There is no doubt that automation and, at least for the past 30
years or so, computerization have been on going transformations
in the current mode of production but there had been other
periods in the past in which capital shifted from production to
speculation in a way similar to what we have been experiencing
for the past 30 years in the US, in particular and in the core
capitalist countries, in general. I don't mean to say that we are
not experiencing an evolutionary leap in the mode of production,
because I personally don't have sufficient data to conclude
either way, but maybe we can explain this shift of capital from
production to speculation using a more comprehensive theory,
which does not exclude advanced robotics.
I concur. The robot doesn't create speculation or rather speculative capital in the categorical sense. Speculative capital evolves on the basis of the mode of accumulation, which contains a life of its own and its distinct law system. It would be correct to advance a theoretical standpoint that traces the evolution of the credit system
The problem is one of attempting to advance a somewhat new doctrine, whose singular goal is to unravel the ideological form in which to explain to our working class - the American peoples, what they are experiencing. The ideological form means the manner in which the various classes in our culture think things out.
How people think things out leads to categories which by definition are static and "incorrect." The question that was posed in my thinking was "why is society being torn from its foundation" and what is the fundamentality behind the social upheaval in our daily living?
I attacked the problem from what appears to be the most visible side of the social equation in America: the computer and advancing robotics. This does not deny the impact that Enron and the arrest of speculators has had and is having on the thinking of our class.
This question of the mode of production in material life has been debated by generations of Marxist and non-Marxist, and I do not state that I have "solved" this question definitively but have moved closer to a less absurd understanding based on the work of previous generations.
A year from now I will in all probability be totally unsatisfied with what is being written today. The question remains: how to describe on the level of theory and then as a political doctrine, what is taking place in our methods and instruments of work?
On the level of theory I believe we are dealing with a specific form of evolution of the organic composition of capital. In this sense the mode of accumulation - which soars high above the productive reality of the material power of the productive forces, but is in the last instance riveted to this material reality, appears in the realm of politics in the form of the robot in the value system.
Hey, there is no way I would raise any of the above - in this form, in a union meeting. As a category the robot does not create anything put "products."
What the heck.
Melvin P.
