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"Andrew_Kliman" <Andrew_Kliman@email.msn.com> said, on 03/20/00 at 12:39
PM:
>Paul Zarembka (OPE-L 2560) replied: "A 12-page section on fetishism in
>one chapter does not a book of 724 pages make. Production of surplus
>value would have a greater claim (328 pages),
>followed by accumulation of capital (196 pages). Even wages gets more
>attention (28 pages in a whole "Part")."
>But the *centrality* of a theory doesn't depend on how many pages are
>devoted to an explication of the theory. It rather depends on the extent
>to which the theory is integral to and influences the whole.
I would agree but the differences in pages are so lopsided!
Furthermore,...
>Section 3 of Ch. 1 is all about fetishism: the properties of the relative
>commodity (i.e., any and every commodity) get turned into properties of
>the equivalent (see esp. the "peculiarities" of the equivalent form).
>Further, as Marx stresses, the commodity-fetish has more developed,
>subsidiary forms, money-fetish, capital-fetish, etc. Thus in Ch. 4 --
>note that we are no longer in Part 1 -- capital fetishistically appears
>as self-expanding value, a disembodied subject of a process, whereas the
>analysis of the production process goes on to show that it is there in
>production that the human subject's labor expands value.
Section 4 is 22 pages, Chapter 4 is 9 pages, so to accommodate your
argument we can raise the total to 43 pages in *Volume 1*. Yet wages are
discussed elsewhere do we'd have to raise it above 28, if we want to
continue number counting. But much more to the point...
>And what is Marx's analysis of the development of capitalist production,
>especially machine production, all about if not that the worker is
>dominated by the product of her on hands, just as ...
No, *Capital* is about the exploitation and domination by one social class
over another in the specific form of the capitalist mode of production.
It is NOT principally about workers being "dominated by the product of
her/his own hand".
>And then there's Vol. III. It would be easy to point to the Trinity
>Formula, or to the crucial discussion of relations of production and
>relations of distribution. But really, this whole volume is again one
>*transformation* after another. The whole thing is about how the
>inversion of subject and object -- worker and machine ...
Same response as above.
Paul
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