[OPE-L:8264] Re: 'entrepreneurial ability' in late capitalism

From: Michael Eldred (artefact@t-online.de)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 06:13:33 EST


Cologne 02-Jan-2003

Re: [OPE-L:8259]

gerald_a_levy schrieb Wed, 1 Jan 2003 08:03:24 -0500:

> Re Michael E's [8255]:
>
> > With collective social ownership and mediated social collective control of
> > the  means of production, the coercion to earn a living would take
> > another form. The  struggle for control of the means of production and
> > the social plan for  production would be then a direct political struggle,
> > with other losers and winners.
>
> True enough, but then we're no longer talking about capitalism.

Yes, that would be a kind of socialism.

> > The individualism of Western capitalist societies has an intimate
> > connection with the abstractness of association through the social
> > relation of  value. The reification of social relations in money is also a
> > setting-free from  social control by a superior power. I think that
> > Marxism has not thought deeply enough about this.
>
> What is the "superior power"?

Yet another meaning of _archae_, the rule of people by rulers (e.g.
democratically elected politicians).
Our human predicament seems to be that each of us is indivisibly an individual
but that we are together in the world and that this inevitably requires some
form of polity, of government. One kind of social relation is that of rule
through the medium of political power.

Modern Western thinking on government endeavours to save the notion of
individual human freedom in view of government by squaring the circle of
political power and rule in the idea of democracy. Although the people are
ruled, they in turn rule the rulers. Marxists want to extend this rule of the
people in some form or other to the realm of production and distribution of
material goods, thus socializing what was dissociated and private (depriving the
polity direct control). A polity is a form of sociation, exchange is another
paradigm of sociation.

Michael
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