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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2005 22:47
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fettering - Restriction
V: Restriction itself is either a function of recognized need
(self-restriction: what Hegel and Marx regard as the real nature of
freedom)
or of coercion by others to realize their needs in contradistinction from
one's own. Of course the subject of restriction is here is that of human
interaction and not of a reified abstraction such as, 'the forces of
production". To discuss the abstract forces of production as the subject
of
restrictions of a specific system of relations of production is
meaningless
insofar as the abstract forces of production refers only to a component of
a
theory of productive systems without form or function relative to some
specified relations of production. You can, say, compare the forces of
production of capitalism with those of feudalism or of some other concrete
productive system to determine the differential properties of each system
and thereby the limits on the development of the forces of production
imposed by the relations of production of one system relative to the
other.
So, pray tell, to what are you comparing the forces of production of
capitalism? <<
WL: I agree that there is an abstract character to restriction or the
fettering of productive forces that is the material expression of human
interaction -
objectified labor. I first attempted a systematic explanation of this on
Marxmail several years ago. The last exposition on this inherent
restriction as
human interaction was an imaginative article written as a post card from
the
year 2050 I believe. for the Socialism list.
Here is my vision of the process in our imaginative communist economy.
1). The restriction I refer to is the inherent nature of the
infrastructure
and production. Discovery can outrun the time frame in which it takes to
get an
idea from the individual or group into the manufacturing process,
prototypes,
and full implementation to product in consumer or associated producers
hands.
For instance, from planning to construction and production for a new
computer
chip making facility might take 36 months, during which time aspects of
the
process have been further revolutionized but cannot be grafted unto the
pathways of the facility under construction, because the properties of the
new design
may outrun the capacity of the new pathways.
2). At each stage of the process there is the human interaction of
individuals colliding with one another as an expression of what makes us
social. Freedom
here, is recognizing this condition of being. In our imaginative communist
economy organization is horizontal and runs around the globe on the basis
of the
world wide web that allows access to all production information and
details
of all schematics. Various "jocks" - engineers, builders, associated
producers,
etc., access this information and present designs, but they are located
within the radius of the actual facility and their production team. This
is an
inherent restriction on the potential because these new designs have to
travel
through a system of implementation.
Although abstract, but conforming to the outline of the new emerging
infrastructure, 1 and 2 are different sides of the production process and
its inherent
restrictions. This abstract process operates in modern society within a
property shell.
I would hardly call this exposition of the 'hang ups' in the
productive process as abstract or even 'socialist'. Rather they are a
fairly concrete representation of the difficulties of coordinating the
complexities of the temporal relations of various processes involved in
modern industrial productive practice. As such this representation is
reminiscent of the various writings on TQM that concern the development of
techniques for coordinating time-tables for various processes.
TQM is of course largely concerned with eliminating the 'hang ups' in
production itself: mostly by coordinating labour and the means of
production, machine operation, repair, purchasing and storage of raw
materials and, naturally, sales such that the enterprise avoids
bottle-necks, overruns etc. Your discussion of bottlenecks of design
production and information distributions is interestingly different from
most of the concerns of TQM, but it still is essentially within the category
of the micro-organization of industrial practice.
'Hang ups' in complex systems of production are indeed restrictive of
potentially greater levels of productivity, but if the restriction is in
correctable without seriously comprising the organization as a whole , then
it is not a necessary restriction and therefore only a 'problem' to be
solved like any of the 100's of other that afflict complex organizations.
This process was even worse in the auto industry as it is configured as
bourgeois need and . . . AND . . . operating on the basis of the circuit
and cycles
of bourgeois reproduction. Vehicles of course are the positive result of
the
technological advance. They are neither bourgeois or communist except as
metaphor. (What is a socialist automobile? A vehicle produced by the
working class
and driven by its leadership).
Yet, the sum total of our present day commodities express the value
relations
and bourgeois need.
Communist economy does not remove this contradiction that is human
interaction with alienated . . . pardon, objectified labor. What is
removed is how this
inherent contradiction, born of the emergence of the mode of production as
society configuration, moved in antagonism, within bourgeois society.
In auto what I experienced or imagined myself to have observed over a life
time is the timing and conditions under which the technological advance is
implemented that discloses the actual living fetters bourgeois production
place on
the development of its productive forces. The technological advance is not
simply grafted upon the existing productive forces without thought, or "a
logic"
but implemented at the bottom of the crisis of profitability. That is
expansion in a booming market is driven by working three shifts or
building more than
less replicas of an existing facility because capital must have existing
equipment immediately.
The marked tendency is to build a new factory with an improved
technological
bias at the bottom of the curve to overcome the crisis of profitability,
which
increases the density of constant capital and set the stage for the next
crisis. I call this tendency that expresses the inner compulsion of how
and on
what basis the bourgeoisie revolutionize production a fetter. This
process
proceeds by antagonistic development or the destruction of value.
As you write, " The technological advance is not simply grafted upon the
existing productive forces without thought, or "a logic" but implemented at
the bottom of the crisis of profitability."
Here you appear to reiterate Marx's distinction between policies of
capital accumulation through the amassing of absolute surplus value, "by
working three shifts or building more than less replicas of an existing
facility", and relative surplus value: "to build a new factory with an
improved technological bias at the bottom of the curve to overcome the
crisis of profitability, which
increases the density of constant capital and set the stage for the next
crisis."
But this is no more a matter of 'fettering' than is the limiting
description of any other mode of production. To be sure, capitalist
production is designed to realize profits and to use them to sustain
profitability of enterprise, but this is still a purely descriptive
restrictive, necessary for the identification of capitalism as capitalism.
What is being compared has an abstract quality in the sense that the sum
total of the actual material implements of the productive forces and their
potential is called into question as their deployment as capital. What is
not
abstract is bourgeois need as the material configuration of the productive
forces.
My understanding of the inner logic of Marx most famous statement on the
productive forces coming into conflict with the existing relations of
production
(however one defines relations of production) is that the productive
forces
also rebel against themselves as productive forces at a given state of
development and as productive forces organized as capital - bourgeois
property. The
rebellion against themselves as productive forces is the inner meaning of
the
spontaneous development of production or what drives sublating one
historically
evolved state of development.
Finally! This is the argument I expected you would make.
First, I must go on record here for regarding "Marx most famous
statement on the productive forces coming into conflict with the existing
relations of production" as Marx's great 'cop out' rather than his greatest
contribution to the history of the development of the relation between the
forces of production and of the relations of production. It represents
Marx's almost desperate effort to find a way out of a serious contradiction
in his theory of development; the problem of accounting for the impact of
material forces on a system (of the relations of production ) that is in
essence a closed, self-organizing, and self-developing organization in which
the concepts that describe the organization are what facilitate its
operation and growth, i.e. capital, profits, and all the rest of the
nonsense of capitalist political economy. In truth, the historical
conditions of industrial development of the first 2/3rds of the 19th century
did not provide Marx with the intellectual tools for finding a solution to
this problem. Marx's successors, Labriola, Plekhanov, and Lenin (who came
closest to resolving this contradiction but did not though he should have
and probably did know better) have less of an excuse for failing to repair
this error.
To see the speciousness of Marx's argument, just look at how you write
on this inner logic of the dialectics of the development of productive
process:
"The rebellion against themselves as productive forces is the inner meaning
of the spontaneous development of production or what drives sublating one
historically evolved state of development." What reification! The very
critique of Marx against the fetishism of capitalist political economy finds
a home in his explanation of how the forces of production force the
development of new forms of relation of production.
"...the productive forces also rebel against themselves as productive forces
at a given state of development and as productive forces organized as
capital - bourgeois property." More reification and a most imprecise
description of the conditions in which this rebellion of the tools occurs
"at a given state of development."
Indeed, changes in the forces of production do determine the relations
of production, but the process is a complex evolutionary one in which new
modes of production emerge alongside dominant forms, as a product of
material conditions produced by the latter. Some of these new modes
represent more effective systems for handling productive processes in the
expanding material states generated by the dominant system than the dominant
system itself. The result may be, as it was in the relation between
commercial agricultural practice and developing industrial production in
18th and 19th century England, the eventual domination of the new mode of
production. Here, the issue is not so much a matter of fettering (though
this may be part of the argument of the interested partizans of the the new
mode of production in rationalizing their coming into power) but of
competition between a newly developed, vigorous productive system with a
decadent older system.
I understood the above sentence to be the meaning of stating that capital
mitigates against this specific shape of fettering. On this basis I agreed
with
that proposition.
Capital as bourgeois property contains it own fettering as the inability
to
release the potential of the material power of production except under
conditions of profit motion. This profit motive or bourgeois need has
given our
current productive forces the historically specific character of capital.
The
development of heavy industrial in America did not proceed on the basis of
the
abstract "need" for "machines that make machines" but on the basis of
needing
machines that make machines for making automobiles, ship building,
railways for
transport of goods created to secure profits, etc.
The fetter on the productive forces is their character as capital or the
specific cycles of reproduction in search of an expanded - expanding,
value. All
of this process I put under the meaning of bourgeois need.
The bourgeoisie and the workers believe it or not understand much of this
process as lived experience. My guardians - CEO's and directors, would
tell us
"labor lieutenants" point blank that implementing the available technology
would
destroy the value of labor power or as it is stated, further destroy the
great American middle class and then everyone else. "People have to work."
It gets deeper. The actual workers engaging production are capital during
the
epoch of the bourgeoisie . . not just capital, but capital in the hands of
.
. . or rather capital operating on the law system that corresponds to
individuals privately owning production. The refusal of bourgeois society
to educate
its workers in modern science is a real fetter on the development and use
of
the productive forces. The specific organization of the management system
of
bourgeois production is a fetter on the development of the protective
forces in
virtually every branch of industry and is no more than a modern
surveillance
system filled with stool pigeons, rat finks and trade union structures
hardly
distinguishable from fascist labor fronts.
First, the worker is not capital, the labour power he gives to the
capitalist in return for his wage which is, ideally the amount necessary to
preserve the labourer's work capacity and to produce the next generation of
workers.
Adam Smith, Ure (the 19th century ideologue of industrialization) as
well as Marx all made the point that the outcome of mechanization was to
depress all the creative, intellectual (and even martial!) qualities of the
worker. The creativity, intelligence and martial virtues are not necessary
characteristics for a machine tender and are usually regarded as spoiling
the quality of a properly docile, obedient worker. This is not fettering,
but an essential necessity for the effective operation of creative,
intelligent and very very martial capitalism.
Pardon, the fettering of the productive forces I refer to is there quality
as
capital and bourgeois property or bourgeois need.
That's fair enough.
Waistline
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