> "As younger researchers socialized in a different world, we didn't
> carry the same theoretical baggage. Uninhibited, we applied the
> Cartesian Ctrl-Alt-Del and started by assuming that there is no
> bifurcation to begin with and therefore no real-financial
> interaction to explain. All capital is finance and only finance, and
> it exists as finance because accumulation represents not the
> material amalgamation of utility or labor, but the reordering of
> power."
On Marx's ontological and philosophical anthropological assumptions, the "real" labour process is the locus within which human powers, via their "estrangement," develop and where that development is objectified in the "forces and relations" of the process, these being understood as "the power of knowledge, objectified."
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
It's by "giving the greatest impulse" both to this development and to "the integral development of every individual producer" that capitalism, according to Marx, generates the degree of development of human powers that enables the transition, via revolutionary practice, to ""the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
This is what the "accumulation" of "capital" represents for Marx. Nitzan and Bichler don't seem to have noticed this when they pressed "the Cartesian Ctrl-Alt-Del."
Ted