G'day Penners,
Tom rather poetically proffered a Marx quote on subsumption last week (and
yes, my confused synapses hasve wondered off to the institutionalists too)
and proclaimed it an enduring source of reflection ever since. Well, I'm
not up to the level of debate that ensued.
But, in case, anyone's interested, here's the one that has had the same
effect on me (it's from Grundisse):
'As soon as human labour, in its immediate form, has ceased to be the great
source of wealth, labour time will cease, and must of necessity cease to be
the measure of wealth, and the exchange value must of necessity cease to be
the measure of use value ... the mode of production which rests on the
exchange value collapses.'
Now, a lefty musing in his/her happy abstractions, takes great heart from
this. It can only mean the fat lady is clearing her throat and world
socialism is ready at stage left.
But we are really not a quantum leap from this state of production now are
we? And one senses crises of conjunctural rather than structural gravity
just now. And certainly barbarism is 10/1-on favourite for the succession
if and when there is one in the foreseeable future. So we've before us a
mass marginalisation of a great proportion of currently working people.
Their labour no longer needed, while a small middle class with sufficient
wherewithal to gobble up department 2 goodies attenuates underconsumption
potentials.
An enormous mass in desperation and in the street. The revolutionary class
no longer the industrial proletariat, not even a reserve army (for they do
not even serve that purpose) - just hordes of irksome irrelevancies.
Am I straying unforgivably from the righteous path? Do I need Prozac? Is
anyone theorising thus?
Cheers,
Rob.
************************************************************************
Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.
Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH)
Fax: 02-6201 5119
************************************************************************
'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill)
"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital." (Karl Marx)
************************************************************************
