Re Paul Cockshott's 6444: [...] >The locus in Marx is Chapter 15, section 2 of Capital, I. >(Machinery and Large-Scale Industry: The Value Transferred by the >Machinery to the Product). Pp. 513-17 in the Fowkes translation, >ending "Hence we nowhere find a more shameless squandering of human >labour-power for despicable purposes than in England, the land of >machinery." >( I am indebted to Allin for this reference) Paul and Allin, just for buttressing your point: "If small scale landownership creates a class of barbarians [!] standing half outside society, combining the crudity of primitive social forms with all the torments an misery of civilized countries, large landed property undermines labour-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital powr of the nation, on the land iteslf. *Large-scale industry* and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture *have the same effect*. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former *lays waste and ruins labour-power* and thus the *natural power of man*, whereas the latter does the same to the *natural power of soil*, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their par provide agriculture with the meas of *exhausting the soil*." Capital III, pp. 949-50, emph. added. Indeed, capitalism is not an "optimizing" and "rational" system as, e.g. general equilibrium theory leads us to believe. It is founded on the waste and destruction of the natural and social "powers", being the latter the associated labor of the human beings. A.R.
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