M-TH: Re: Capital and "Capital"
When I wrote: >>Selling your own labour-power is not where power and prosperity is at. >>Selling other people's labour is. I was asked: >Well, unless you're an artist or a novelist -- someone who produces >something completely "useless". Or? And I replied: The petty-bourgeoisie is in-between the bourgeoisie and the working class, owning its own means of production but using its own labour-power to produce the labour needed to finish the commodity, which it then sells for its value (allowing for the effects on value/price allotted to the individual commodity by the process of equalization of the rate of profit etc), appropriating this to itself. So it keeps the surplus-value, ie the value over and above what is required to pay for the elements going into the commodity, including labour-power. The working class doesn't own the means of production, and only gets paid the value of its labour-power, not the labour it put into the commodity. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and appropriates the value realized by the sale of the commodity, but doesn't put its own labour into the commodity. Artists or novelists fall into the petty-bourgeois category. If they are at the lower end they end up exploiting themselves. If at the higher end (some artist employing assistants, like the workshops of the renaissance, or Enid Blyton,say) they use the labour-power of others as well as themselves, so they get most of their wealth from exploitation. The petty-bourgeoisie is not what it was. Its ranks have been thoroughly proletarianized, so that formerly independent operators are now employees, hence the large new intermediate layers of specialists (doctors and engineers, say). Of course the recent neo-liberal reaction has attempted to recreate formally petty-bourgeois groups back out of these proletarianized hordes, hence the new phenomenon of independent consultants who used to be employees. In historical terms, in relation to the general development of the means of production, this is like a wave or two falling back while the tide is coming in. Choose your moment and you could claim the tide had started to turn, but forced to take the whole process into account, you'd get egg on your face. As for the "uselessness" of a commodity, that's purely in the eye of the purchaser. Any commodity that's bought has use-value in the economic as far as the transaction is concerned. A commodity that gets sold has both exchange value and use value, full stop. A commodity that doesn't, don't. This even goes for such things as poison gases, plutonium, warheads, landmines, Maggie Thatcher knick-knacks and the products of the entertainment and media industry. Perhaps someone could add another angle or two to give it some colour and 3-D, so it really helps. Cheers, Hugh --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Capital is wrong
>A factory when used as a factory is a use value that is >not a >commodity. It is only a commodity when it is sold. George misses the point of Marx's comment. All wealth takes the form of commodities. The fact that something is not being sold at that moment does not stop it from being a commodity. (More to the point, George only recognises consumer goods and not capital goods as commodities). A factory that remained unsold throughout its lifetime would be a rare exception. Forgetting that the original site would be bought from one vendor, and the building from another, once constructed and in operation the factory, as the property of a business would be traded every day on the stock exchange (or more precisely, parts - shares - of it would be). It is also false to think that the commodities that rest unsold on the shelf of the supermarket at the end of a busy day are not therefore commodities (they only cease to be when they perish). A commodity that is not being sold at any one moment is not thereby any other kind of property than a commodity. Marx's point is very precise, and I am surprised that George want to quibble with it. Under capitalism all forms of wealth are commodities. In message <002d01bf8b47$b93d3b80$8afe869f@oemcomputer>, George Pennefather <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >Jim is making a mistake. A factory when used as a factory is a use value that is >not a >commodity. It is only a commodity when it is sold. Factories can exist for years >and >years -indeed for their entire life span-- as use values --as forms of fixed >capital. > >The dirty hanky in my pocket is a use value --snot rag. But if I am prepared to >sell it to >you and you buy it from me because you have a use, say, for my snot rag then it >eh presto >a commodity. > >Warm regards >George Pennefather > >Be free to check out our Communist Think-Tank web site at >http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/ > >Be free to subscribe to our Communist Think-Tank mailing community by >simply placing subscribe in the body of the message at the following address: >mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > >George is making a mistake. A factory is a commodity that can be bought >or sold, just as it can be used in the hands of its owner. Factories are >bought and sold all the time. >-- >Jim heartfield > > > --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- > > > > > --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- -- Jim heartfield --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
M-TH: Re: Capital and "Capital" PS
*This is off-list* Dear Joanna, Here's an important aspect of the petty-bourgeois equation that slipped my mind -- shows how Anglo-centric I am (smallest proportion of population in agriculture in the world for ages and ages). And also how off-putting a reference to artists and novelists can be ;-) Cheers, Hugh ** How could I let the *peasantry* slip my mind in my piece on the petty-bourgeoisie? Must be the early destruction of the peasantry in England and its replacement by tenant farmers who are in the same boat as small capitalists, no difference between running a farm and running a print shop. But in an awful lot of countries (Russia, France, Sweden, the US, etc) the landowning peasantry has constituted a huge factor in the social and historical equation. Not only has the peasantry historically constituted far and away the largest section of the petty-bourgeoisie, but it has been the most explosive mixture fuelling the big revolutions (English, American, French, Russian, Chinese). And particularly the small (no or one or two workers employed) and middle (a smallish number of workers employed) peasants. The interests of the semi-slaves (thralls), the landless rural workers, the crofters and the indebted and dependent peasants have always been socially or politically directed against the landowners and the usurers, and the free small peasants have always been at risk of plunging down into debt and dependence with their destitute comrades-on-the-land. Here it is really a question of exploiting your own labour-power (and that of your immediate family), however much you own your own means of production. And that process of proletarianization that I mentioned has of course taken its most dramatic form and been on the most mind-boggling scale in this category of the petty-bourgeoisie. The whole postwar phenomenon known as urbanization is in fact the proletarianization of the peasant petty-bourgeoisie on an unprecedented and monstrous scale. The monetarization and generalization of the market economy in country after country around the world, in Latin America, Asia and Africa, has led to the wiping out of subsistence farming and the destruction of small-scale peasant production everywhere. The consequences have been indebtedness leading to dispossession leading to one the one hand a huge population of landless rural labourers (spearheaded politically by organizations such as the MST (the movement of the landless) in Brazil) and on the other to a huge migration to the cities and the vast slums of "urbanization". This process fuels the sex industry in Thailand, for instance, and creates a huge pool of desperate labour-power ready, at least initially, to work for next to nothing for the multinationals. But at the same time as the destruction of the petty-bourgeoisie throws billions of people into the proletariat (in the sense of those owning nothing but their labour-power), it also removes one of the main social bases for fascisms of the classical German, Italian and Spanish kinds. A desperate middle and small petty-bourgeoisie on the brink of slipping into pauperdom and ready to scapegoat anybody and do anything to prevent this. With the virtual elimination of the petty-bourgeoisie as a mass force in its own right (even though this force always aligned with one or other of the two main classes of capitalist society and was never able to have an autonomous standpoint of its own), the class stand-off between the bourgeoisie and the working class is in fact that much clearer now both nationally and on a world scale than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cheers, Hugh --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
M-TH: Mexican Elections
This "reporting" out of today's New York Times, appears to be part of building the spin necessary for the smooth transition to Mexican "democracy", which the US wants to negociate. There have been growing signs for months, that an alliance of rich Mexican businessmen, the Catholic Church, the US govermnent, and elements within the PRI itself are preparing the road ahead to jettison the world's oldest dictatorship. Continuing to accept the amount of dry rot within the PRI for another 6 years, is believed to be the sure road to Mexican disintegration from social disarray. Something that the Clinton Administration hopes to head off. It would also be the crown to crow about in the Clinton foreign policy, if right before the US elections it could deliver this "success" to the Gore campaign. Still, the PRI element is a lot like the Cuban Miami Mafia, that also at times is able to vear off on its own course and sabotage delicate US operations. The next months are going to be extremely important for future US foreign policy in Latin America. Can Clinton pull off the con, of establishing a two party "democracy" within Mexico? It's going to be a difficult, but a very do-able project. Tony Abdo .. March 12, 2000 In Mexico's Election, the Race Is Real By SAM DILLON MEXICO CITY, March 11 -- For months, Mexico's presidential race seemed headed inexorably toward a 14th consecutive victory by the governing party. Suddenly, it has turned into a real race because Vicente Fox Quesada has made advances that give him a better chance at the presidency than any other opposition figure since the Mexican revolution. Mr. Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive who usually wears cowboy boots, has considerably narrowed the once-overwhelming lead in public opinion held since last fall by Francisco Labastida Ochoa, the nominee of the president's party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, recent polls indicat A bankers' convention in Acapulco this month showed just how clearly some members of an elite that has always supported the governing party unconditionally now believe it is time to end its long monopoly over the presidency. At the convention on March 4, hundreds of financial executives leaped into a standing ovation the moment Mr. Fox strode onto the convention floor, cowboy boots freshly -- and personally -- polished on the plane ride up. Several times, the bankers punctuated his speech with applause, even when he said that "after 70 years, we Mexicans have finally understood that there are better political alternatives." "We're one step away from changing governments," Mr. Fox said. The bankers gave Mr. Labastida a lukewarm reception. The third major candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a former Mexico City mayor, is so far behind that some in his camp are urging him to withdraw from the race so the opposition can unite behind Mr. Fox. That is unlikely. "But what's important is that some of Cárdenas's backers have concluded that Fox is the only candidate who can beat the PRI," said Jorge Castañeda, a political scientist who knows both opposition candidates well. Since the early 1980's, voters have elected thousands of opposition mayors, a dozen opposition state governors and an opposition majority in Congress. But Mr. Fox's current strength is extraordinary because in presidential politics Mexico has been a one-party nation since the Institutional Revolutionary Party was founded in 1929. No presidential nominee of the governing party has ever received less than 50 percent, according to official results in a country with a tradition of ballot stuffing and vote-buying. As recently as 1976, José López Portillo was elected with 100 percent of the votes -- no other name was on the ballot. The opposition's best presidential showing, officially, came when Mr. Cárdenas garnered 32 percent in his first presidential bid in 1988. But many Mexicans believe that many votes were stolen from him. All previous presidential elections were organized by agencies controlled by the governing party. This year, the Federal Electoral Institute is fully autonomous. Still, Mr. Fox said in an interview he is not convinced that the governing party would relinquish the presidency if an opposition candidate won by a margin smaller than 5 percent. Factors that may decide the outcome of the July 2 elections include several planned presidential debates and how voters finally react to the economy, one of Latin America's most robust. Some analysts say Mexicans, crediting President Ernesto Zedillo's stewardship for lowering inflation and producing steady growth, will elect the governing party once more. Others argue that stability favors Mr. Fox because even conservative voters may be more willing to risk political change. "Fox is an outsider," the candidate said of himself one recent day, climbing into the Chevrolet Suburban that ferried him be
