In the below, I defend myself against Tom Walker's accusations that I am
some sort of Marxist fundamentalist. If you are not interested, please feel
free to delete _now_.
At 02:10 PM 2/16/98 -0800, Tom Walker wrote:
>Karl Marx wrote,
>
>>As the director of the labour process the capitalist performs *productive
>>labour* [emphasis in original] in the sense that his labour is involved in
>>the total process that is realized in the product). We are concerned here
>>only with capital within the immediate process of production. The other
>>functions of capital and the agents which it employs within them form a
>>subject to be left for later.
>
>Jim Devine thinks that Marx's reference to "other functions of capital and
>the agents which it employs" alludes to something in vol. III. For all I
>know, maybe that was Marx's intention. But even if that was his intention,
>the Marx quote raises a question (for us, today) that Marx could not
>conceivably have answered. Nor is vol. III the place I would look for the
>latest word on credit cards, mutual funds, ATMs, cablevision, jet lag,
>global warming, post-modernism, Taylorism, cel phones, the internet, the
>former USSR or the Y2K problem.
I don't know who you are talking about here. I am not a CAPITAL
fundamentalist. CAPITAL can give us insights about today's economy, but
only on the abstract level. These abstractions must then be modified to
deal with the specifics of real-world concrete issues. (For example, his
discussion of credit may give us insights into one specific form of credit,
i.e., credit cards.)
And sometimes Marx's insights are wrong on both the abstract and concrete
levels (as with his conceptions of imperialism, which were based on
insufficient information and maybe even a failure of imagination for all we
know).
Finally, sometimes his insights are _limited_. (Awhile back, I had a
discussion with Ajit where I pointed to evidence that Marx acknowledged the
role of substitution of means of production of labor-power in production.
One of my points was that _even if_ Marx rejected such substitution in
theory doesn't mean that we have to do so.)
In any event, I still don't see what Tom sees in the quote from Marx that I
didn't see.
>Marx is dead [rest of Monty Python parrot routine omitted]. Capital is a
>monumental work both in terms of its grandeur and its immobility. Get over
it.
Again, I ain't no fundie. And I thought I was the one who argued against
the scholasticism of CAPITAL fetishism and quotation-mongering _except as_
instrumental to the development of an understanding of the empirical world
(the development of Marx_ian_ political economy).
>Or go around it. The problem TODAY with taking Marx's historical subject
>(actual: bourgeoisie; potential: proletariat) for granted is that for Marx
>those two great classes roughly corresponded with something like what you
>might see if you looked around you: capitalists themselves performed the
>functions of capital, aided by a small retinue of commercial servants;
>workers worked in production. Not only has the number of "servants"
>increased but the way they do their work has changed fundamentally .
>("Servants of all lands unite, you have nothing to lose but your jeans!")
Tom here is referring to a private message that I sent to him alone rather
than to pen-l, to avoid burdening the list. But no problem; I take no
offense. The problem is that it's unintelligible to those who didn't read
my missive. Again, my response is as above; I've rejected fundamentalism
all along.
BTW, this vision of capitalism with a large number of "commercial servants"
rather than production workers (if I understand Tom correctly) is just
looking at the advanced capitalist countries. If we see capitalism as
involving a world system, there's a hell of a lot of production workers in
the poorer countries. On top of that a lot of the "servant" labor, e.g., in
the "service" sector, in the advanced countries is really production labor
(i.e., at McDonald's). In any event, in my missive to Tom, I never referred
to production labor but instead to "wage laborers" or something like that.
>Marx's view of the relationship between the classes centres on how labour is
>subsumed under capital in the labour process. That is to say it is _more_
>than a matter of ownership/non-ownership of the means of production. It is
>also a matter of the articulation of the labour process(es) through which
>the position of the capitalist as owner and the position of the worker as
>non-owner are perpetually reproduced. For Marx, the distinctively capitalist
>mode of production was characterized by the real (not just formal)
>subsumption of labour under capital. This real subsumption meant, first of
>all, separating the work activity from the person of the worker and
>incorporating that activity into a mechanism.
I didn't disagree.
>Marx didn't talk about and had no particular reason to talk about the
>separation of the functions of the capitalist from the person of the
>capitalist and their incorporation into a variety of mechanisms. But it
>seems to me that at the end of the 20th century, it is very much a question
>whether the mode of production we've now got can be said to still follow the
>"logic of capital."
Gee, didn't Marx talk about how the modern joint-stock corporation involves
"the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist
mode of production itself"? (vol. III, ch. 27, p. 438 of Int'l Publ.
hardback ed.) that seems to have something to do with an organization
performing the "functions" of the capitalist without being a capitalist
itself.
I never mentioned the "logic of capital." It's no accident that I didn't,
since I think that to understand actually-existing capitalism, we have to
not only look at the logic of capital but also the independent dynamic of
wage-labor, the development of anti-capitalist movements (or their decay).
enough!
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
"It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
