postone as a Marxologist, but I think Principia Dialectica are fairly dire. Their reception of Postone is mediated entirely by the German Krisis group, who basically try to reclaim Postone as a co-thinker, despite the fact that he does not adhere to their Grossmanite theory of capitalist collapse, and his conception of abstract labour is quite difference from Robert Kurz's.
PD are basically trying to construct a political tendency out of what is basically a work of Marx philology. I honestly don't think value-form theory lends itself to programmatic intentions. It's basically just a means of clarifying Marx's work.
As for "capital as subject", when Marx uses the phrase "automatic subject", he is actually ridiculing the notion that money appears to generate a surplus with intermediation. He does this right before he "enters the realm of production", where he then describes exactly how this surplus is generated.
Julio:
> What is productive from the viewpoint of
> capital is not necessarily what is productive > from the viewpoint of working people under
> capitalism
The concept of "productive labour" has a very specific meaning for Marx. If you want to just use the phrase in a way that differs from Marx, go right ahead, just don't pretend to be extending or expanding Marxian concepts.
A lot of this just strikes me as an attempt to try to justify social struggles by slotting them into a productivist framework. Martin Glaberman correctly criticized this as the false notion that social struggles have to be "proletarian" in order to be supportable.
> If domestic labor contributes to keep the
> value of labor power low, then capital as a
> whole benefits from it. In other words,
> capital appropriates the fruits of domestic
> labor free of charge.
Sure, just like when a worker owns a plot of farm land, this also enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power below the costs of its reproduction. So what? That still doesn't make housework "productive" in a Marxian sense, because the labour thus performed is not mediated by a wage.
If you don't *like* Marx's analysis, that's fine. I am not arguing for Marx as a god whose truths are unquestionable. What I am arguing against is using Marx's categories in a way that contradicts Marx's own usage, and then trying to pass it off as Marx's usage.