From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2006 - 02:43:56 EST
I think Andrew Trigg has something to teach us here. Regarding aim of the capitalist entrepreneur...it's the maintaining and enlarging of a fund for luxury spending. The means for this is the valorization of capital by means of the exploitation of wage laborers (disguised and not). The capitalist does not expend his gross receipts so as to maintain at the least his fund for luxury consumption ad infinitum (or at the least for the duration of his life and perhaps beyond that depending on the strength of his intergenerational commitments which Schumpeter saw as dangerously weakening as a result of the corrosive effects of feminism on the ever more child-less bourgeois family) . The capitalist also not only reproduces his capital investment; he capitalizes surplus value to ensure that his up-to-date investments will return him not only the funds for his present consumption of luxuries but a growing fund. The capitalist accumulates not out of Protestant ascetism but in pursuit of the means by which to purchase the newer and more expensive luxuries that have captured his imagination. The capitalist is as much in the grip of imaginative fantasy (of being able to afford new luxuries and pass on a patrimony) as he is under 'mechanical' necessity to reinvest and capitalize surplus value. All his spending--on luxuries today and in capital investments--is motivated by the pursuit of luxury. The all important relationship between capitalism and luxury seems to have been ignored. Andrew Trigg is a great exception. There seems to be little discussion of Sombart's book Capitalism and Luxury. And, Andrew, Grossman did not ignore this relationship. He understood well that this is what gave meaning to the capitalist of the accumulation of capital. Also see the Jack Goody piece I referenced in recent discussion. Rakesh
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