Jonathan Nitzan wrote: > Differential accumulation works partly through mass > persuasion and the > use of force.
If that's the best it can do, it's an elephant labouring to give birth to a mouse. We could ask, then, what's persuasion?; what's force? but let's not go there until we give value theory one more kick at this can. > Incidentally, can value theory “predict” those sort > of things? Yes, setting aside the loaded term "predict" I believe it can explain what the obstacles to effective political action have been and at least suggest which forms of struggle or kinds of persuasion might be more effective than others. I believe Marx did this when he identified the struggle over the length of the working day as the strategic lynchpin for the working class in the middle of the 19th century. A single sentence sums up that identification for me better than any mathematical demonstration of falling rates of profit or any other supposed tendency or counter tendency of capital: "the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive..." Although in Capital Marx coyly attributed the resolution to the International Working Men's Association at Geneva, he was also the author of the resolution, according to the records of the association. Now, I'm not sure we mean exactly the same thing by value theory. You seem to be primarily concerned with the laws of motion of capital, while I would see the whole mathematical demonstration of these "laws" as Marx's digressive attempt to settle scores with classical political economy. In terms of settling scores with classical PE, he succeeded. But I don't think the laws of motion take us beyond that. The questions classical political economy posed in the first place were misguided. As Dilke (I'll assume the anonymous author was Dilke) wrote, political economy is concered only with the contradictory notion that "the richest nations in the world are those where the greatest revenue is or can be raised; as if the power of compelling or inducing men to labour twice as much at the mills of Gaza for the enjoyment of the Philistines, were proof of any thing but a tyranny or an ignorance twice as powerful." What I mean by value theory is the qualitative, social and historical analysis that focuses on the distinctions between, for example, the production of absolute and relative surplus value and the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital in the labour process. When Marx uses numbers to give substance to those qualitative factors, I'm perfectly content to view them as hypothetical, illustrative numbers and not as representative of quantities that are, even in principle, measurable. In other words, the numbers are simply more vivid illustrations of the commonplace concepts of "more", "less" or "the same". They are like the colours on a map. The last time I looked, it wasn't at all obvious to me that Canada was "blue" and the US was "orange" but that's what it shows in the atlas. Today -- as in the middle of the 19th century -- the strategic focus of struggle is with regard to time, albeit in a very different way then when Marx analyzed it. We're not dealing anymore with the transition from absolute to relative production of surplus value, nor with the transition from relative to general, social production of value, which I believe characterized Marx's epoch. I think we're dealing with something dreadfully new that can only sound paradoxical if described in terms of the old categories. Virno refers to it as the "communism of capital" and I think the impossibility of that term expresses something of the impossibility of the operation that is going on. The production of surplus value no longer needs to take place within a production process or site characterized by the sale and purchase of labour power. I am producing surplus value at this very moment that you and anyone else reading this may realize "on my behalf" two months or two years from now in some seminar, conference, class room or television studio. It only awaits its revenue-generating moment. Again I return to the anonymous pamphlet that Marx imperfectly "rescued from oblivion." In that pamphlet value and even surplus value were _moral_ terms that could be opposed to revenue and exaction. A world composed only of value and surplus value would within very few years evolve into paradise because value and surplus value have limits. Dilke didn't imagine that we lived in that world. Revenue has no limit. Capital can produce as much revenue as it can imagine. But ultimately neither capital nor the capitalist nor that state nor anyone else can consume revenue. So that revenue exists only so long as capital agrees to forego consumption or only insofaras it can _exact_ value from the value producing process, essentially as an accessory to the state's power to tax. Enron, et.al., was an anomaly only to the extent that the creativity of the accounting procedures exceeded the consensus level of innovation in degree, not in kind. Finance capital that produces no consumable product (even immaterial) is only fictitious in that regard. It is decidedly non-fictional in its claims against total value of commodities. It is not fictituous capital that is destroyed in a crisis; it is only a portion of the total claims that exceeds the value of commodities available to be consumed. It could very well be somebody's first social security check that they have already fully funded through payroll contributions that has to be destroyed. The claims of "fictitious capital" against that social security check may very well be more real than the retiree's because one is enforcable and the other isn't. So I can see where value theory or value may seem to be inoperative concepts. They no longer attach themselves to a formidable portion of the accumulation process. They are like human rights in Guantanamo -- something to be adjudicated by agencies with no particular stake in upholding human rights. Value is produced over here and over here and here and capital is accumulated over there and over there and there. But instead of the discrepency pointing to an economic crisis for capitalism it points to a crisis of character (cynicism), of subjectivity (opportunism) and of community (fear). Perhaps by abandoning value we could reconcile ourselves to all this and see it as just the way things are. After all it IS the way things are. The Sandwichman ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
