Re: [OPE] FWD: Important review of Kautskyism Past and Present

Sorry, Paul. I can see how my expression of the second point would be
confusing to you.

Here's a clearer way to say it -- the separation of productive entities from
one another is structural. By contrast, a sole proprietorship, a capitalist
joint stock company, a worker cooperative, a patriarchal estate, a
multinational corporation, etc., all are different institutional forms that
might give expression to such a structure.

As for the first point, I was just trying to offer the foundational
distinctions of capitalism as a place to begin. To extend this to the
context of the state, we would first have to know what the structure we were
interested in was a structure of. The examples I gave are structures that
characterize the appropriation of nature by labor, and, as you suggest, the
state is different.

Where a non-producing class pumps a surplus product out of a producing
class, then social reproduction cannot take place without the addition of
force. Structures of state power are relations of force and the relations of
consciousness that correspond to and reinforce them. That is, in the last
analysis structures of law and the state appropriate behavior by force. So
that's the answer to the question I posed above -- what is the nature of the
structure we're interested in; what is it we propose to study.

Such structures get manifested in different institutional forms, e.g.
parliamentary institutions, an independent judiciary, etc. To give a legal
example, relations of contract -- relations of force/of will -- reproduce
the autonomy of separate productive entities indifferent to yet dependent on
one another. But these, the particular legal rules, take different
institutional forms in different countries at different times depending on
history, tradition, particular configurations of class, etc.

Without doubt, Dave, forms of taxation are necessary to support the
separation of the state from civil society. But surely we first need to
give an account of the structures of coercion that make taxation possible.
Anyway, I agree with you that we need to distinguish structural accounts
from explanations limited to class or personal interest. Interests have to
be explained in terms of the structures that generate them and which they
tend to reproduce. If I produce independently a use value useless to me,
then it is in my interest to find a market and I take consciousness of this.

howard

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Cockshott" <wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
To: "ope" <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 3:16 PM
Subject: [OPE] FWD: Important review of Kautskyism Past and Present

>
>
>
> First point: I thinkDave Z was using the terms in the context of the state
> rather than production.
> Second Point : are not the enterprise form and the separation of
> enterprises two sides of the same coin?
>
> --- original message ---
> From: "howard engelskirchen" <he31@verizon.net>
> Subject: Re: [OPE] Important review of Kautskyism Past and Present
> Date: 12th August 2010
> Time: 6:57:27 pm
>
>
> the separation of the laboring producer from the conditions of production
> is
> structural. The corporate form or forms of nationalized or state
> ownership
> are institutional. The separation of enterprises from one another is
> strucural; the enterprise form is institutional.
>
> howard
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Cockshott" <wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
> To: "Dave Zachariah" <davez@kth.se>; "Outline on Political Economy mailing
> list" <ope@lists.csuchico.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 9:12 AM
> Subject: Re: [OPE] Important review of Kautskyism Past and Present
>
>
>> What is the difference between a structural and an intitutional
>> mechanism?
>>
>> --- original message ---
>> From: "Dave Zachariah" <davez@kth.se>
>> Subject: Re: [OPE] Important review of Kautskyism Past and Present
>> Date: 12th August 2010
>> Time: 12:57:48 pm
>>
>>
>> Lately I've become increasingly convinced that the problems of the
>> orthodox theory of imperialism are really rooted in a flawed orthodox
>> theory of operation of the state in a capitalist mode of
>> production---which was a reasonable model up to the beginning of the
>> 20th century but problematic since, as Vivek Chibber has pointed, it
>> was based on personal and institutional rather than structural
>> mechanisms of the state's class bias. Hence one must go there to
>> resolve the foundational problems.
>>
>> //Dave Z
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Received on Fri Aug 13 02:42:42 2010