Michael Perelman wrote: > I do not think that it is a good idea to personalize > differences on the list.
My apologies for the previously ambiguous subject heading. What I meant, of course, was "my beef with Nitzan's argument, tone and mode of argumentation." I have no animosity toward the person who made those arguments. Jonathan Nitzan has said something rather remarkable and deserving both of acclaim and qualification. He said that "Marx's distinction between real and fictitious capital should be reversed." I've provided the context for that quote below. He also implied that Marx's distinction is based on real capital being "stuff," whether that stuff be utils, abstract labour, machines or whatever. In other words, Marx violated his own strictures against fetishization of relationships in his very conceptualization of capital. I won't argue against that implication because, although I disagree that Marx fetishized capital I do think that Marxism has tended to fetishize capital and Marx's presentation in Capital must bear at least partial responsibility for that. So what does Nitzan and Bichler propose to do in response to that alleged fetishization of so-called real capital? They propose to "reverse" the distinction. Call finance capital "real" and industrial capital "fictitious." That's all very well taken in terms of clearing out cobwebs but it simply reproduces the underlying temptation for fetishization. One can as easily fetishize the present value of expected future earnings as one can a machine. Just ask Frank Partnoy. But what do we get if we dig deeper into the distinction between real and fictitious capital? That distinction has its precise counterpart in the much criticized distinction between productive and unproductive labour. One could say (for the sake of argument) that "productive labour is to real capital as unproductive labour is to fictitious capital." So, if we reverse the distinction between fictitious and real capital, we should have to also reduce the terms between productive and unproductive labour. Lo and behold! That is precisely what that (sniff) "post-Marxist" Virno was suggesting. Well, pretty close. Actually, he says something more like the old distinction is dissolved in the new forms of labour. Which brings me to another distinction involving the word "real," the distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital in the labour process. Marx was saying in the previously unpublished "chapter six" that these relationships had evolved from one to the other form, so there's no reason to expect them to suddenly stop evolving. But maybe Marx tried to explain things with too much misplaced concreteness. This is where I would detour back to the oblivious "anonymous pamphlet of 1821." There we find an extensive discussion of fictitious capital and unproductive labour -- a discussion, moreover, that places fictitious capital at the core of a distinctive accumulation process, separate from and counter to the process of accumulating "real wealth" (which for the author of the pamphlet was disposable time and the facilities for procuring that disposable time). "But it is here that /power/ has ever interfered, and by misdirecting the labour of one part, and destroying the labour of another, no longer permits a real accumulation of surplus produce, nor consequently such an increase of capital as shall reduce the value of existing capital, or reduce the capitalist to the necessity of labouring again." Jonathan Nitzan wrote: "We argue against the very notion that capital derives its pecuniary quantities from some "substantive" reality based on "stuff" (whether measured in utils or abstract labor). As we see it, capital is the numerical architecture of capitalism, the basic code of the "capitalist nomos". Marx's distinction between "real" and "fictitious" capital should be reversed. "Finance is the only real form of capital. The notions that machines can have a "quantity" is the fiction. Finance, or capitalization, represents the present value of expected feature earnings. The earnings and their discounting mechanism have nothing do with the quantity of any "stuff" such as machines, goods or services. Rather, they are the numerical representation of the power of exclusion. This power permeates the entire social process, from the assembly line, through formal politics, to religion, culture, consumption and what not. In that sense, capital represents the capitalization of power." ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
