I don't remember when the famous "chapter 5" debate occurred. It was quite a while ago (1992? 1994?) and I couldn't find it in the pen-l archive. (Gil had an article based on it in SCIENCE & SOCIETY a couple of years ago; my article in Bill Dugger's book INEQUALITY (Greenwood: 1996) was based on it, too.) My point in the quote was that the issues being discussed were basically "how to read Karl Marx," the title of an excellent book by Ernst Fischer (with Franz Mehring and John Bellamy Foster), published by Monthly Review Press awhile back.
As I understand him, Gil reads CAPITAL (even volume I!) as some sort of microeconomic analysis, applying deductive logic. Somehow he sees the capitalist domination of workers in production as unnecessary to the creation of surplus-value; merely lending money as rentiers do -- with none of the bossy rules, picky credit-rationing, and nosy monitoring activities of real-world bankers -- somehow can evoke workers to work beyond the time necessary to reproduce their labor-power. (I won't go further, since my failing memory banks encourage unintended slander to arise.) My view is that it's a (somewhat unreadable) book that follows a Hegelian mode of presentation, moving from a very high level of abstraction in volume I to a lower level of abstraction in volume III. Marx starts with the whole and then slowly introduces the parts. True "microtheory" (supply & demand, etc.) is only approached in volume III, while Marx only follows deductive patterns of reasoning for short bits (since his aim is to understand the empirical world, not to build sand-castles in the air). In the famous chapter 5, Marx's level of abstraction is that of "capital in general" (to use the terminology of the GRUNDRISSE) in which abstract capital (M--C--M') faces abstract labor and labor-power. That is, the macro level and the micro level are deliberately conflated, with the almost all of the heterogeneity of capital and labor being abstracted from; at this level of abstraction, prices of production are proportional to value (or equal, if they're measured in the same units). The question, of course, is how exchange at value could allow the capitalists to actually make a profit (M'>M) on the aggregate level -- as opposed to merely earning profits that correspond to another's loss, so that the aggregate adds up to zero. Marx's answer (which Gil attacked) is that there exists a unique commodity -- labor-power under conditions of proletarianization -- which has the use-value of being able to produce more value than its own value; it's the domination of labor in production by capitalists or their agents which can realize this potential. In this view, while it is true that an _individual_ capitalist can lend money and make a profit (M--M' with M'>M without intervening hiring of labor-power and organization of production), seen from the macro level, this profit is a redistribution from the industrial capitalists, who do hire labor-power and dominate workers in production. My point about Charlie Andrews' book is that he is very good at understanding how to read Marx and at integrating valid parts of standard microtheory into the totality that he sketched (without attempting the impossible feat of reducing Marx's view to orthodox microtheory). Because of this, he doesn't confuse microeconomic receipt of profits by individual rentiers with macroeconomic production of profits by the capitalist class as a whole; he doesn't fall for the fallacy of composition. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine > -----Original Message----- > From: Ian Murray [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 7:59 PM > To: pen-l > Subject: [PEN-L:26166] old ghosts > > > penner's I stumbled across this quote from Jim D. at the > laborrepublic site: > > "Chapter three ... is crystal-clear. If we'd read this > chapter beforehand, > the famous PEN-L debate with Gil Skillman over volume I of > Capital would not > have happened."-Jim Devine > > What year did this debate occur so I can check the archives? > > Ian >
