Dennis Claxton quoted Nitzan and Bichler:
> "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."
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It's hard to take seriously anyone putting forth this bit of egotistic pomposity. Unsocialized indeed -- except by that most banal bits of bourgeois ideology, the "slef-made man." And power doesn't exist as an independent entity or explanatory category. It can only be introduced late in an analysis.
But my interest here is in Ted's first paragraph:
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."
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I'm somewhat skeptical that this was Marx's ontology, or that after 1850 or so he had any particularly developed ontology at all. In any case (a) it won't do to make labor an ontological principle and (b) no such ontological concept is _needed_ for his Critqiue.
On the first point. Homo sapiens has been around for about 100K; evidence of what Arendt called "work" don't go back more than around 40K B.P. But on _any_ understanding of labor, it doesn't go back more than about 12K B.P. with the neolithic "revolution." Labor _has_ to be seen as a historical rather than ontological or "anthropological" form of human activity. And I think it makes most sense of the concept (as used by Marx) to see it as existing only in capitalist economies. (Arendt's use of the term would apply to the neolithic and later non-capitalist cultures, where it became a necessity for existence. In paleolithic cultures it makes no sense, what we would call "labor" being indistinguishable from other daily activitiesd rather than a separate category set off from "living."
Arendt's use of "labor" makes good sense in her context, since she does not really focus on capitalism. But labor in the narrow sense of wage labor in a capitalist enterprise ( with no particular ontological assumptions needed or desirable) makes much more sense of both capitalism and Marx's critique.
Carrol
P.S. The sanctimonious programmers at Microsoft just can't stand my insistence on keeping paleolithic and nolithic lower case. Word keeps capitalizing them, and putting a wiggly red line under them when I correct their corrections.