In response to the following,
>> Must something be "socially visible" to be theoretically significant?
Duncan writes:
>No, but don't the examples you give suggest that labor power only exists
>in an embryonic or potential form in these situations?
I would say not, unless the conclusion of the argument I'm contesting is
assumed. I understand labor power as the capacity to labor, rather than as a
commodity, on the ground that commodification of labor power is simply a
historically contingent implication of the labor-labor power distinction.
Thus, in the cases I've presented, this capacity is necessarily actual
rather than "embryonic" or "potential"-- otherwise it couldn't be expressed
in surplus labor. Furthermore the substantive *distinction* between labor
and labor power is operative in these cases; otherwise, for example, the
power of usury would not have been dependent on and coterminous with a
propertied small producing class.
To put it another way: the significance of the labor-labor distinction,
expressed in each of the historical surplus value-bearing circuits of
capital, does not depend on the commodity status of labor power. To the
contrary, its commodity status derives from the historically contingent
strategic implications of this distinction.
Gil
>> For example, are labor values "socially visible?"
>>
>> I would reply that the *manifestations* of the labor-labor power distinction
>> are socially visible well before the commodification of labor power, and in
>> fact, as argued in the previous post, the latter is simply one of these
>> historically contingent
>> and socially visible manifestations.
>>
>> Specifically, the substantive distinction between labor power and labor
explains
>>
>> 1) why usury capitalists required that small producers post collateral for
>> their loans to finance means of production, and therefore
>>
>> 2) why, in Marx's words, "usury is a powerful means for establishing the
>> pre-conditions for industrial capital--a might agency for separating the
>> conditions of production from the producers" [see e.g. Paul Mantoux, The
>> Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, for a discussion of this
>> redistributive effect of collateral requirements], and also
>>
>> 3) why, as Marx says, "the power of the usurer comes to an end" once workers
>> become propertyless.
>>
>> By extension, if not for the ubiquitous operation of the labor-labor power
>> distinction, there would be no clear reason for the commodification of
>> labor power _per se_, and no basis for the subordination of
>> interest-bearing and merchant's capital to industrial capital once workers
>> become "free in the double sense."
>>
>> Thus, even if we can't "see" labor power in these "antediluvian" circuits of
>> capital, we can certainly see the consequences of the distinction between
>> labor power and labor, and indeed could not explain the historical movements
>> of these circuits, or the genesis of the circuit of industrial capital,
>> without it.
>>
>> In solidarity, Gil
>>
>>
>>
>>
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