Paul -- I think value form's approach in identifying economic forms first and explaining private property on that basis is correct. As I understand it, exchange value is predicated upon the autonomy of independent producers who produce values useless to them for others. This is not a relationship of property, at least in any legal sense, but a relationship concerning the distribution of agents of production to the means of production. Property relations as legal relations are relations of force and consciousness derivative of that. So if we want to speak of commodity ownership we would speak of onwership of value and reach the reverse of your proposition, namely: private property is predicated upon the value form of labor. Capital is more complicated because it is intrinsically a relationship involving the subordination of will, nonetheless we can start with the distribution of agents in the sense of the separation of direct producers from the means of production. And this of course is immediately a class relation. Howard At 11:36 AM 7/1/01 +0100, you wrote: > meaning 'of no particular concrete/ or technical skill'... human >labour in general... although there is an avoidance of the notion of some >essential physical/mental activity.. since this would move into an obvious >a-historical position. private property. Now we are no longer >dealing with a directly - as I stressed some time ago - the link in an >historically new social process. Private property exchanges with >private property, abstracted from the particular existence of man as a >directly social being. Mankinds directly social being is of no immediate >interest to capital. The quality of labour socially, becomes 'abstract' >when direct exchanges are broken down through the spontaneous development >of money. It becomes systematically over a period of time. >Understanding it after industrial capitalism had developed simply enabled >us correctly to understand the history leading up to it accurately. >labour . Money is the gateway by which private property is able to act for >its own society, it blesses the private offering with the stamp of social >validation. It reveals the abstract, social, nature of the labour >performed privately. between private property, and so class >society based on labour power as a commodity, and not one sidedly >reiterate the fact of exchange as such. Fraternally Paul B.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jul 31 2001 - 00:00:02 EDT