TWO WORDS: RICKY RAY
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
WE ARE CAPITALISM
It (Capitalism) is thus, despite itself , instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time,in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.
The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Wir sind Kapitalismus
The Subversion of Politics
European Autonomous Social Movements
and the Decolonization of Everyday Life
Copyright Georgy Katiaficas 1997,2006
European Autonomous Social Movements
and the Decolonization of Everyday Life
150 years later
Edited by Marcello Musto
With a special foreword
by Eric Hobsbawm
Michael Heinrich teaches economics in Berlin and is managing editor of PROKLA: Journal for Critical Social Science. He is the author of The Science of
Value: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy between Scientific Revolution and
Classical Tradition, and editor, with Werner Bonefeld, of Capital and Critique:
After the “New Reading" of Marx.
Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge
By Guglielmo Carchedi
Capital in general and many Capitals
Written in 1857/58 – during the first great world crisis (affecting not only the few industrial / industrializing countries but also the “rest of the world”)
Marx’ ambition: refutation of Say’s law, overcoming the fallacies of the “general glut debate”
Discovering the law / inner necessity of crisis in modern capitalism
Discovering / explaining the long term tendencies of capitalism (its historical laws of development)
Credit and Crisis
What is the final goal of Marx’ analysis?
To explain why and how capitalism is a self-destructive social system – undermining itself, destroying necessary preconditions which it can not reproduce / replace
To explain the limits of credit (which is a device to overcome many of the restrictions imposed upon capital)
To explain how and why the credit system in the end accelerates and aggravates the crises of capitalism
Why Credit?
Credit as a social device – rising from the exchange process
Credit presupposes capital – Capital presupposes credit
Credit links together money as money and money as capital
Credit provides the base for new forms of associated capital (the highest form, according to Marx)
Credit facilitates / accelerates the process of accumulation
Credit provides the most sophisticated form of social regulation of relations of production and exchange which are compatibel with capitalism (and already point beyond the capitalist mode of production, according to Marx)
Why Crisis?
The double meaning of crisis – both a symptom of the obsolescence of capitalism / and an element that slows down the decay of capitalism (enables fresh starts again and again – just because of the destruction of large portions of value and capital)
The dynamics of crisis – as a crucial phase in a longer process / as a decisive period of the trade cycle, industrial cycle
The different “forms of crisis” (among others: monetary crisis, credit crisis, financial crisis, industrial crisis …)
The long term tendency of crisis – to become world-wide, to become more and more severe
The range and scope of Marx’ theory of crisis
Crisis means the “explosion” of all contradictions of the capitalist mode of production
Crises are inevitable / necessary in capitalism as a temporary means to create new opportunities for capitalist development
A multifaceted phenomenon – the general crisis comprises several particular crises
Explanation has to be complex as well
Accordingly, there seem to be several Marxian “theories” of crisis (in fact, there are several causal chains that Marx follows and combines)
General conclusion – the meaning of the Grundrisse
The Grundrisse are not the “better or richer version” of Capital
They are just one stage in the long learning process of its author (learning how to build the critical theory) – althoug a very important one
The Grundrisse are a first big step towards Capital, no more, no less
Conclusion – Lessons that Marx drew
Writing “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1858, published in 1859)
Two versions (fragmentary “Urtext” and text as published in 1859
Lesson A: “The dialectical mode of exposition / presentation is only right, if one is aware of its limits” (Urtext)
Lesson B: Analysis of the commodity (form) and the exchange relation (process) is indispensable to develop the concept of money
Michael R. Krätke
Changing Worlds of Labour - Karl Marx and Beyond
Marx' theory or theories of crisis
Capitalism and its crises
Finance Capital - 100 years after Hilferding
AND MY WORK TIME, IS I GET PAID A LITTLE FOR MY WORK TIME
THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE
IS FOR FREE TIME FOR ALL
AND THE ABOLITION OF THE WAGE SYSTEM
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital.The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all.
For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.
FORDISM AND POST FORDISM IN THE GRUNDRISSE
Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production
(value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.
But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather -- and large industry reveals this -- in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.
(What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body -- it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.
The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.
Forces of production and social relations -- two different sides of the development of the social individual -- appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.
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