>Gil writes: > >> > But the sense of the argument above is >> >plain: dare to suggest that even a portion of Marx's argument is logically >> >suspect, and you are engaged in the sort of thinking that leads to the >> >Holocaust. >> >Gil Skillman > >Then I'm very much afraid that Rakesh simply seems to confirm >what Gil has said (see below). Note especially Rakesh's reference >to 'manifestly spurious'. I wish it was manifest, I really do. But it >certainly isn't to me at least. If it was I wouldn't have been wasting >my time trying to work out what Marx was on about for so many >years (and, presumably, Marx wouldn't have wasted so much of his >time and energy writing Capital) > >The basic congruity of Marx's 'vision' of Capital with my experience >of the same does not entail the 'manifest spuriousness' of critical >commentary on Marx's arguments. Andrew B, I am not saying that any critical commentary on marx is manifestly spurious. I am saying that Gil's specific criticism is groundless. Here's the crux of Gil's argument ( OPE4687) > >Imagine an exchange economy of A's and B's in which the A's are all small >commodity producers--thus non-capitalists-- and the B's are all merchant >capitalists. Each merchant capitalist buys commodities from some producers >(M-C) and sells them to others at a profit (C-M', completing the circuit >of capital). If this is done by the merchant capitalists as a class we >have surplus value in the sense you attribute to Marx: M-C-M', with M' >greater than M, as an aggregate category descriptive of the entire class. >Of course, for the class of small commodity producers taken as a whole, we >have an aggregate circuit C-M-C', with the value content of C' less than >that of C, *but this is utterly irrelevant from the standpoint of Marx's >definition, as you have specified it.* All we need to know is that M' > M >in the circuit of *capital*. Why for example after half a decade of making his argument argument does Gil not note that Marx explicitly recognizes such a possibility on the very pages he is so fond of quoting: "The form M-C-M', buying in order to sell dearer, is at its purest in genuine merchants' capital. But the whole of this movement takes place within the sphere of circulation. Since however it is impossible, by circulation alone to explain the transformation of money into capital, and the formation of surplus value, merchants' capital appears to be an impossibility, as long as equivalents are exchanged; it appears therefore, that it can only be derived from the two fold advantage gained, over both the selling and the buying producers, by the merchant who parasatically inserts himself between them. It is this sense that Franklin says 'war is robbery, commerce is cheating.' If the valorization of merchants' capital is not to be explained merely by frauds practiced upon the producers of commodities, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which are as yet entirely absent, since here our only assumption is the circulation of commodities and its simple elements." Capital I, p. 266-67 So Marx thinks merchant or commercial capital has in a fully developed capitalist society a different and stronger basis than robbery or fraud, a basis that can only be understood if we are generous enough to follow Marx's analysis all the way through to see how merchant or commercial profit (as well as interest) is now derived from the surplus value which is thrown off from the modern primary circuit of industrial capital in which wage workers are exploited though having sold their labor power at value. Marx asks for our patience (which Gil, enemy that he is, is unwilling to give Marx) so that he can explain the new place commercial or merchant capital, though antediluvian, has in a system of generalized commodity production. But instead of patiently following Marx's argument through, Gil wants to write it off as illogical in ch 5 on the basis that he did not consider a possibility which he himself highlighted?! It is basic to Marx's method that the forms of capital which are historically primary are not analytically primary in the theorization of a modern capitalist society. Gi;ls reading of Marx is terribly ungenerous to say the least; it is ungenerous just in the way bourgeois economics. And in this case the so called critique leads to incomprehension of the logical ordering and thus import of Marx's theory which has provided the greatest weapon in the war against the socialism of fools. Again, I did not say and imply that Gil was an anti semite; I said that he was removing the conceptual arsenal and theoretical understanding of bourgeois society needed to best combat it. Rakesh
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