Re: 'human capital"

[Ted Winslow]

There is a more fundamental way in which Marx's approach to "capital" differs from Becker's and makes the "human capital" approach an expression of "fetishism." The following passages also elaborate the idea of "forces of production" as an expression of the development of mind i.e. as the objectification of rational self-consciousness - "the power of knowledge, objectified."

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." Grundrisse pp. 705-6

"According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting labour) and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation - which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it - of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.

"... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one." "Capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous" ([Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.

"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:

"... The real wealth ... is man" (Della Moneta, Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).

"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites." pp. 266-7 Theories of Surplus Value Part III

"What is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics - and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds - this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. " Grundrisse p. 488

Ted