From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sun Oct 24 2004 - 13:57:49 EDT
---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Re: (OPE-L) Combined Development: Cell Phones and Trotsky From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Date: Sun, October 24, 2004 1:52 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marx remarked that all economy reduced to the economising of time, the saving of time, ultimately worktime (expenditure of human energy in production of some kind). If mobile phones can abolish space-time barriers, this can have an immediate economizing effect. It can speed up the turnover of capital, transaction time, and so on. It can create markets where previously there were none, or expand markets. Thus it can both raise the rate and volume of profit. Specifically, human relations themselves can become a source of capital accumulation, much more directly through the instant transmission of information. Yet mobile phones might also have their drawbacks. I was just working on my list of the primary sources of capital accumulation, and tentatively I added a new source (yep, there's progress in the world): (1) Destruction of property or people (2) Unilateral grants and gifts (including philantrophy, goodwill etc.) (3) Own work on own account (4) Appropriation of goods not owned by anybody (5) Levying and taxation (6) Positive revaluation of assets (7) Legal dispossession (8) Licensing (9) Illegal dispossession (10) Capitalisation on human relations and publicity (11) Legal appropriation of value from uncompensated labor (slavery, indentured labor, wage labor, etc.) (12) Legal exchange & commercial trade (from barter to futures) (13) Leasing (14) Illegal appropriation of value from uncompensated labor (extortion etc.). (15) Seigniorage (16) Positive revaluation of assets (17) Invention & discovery (18) Acquisition of information (19) Illegal exchange & trade (from barter to futures) (20) Renting (21) Invention (22) Borrowing You can kinda see why the bourgeois classes are so concerned with moral issues these days - after all, property ownership must be acquired in a just, fair, equitable, etc. way, yet the possibilities for unseemly forms of wealth appropriation are multiplying in a digitalised world. So far, it's clear the bourgeois classes don't like terrorism. Killing must be done only by authorised personnel. The question is raised, however, whether there is any advance on that negative morality. Jurriaan
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