Jonathan Nitzan wrote: > Question: if we abandon > value, don’t we need > an alternative theory to understand the “way things > are”? (or does the > end of value make capitalism patternless?)
Am I glad you asked that question, because it leads right into the point I had in mind but forgot to address. I was thinking of the unspoken assumption that if capital has a pattern it results from some internal dynamic of capital itself that we might discover by examining the mechanism of capital accumulation. If there is a pattern to capitalism it more likely results from capital's opportunistic response to the internal dynamic of labour, which in turn is governed by the characteristics of species being: most notably that we are born and as infants are dependent for several years on older members of our species and that we eventually die and thus generation must replace generation. Of course there's the interim requirement of food and shelter for subsistence and there's our social developmental characteristics, which are not fixed but quite malleable. Each generation grows up against the background of capital's adaptation to the challenges presented by the previous generation. That is, each generation grows up knowing the old rules like the back of it's own hand and thus able to intuit how to thwart and subvert the old rules. And that's why capital has to innovate. It has to change the rules in some way that makes the subversion or evasion of yesterday's rules the enforcement of today's. That's easy. Capital doesn't invent, it appropriates. But it's not so easy after all because if labour becomes resigned to its subordination, capital loses its ability to transform itself . Capital then becomes merely parasitic. Toward the end of _Wages, Price and Profit_ Marx comments that the "development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man." But he then cautions against taking the lesson from this that the working class should renounce their resistance and abandon attempts for even temporary improvements because, "If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation." "One level mass of broken wretches past salvation" -- is an exuberant moral condemnation, perhaps hyperbole, but it evokes for me the image of a base upon which expanded reproduction and accumulation of capital could hardly occur: a breakdown of socialization, a breakdown of legality and bourgeois morality. Confronted with this "level mass", capitalism itself would become patternless. It might thrash, it might oscillate, it might even continue to increase by federal reserve bank decree or concession but it wouldn't develop in the sense of adapting imaginatively to new circumstances. If we abandon value, it seems to me that we jettison the objective basis for class struggle and thus any reason (other than nostalgia) to think in terms of classes. Not only would the end of value make capital patternless, it would make it meaningless as a concept. To still call whatever it is capital would be to invite confusion with that which we are accustomed to think of as capital. I'm afraid that without value what we're left with is some sort of prescribed but unstable hierarchy of ranks for the highly differentiated distribution of privileges -- a fiendishly skewed pluralism. That might or might not be where we're at but it's probably close to the way that a lot of people see it. It's the updating of the old "democratic pluralism" taught in sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. In such a fiendish pluralism people may well feel that the outcome of the differential distribution is unfair to them personally and they may struggle, group against group, to move up the hierarchy. But without an objective basis for collective struggle as a class nothing changes fundamentally. That objective basis for struggle -- the common thread of injustice -- is the discrependy between value as it arises in production and the share of claims against that value accumulated by capital both inside and outside the labour process. Value is certainly in crisis, both as a concept and as a real entity. To be sure, it has been in crisis since it appeared as a concept. Nothing is to be gained by calling for the restoration of value as a real force in the world. But much is to be lost by accepting its premature abandonment conceptually. It is the very crisis of the concept and the intensification of that crisis in the present that makes it now more useful than ever. Marx, I imagine, would be among the first to say good riddance to value when the time has come to bury it. Virno's impossible phrase, "the communism of capital" suggests that the time has almost come. But not yet. The Sandwichman ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
