From: rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU
Date: Mon Apr 28 2003 - 20:04:31 EDT
Paul Bullock writes: For Rakesh: If I remember well enough Marx made a comment during this later time that he had 'finished with all that *** ' when refering to the studies of Capital, meaning that he had solved the basic problems. His studies of the Turkish material on Rent, his learning of Turkish eg, doesn't indicate a search for an easier task to me! Remember the 'cubic metres' of material on the topic found by Engels after Marx's death...marx wanted to trace back the historical origin of rent as a 'turkish' form. _______ The "Turkish" form would be (Marx draws here from Richard Jones) ryot rent or tax, right? Here the state is claimed to be landlord, and this is of course the claimed basis for the putative uniqueness of the East. Jones underlined that in Turkey the rate of ryot rent differed according to religion--one seventh of the produce where the cultivator was a Turk, one fifth where he was a Christian. True? All this raises the questions of whether there was an absence of landed property in the so called Asiatic Mode of Production and whether the appropriation of surplus in the form of tax separated such modes of production from those in which the surplus took the form of rents--whether labor, metayer or cottier. These questions are taken up in John Haldon's The State and Tributary Mode of Production. It is important to remember (I believe) that Marx points to the difference between ryot rents or taxes and other forms of rent just before enunciating what can perhaps be called the central dogma of historical materialism: "The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude,, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production o the imediate producers--a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power--in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of the state in each case." Capital 3, Vintage. p. 927. It's perhaps not surprising that Marx spent many of his later years researching his theory of the specific economic forms in which surplus labour has been pumped out across time and space? Thanks to Michael P for sending me Mattick's review of Strachey's Nature of Capitalist Crisis; it is very interesting indeed. All the best, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 30 2003 - 00:00:01 EDT