Charles:
> First u should argue against the several passages from _Capital_ I sent (
> this time and a couple of weeks ago) countering your claims, comrade.
Comrade, the passages I quoted are the definitive refutation of your arguments.
^^^^^ CB: Not really. A quote from Grundisse does not prove something about _Capital_ You make claims about the first chapter of _Capital_ and all the quotes from theie adduced on this issue this time and the last time you brought it up a few months ago "definitively" corroborate my arguments . By the time he writes _Capital_ , he may have moved away from that assertion. Grundisse isn't even published.
But specifically on your fetish ( sorry) concerning Engels' formulation of " simple commodity production" , Marx's statement in Grundisse, doesn't say that the exposition of _every_ category of capital must be presented out of historical order. Simply put (smile) commodity production without fullblown money or labor power as a commodity might come first in the exposition and historically. Big deal. So what.
> Also, we should maybe make some comments on how your claim impacts the
> struggle today. Assume , arguendo, you are correct: So what ?
Aside from Carrol's often repeated point about the historical specificity of capitalism, I also sort of like what the comrades from Endnotes have to say in their latest issue:
^^^^^ CB: My argument is also that capitalism is historically specific. Capitalism's differentia specifica is labor power as a commodity predominantly (wage-labor) and commodity production as predominant (not peripheral as in earlier modes of production). I'm certainly not claiming that either capitalism or "simple commodity production" is universal. I'm a student of Marshall Sahlins , author of _Stone Age Economics_. Gift exchange predated commodity exchange in human societies.
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"The critical import of value-form theory is that it calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value. It recognises Marx’s work as an essentially negative critique of capitalist society. In reconstructing the Marxian dialectic of the value-form, it demonstrates how the social life process is subsumed under — or “form-determined” by — the value-form. What characterises such “form-determination” is a perverse priority of the form over its content. Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression. Rather, in a fundamental sense value — as the primary social mediation — pre-exists and thus has a priority over labour." [...] While it seems true and politically effective54 to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital. Socially necessary labour time is the measure of value only because the value-form posits labour as its content. In a society no longer dominated by alienated social forms — no longer orientated around the self-expansion of abstract wealth — the compulsion to labour which characterises the capitalist mode of production will disappear.55 With value, abstract labour disappears as a category. The reproduction of individuals and their needs becomes an end in itself. Without the categories of value, abstract labour and the wage, “labour” would cease to have its systematic role as determined by the primary social mediation: value.
^^^^^^^ CB: Is the suggestion here that your interpretation of _Capital_ means the proletariat is not the revolutionary class in capitalism ? That's certainly doesn't sound like Marx ( Marxologically speaking ; smile)
(((((
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This is why value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself — of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. Communisation is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. Value, understood as a total form of social mediation, cannot be got rid of by halves."
Full article: http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/4
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CB: I have to think about that. Could you be a bit plainer in the implications of your theory for practice ?