From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@IASTATE.EDU)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2008 - 13:53:56 EST
from the Results, 1061-1065 of the Penguin edition: "Hence capital not only produces capital, it produces a growing mass of men, the material through which alone it can function as additional capital. Therefore, it is not only true to say that labour produces on a constantly increasing scale the conditions of labour in opposition to itself in the form of capital, but equally, capital produces on a steadily increasing scale the productive wage-labourers it requires. . . . Capitalist production is not merely the reproduction of the relationship: it is its reproduction on a steadily increasing scale. . . . It is not just the objective conditions of the process of production that appear as its result. The same thing is true also of its specific social character. The social relations and therefore the social position of the agents of production in relation to each other, ie the relations of production, are themselves produced: they are also the constantly renewed result of the process."* *the manuscript breaks off. Dave, you confuse subsets of cartesian products with Aristotelian composites of activity and form. Marx used the later; neo-classical economics uses the former. Marx grounded the investigation of social life in the study of composites of labor activity and form, of "enformed social labor". Thus the definition of both the commodity and capital relations must be of labor-form composites. Howard At 11:40 AM 1/9/2008, you wrote: >on 2008-01-09 15:53 Paul Zarembka wrote: >>I don't think so but I suppose this is clear enough from my messages. >>Paul >> >>--On 1/9/2008 3:23 PM +0100 Dave Zachariah wrote: >> >>>But if one says that capital *is* a relation, then "capital >>>accumulation" >>>--- by definition a quantitative process --- loses its meaning and >>>Marxist >>>economic theory will be obscured. > >Ok, I know you disagree. But then if capital is by itself a relation, >what does it mean to "accumulate relations"? Can an agent do so or only >the economic system? > >Relations are subsets of cartesian products between sets of agents. Then >according to the argument above, "capital accumulation" suggests that >the cardinality of relation (set) that constitutes capital is increasing. > >//Dave Z
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jan 31 2008 - 00:00:06 EST