Jim Devine wrote:
you seemed to be talking to me, responding to what I said. I'm sorry
that I made the mistake to make that assumption.
I was responding to what you said, specifically to this:
On 12/2/05, Ted Winslow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
"Capital" is our creation; we (including "capitalists") are not its
creation.
this is a false dichotomy. Capitalism is both "our" creation and a
creator of our consciousness. To Marx, people create history, though
not exactly as they please. What limits their ability to create
history is the pre-existing social structure (along with nature). That
social structure was the creation of people in the past. These people
were also constrained, by the (different) social structure inherited
from their past (along with nature).
The point of the response was to explain what I meant by the sentence
you quoted. What you say here misinterprets it. The part of my post
you didn't quote claimed explicitly that, for Marx, human self-
estrangement "is not the responsibility of the self-estranged
individuals, it's the outcome of the inconsistency between the actual
conditions and the conditions required for full human development".
So, for the reasons I gave, I don't understand how the claim here
that "capitalism is both 'our' creation and a creator of our
consciousness" and your subsequent claims that
there are
unplanned results arising from the consciousness and actions of large
numbers of people who respond to the incentives and constraints that
make up the social structure. It's as if there were an "Invisible
Hand" guiding people to produce certain results -- but I reject the
Smithian idea that this IH always produces good results.
and that
it's people who created the "incentives and constraints
that make up the social structure." But that structure is given to us
in the short run and we cannot will it away. We can't make it go away
by wishing so. Rejecting the system's fetishism is necessary, but not
sufficient. Action -- especially collective action -- is needed.
are disputing something I said.
I do interpret Marx as treating social relations as "internal
relations" constitutive of individual "subjectivity" (as exemplified
by the "passions" dominating individual motivation in the forms of
self-estrangement characterizing different systems of social
relations). I'm not sure if this corresponds to your idea of people
responding "to the incentives and constraints that make up the social
structure." This doesn't seem to allow, for example, for the idea of
the "passions". Marx, I argue, does treat the "purpose" of the
capitalist as a "passion" in Hegel's sense, a "passion" expressing
"human self-estrangement".
"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the
same human self-estrangement."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm
"the process of production is a real labour process and to the extent
to which that is the case and the capitalist has a definite function
to perform within it as supervisor and director, his activity
acquires a specific, many-sided content. But the labour process
itself is no more than the instrument of the valorization process,
just as the use-value of the product is nothing but a repository of
exchange-value. The self-valorization of capital - the creation of
surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating and
overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and
content of his activity. And in fact it is no more than the
rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder - a highly impoverished
and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just
as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite
pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner." ("Results of
the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866, Capital vol. 1
[Penguin ed.], pp. 989-90)
Ted
