Michael Perelman wrote:
I have mentioned before how Marx regards the capitalists as
representing the
charactermasks of capital. The German reads (without the umlauts):
"Wie man daher immer die Charaktermasken beurteilen mag, worin sich
die Menschen hier
gegen ubertreten, die gesellschaftlichen Verhaltnisse der Personen
in ihren Arbeiten
erscheinen jedenfalls als ihre eignen personlichen Verhaltnisse und
sind nicht
verkleidet in gesellschaftliche Verhaltnisse der Sachen, der
Arbeitsprodukte."
The English translations do not include the term charactermasks.
You earlier provided an interpretation of "charactermasks":
He referred to capitalists as
the character masks of capital -- meaning that they just play the
role assigned to them.
The problem is the script (Capitalism) not the actors.
This doesn't seem to allow for the idea of social relations as
"internal relations" constituting the "subjectivity" - the
"character" - of the individuals embedded in them. As I've said,
this idea underpins the role assigned by Marx to the "passions".
“He [the capitalist] is dominated by the same absolute drive to
enrich himself as the miser, except that he does not satisfy it in
the illusory form of building up a treasure of gold and silver, but
in the creation of capital, which is real production. If the
labourer’s overproduction is production for others, the production of
the normal capitalist, of the industrial capitalist as he ought to
be, is production for the sake of production. It is true that the
more his wealth grows, the more he falls behind this ideal, and
becomes extravagant, even if only to show off his wealth. But he is
always enjoying wealth with a guilty conscience, with frugality and
thrift at the back of his mind. In spite of all his prodigality he
remains, like the miser, essentially avaricious.” http://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm
In Capital, this development of the individual capitalist is also
said to have characterized the historical development of the
capitalist “passions” (which differ from those dominant in feudalism
e.g. "sordid avarice and most anxious calculation" versus "the open-
handed feudal lord's prodigality").
“At the historical dawn of capitalist production, - and every
capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage
– avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the
progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of
delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a
thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of
development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality,
which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of
credit, becomes a business necessity to the ‘unfortunate’
capitalist. Luxury enters into capital's expenses of
representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the
miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted
consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power
of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life's
enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the capitalist
never possesses the bonâ-fide character of the open-handed feudal
lord's prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind
it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his
expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily
restricting the other. But along with this growth, there is at the
same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the
passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.“ (Marx
Capital vol. 1 {Penguin ed.}, p. 741)
The historically specific early form of the capitalist "passions"
provide the "stimulus" for the "primitive accumulation of capital".
This is brought about by "new forces and new passions" that "spring
up in the bosom of society"; it is accomplished "under the stimulus
of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the
most meanly odious."
"What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its
historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not
immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-laborers, and
therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of
the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property
based on the labor of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis
to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labor
and the external conditions of labor belong to private individuals.
But according as these private individuals are laborers or not
laborers, private property has a different character. The numberless
shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the
intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private
property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation
of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both;
petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development
of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer
himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under
slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes,
it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical
form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of
labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he
cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and
scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the
concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-
operation, division of labor within each separate process of
production, the control over, and the productive application of the
forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social
productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production,
and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive
bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, "to
decree universal mediocrity".
"At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material
agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new
passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social
organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be
annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation
of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially
concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge
property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the
people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the
means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of
the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises
a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only
those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive
accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers
was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of
passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most
meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to
say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-
individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by
capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the
nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1
Ted
