anaxarchos
04-29-2007, 05:00 PM
Couple of things. I haven't read Capital - maybe parts of it in college but I don't remember. I can't stand reading Marx. I am relying on google and you guys to avoid having to do so. This is my weakness, I own it, and I need to get over it. I plan on starting with the Communist Manifesto because I have it on my bookshelf and it is really short. I guess I'll go for Capital next if it is that fundamental.
For the time being, can you clue me into the specific discrepancy here, or are you going to make me do my own homework?
How can you not like to read the old fart? His books are as different as night and day. The Manifesto can blister your skin, while Capital is a dry book (6 books) about economics. I think, though, that they are equally important, and that Capital is the main buttress for the claim that Marx is not just a socialist but the father of "scientific socialism". Personally, I think it is titanic (minus the iceberg).
It is as science that the discussion of Burkett is relevant. In general, scientific theory does not generalize well outside of its immediate realm of inquiry. It is very difficult to map one scientific theory to another domain on the inevitable claim that X is “just like” Y. This applies to bad theory as well as good.
Consider Darwinism and Social Darwinism. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has tremendous significance as the basis for understanding the origin and transformation of species. Applied to human society as “Social Darwinism”, however, it is an absolute dud. If one takes a step backwards, the reason is apparent. Darwin’s theory is a theory about populations which has no implications whatever for “individuals” within those populations. Darwin explains a long-term biological process quite independent of individual consciousness or the relative success of individuals within relatively short life spans. Finally, Darwin’s categories don’t map to human political theories. Darwin’s classifications (the beginning of science according to Aristotle) are precise and objectively determined. “Success” for Darwin is the simple survival of one species in place of another. There is no way at all to compare that to the subjectively determined social “success” used by Social Darwinists. It is entirely clear that “Social Darwinism” is nothing other than a figure of speech: a reactionary social theory intended to appropriate the authority and the phrasing (“survival of the fittest”) of Darwin but nothing more.
As with “good theory”, so also with bad. Consider Malthus’ Theory of Population. Unlike Darwin’s, Malthus’ theory starts as political doctrine designed to agitate against relief or charity to help the poor. Malthus argues that the “natural mechanism” for the control of population is the finite supply of food grown on potentially finite farmland. In fact, there is no historical evidence whatever that this is true. Population does not grow until it is negated by starvation and food supply does not remain static – quite the opposite, productiveness increases at a faster rate than the growth of population. The “Theory of Population” became a dated reactionary political doctrine until resurrected by the neo-Malthusians of 30 years ago.
But, as was detailed in the Means thread, resurrection does not imply renovation. What was both odious and dubious as Theory of Population becomes incomprehensible as the revised theory of “finite resources”. There is no possible corollary between “energy” and population, even in Malthus’ pernicious framework. It gets sillier still if energy becomes “cheap” energy and still more irrelevant if food is replaced by a “totality of resources”, some one of which has to be “finite”, “sooner or later”.
In truth, Malthusian theory is a marker for a certain type of “ecological consciousness”. Just as every theory of a New World Order inevitably traces back to some variant of The Protocols of Zion, every single modern Malthusian reference derives from some sort of anti-immigration root based on “finite” space, subjectively defined. The connection to Malthus, himself, is intended to establish a logical path to both population and the essential finity of “nature”.
Now, on to the question at hand…
Capital doesn’t care about “nature”, anymore than it cares about urban housing or child labor or infant mortality or bubonic plague, all of which it directly impacts. The augmentation of capital has no mechanism for “caring” about anything but the rate and mass of profit and, to the extent that such “external issues” influence the calculations of capital at all, they do so only indirectly, through their impact on the cost of production. The central core of capitalism is its exploitation of labor. Capital makes use of the simple fact that what labor produces is greater than the cost of reproduction of labor. The result is the production of surplus value, the foundation of capitalist production. The significance of Marx’s Capital is in the precise description of this process as a partisan science. Its importance to class conscious social movements is obvious.
There is no question that capitalism has a detrimental effect on “nature” or the ecology of the earth, just as it is clear that there is no intrinsic countervailing mechanism within capital. Again as with child labor, left to its own devices, capital will take the path of lowest costs and highest profits, limited only by social and political pressures, external and independent of the workings of Capital itself.
That is not good enough for Burkett. He would like to turn Marx’s contradiction between capital and labor into a fundamental contradiction between capital and labor or nature. The intent is the same as with all “eco-socialists”: to make the struggle between capital and nature independent of class struggle, and even to give it primacy over such struggle. Just as in the discussion of Darwin and Malthus above, the intent is also to appropriate the slogans and authority of Marxism without paying much attention to its content.
First, there is the contradiction between use value and exchange value. This should not be treated as merely a formal, abstract contradiction as is sometimes done in modern theoretical interpretations of Marx's work. Rather, it must be seen as the historical development of the tension between the requirements of money-making and monetary valuation on the one hand, and the needs of human beings, of sustainable human development, on the other. In Marx's view, capitalism worsens this tension precisely insofar as it develops and socializes productive forces (labor and nature) in line with the requirements of competitive production for profit.
This is not only badly formulated but nonsensical. The contradiction between use-value and value is precisely a “formal, abstract contradiction”. In Marx’s analysis, use-values are merely a precondition for the development of commodities. A “tension”, just as surely exists between the evolution of use-values under capitalism and the actual “needs of human beings” (as those who are against “consumerism” constantly remind us). The problem here though, is worse than bad Marxism. Burkett not only revises but also supplements Marx. Capitalism now “socializes” the productive forces of labor and nature (one wonders how that is done, exactly). The contradiction is with “sustainable” human development. Whatever that silly phrase may mean, it has no correlation to anything written by Marx (I have no patience with the open-ended, intentionally ambiguous verbiage of part of the current left: sustainable, classist, corporatist, hierarchy…). In other places Burkett redefines Marx’s terms. Capital now “exploits” nature, just as it does labor… but in order to make it do so, “exploitation” now no longer refers to the very precise appropriation of surplus value but has become the generic equivalent of “uses” or “modifies”.
The second contradiction established by Marx is the essentially class-exploitative nature of capitalism, its reliance on the extraction of surplus labor time from the direct producers. Marx shows how the wage-labor form both conceals and is shaped by the fact that workers perform surplus labor for the capitalist even insofar as they are paid the value of their labor power. He also shows that this exploitation is based on capitalism's specific social separation of workers from access to and control over necessary conditions of production. This separation is what forces workers to accept worktimes longer than those necessary to produce their own commodified means of subsistence, even though the extension of the length and intensity of worktime hinders their development as human beings. More specifically -- and this aspect has not been adequately appreciated -- Marx shows how this forced surplus labor time involves capital's appropriation of the labor power (potential work) that is produced during workers' non-worktime, not only through rest and recuperation but also through the domestic reproductive labors of workers and other members of worker-households.
In order to set up his next revision, Burkett so thoroughly butchers Marx above that he actually mimics an argument (“Senior’s Last Hour”) that Marx savagely criticizes in Capital. In fact, there is some sort of humanist argument here that may well be accurate but has nothing to do with Marx.
And so on…
For the rest, you are on your own. In fact, you are on your own, anyway. What I have just written is a potential magnet for all kinds of flak (“no its not”, “yes, it is”, “doesn’t matter”, “wanna see my dog?”) that can not be properly resolved on the web.
Hope this gives you a place to start.
