Again assuming that Marx's method is logico historical as Meek claimed, Gil writes in 6366: > My point here is that this representation begs the central question at > hand, since in light of the above, there is no need in *value-theoretic* > terms to "derive" the possibility of surplus value-producing merchant's > capital (which historically preceded the circuit of industrial capital, in > any case) from the circuit of industrial capital. You don't get the central question. The central question is not why the capital form comes to depend on the free wage labor form; Marx has already assumed that independent producers have been expropriated and that there is a free wage labor pool. He says so much. He is going to confine himself theoretically to what the capitalists are confined to practically. That's from memory, but he says something to that effect. Further assume that capitalists don't loan money or constant capital out to worker collectives. Why assume that? Again: because that is in fact not what is practically happening. Marx wants to explain the nature of the dominant relation between Mr Moneybags and workers as he finds it to exist in a fully developed capitalist society. To put it another way: assume that we are on the free wage labor island. But even if you elimiante merchant and loan capital by fiat, the central question still remains. The problem has not been solved by fiat. and AGAIN the central question is: if the value in circulation has been increased (and PVE is just an assumption so we don't have to take account of mutual cancellations), what then what was it that workers had to have alienated in their exchange with Mr Moneybags? It could not have been their labor time--so what is it that was exchanged? and how is the value of this thing that workers alienated determined? Chs 5 and 6 are ultimately about sharpening the distinction between labor power and labor, not proving that the capital form comes to depend on the hiring of free wage labor rather than the putting out system or the loaning of constant capital in other forms. It's fine to trace out historically and theoretically why the latter two have been done in and are usually done in by the free wage form. But as Chris Arthur, Martha Campbell, Fred Moseley and my buddy Wm J Blake have argued--Marx's method is not logico-historical, as Meek claimed. Marx is not trying to give the historical logic behind why the production of surplus value via the putting out system was vanquished by the free wage labor system. Marx assumes the fully developed capitalist system as he finds it almost realized in England. But this system presents great mysteries and problems. And that is what he is mostly concerned to analyze from the very first lines of Capital. In short, the mystery of the free wage form itself requires intensive analysis. I'll respond to the rest later. Rakesh
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