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Posted by Walt Sheasby on March 14, 19102 at 23:42:57:
> CAPITALISM: THE UNMENTIONABLE
Capital study group forming
Many on this Board may endorse the idea of making Marx's Das Kapital a valuable tool in socialist political activism. As the excerpt below points out, the study of the Capitalist Mode of Production has not been stressed by the dominant Political Economy.
I've recently set up a moderated list group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kapital_Gang/ that you are welcome to join if you want a serious study of Capital without diversions. Marxist writers Cyril Smith, Joel Kovel and John Clark have signed up for the group. One of the roads to learning that we will explore is the framing of specific questions or problems that will de directed to various writers in Marxian economics for a response to be published on the list.
Anyone with the skill and capacity to set up and
maintain a web site, in order to post a number of
longer articles as resource material, is invited to write me at wsheasby@cs.com. In general, if you have questions or comments for me, please send a direct email to me rather than posting to the entire board.
To directly subscribe to this new group go to
Kapital_Gang-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
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CAPITALISM: THE UNMENTIONABLE
In the classical writings that defined the level of
analysis of Economics, the emphasis is on the
individual rather than any systemic perspective.
Even the very term Capitalism is scarcely to be
found in mainstream legal and economic theory
in the 19th century (Sombart, 1930).
There were few uses of the term before Marx,
and despite his abundant use of the terms
Capital, Capitalist, and Capitalist Mode of
Production, even Marx’s economic writings
and drafts rarely speak of Capitalism.
Perhaps Marx preferred to speak of Modes
of Production, rather than Feudalism versus
Capitalism, in order to situate Lords and
Capitalists in a more systemic context. In
any case, this shortcut term is only used
rarely in his later writings to define an
historical period and more rarely an
economic system:
However long a series of periodical
reproductions and preceding accumulations
the capital functioning to-day may have
passed through, it always preserves its
original virginity. So long as the laws of
exchange are observed in every single act
of exchange the mode of appropriation can
be completely revolutionised without in any
way affecting the property rights which
correspond to commodity production.
These same rights remain in force both at
the outset, when the product belongs to its
producer, who, exchanging equivalent for
equivalent, can enrich himself only by his
own labour, and also in the period of
capitalism [der Kapitalistischen Periode],
when social wealth becomes to an ever-
increasing degree the property of those who
are in a position to appropriate continually
and ever afresh the unpaid labour of others
(Marx, 1967: 587, 1969: 327, 1976: 733).
Note that in the German original the term is
Kapitalistischen Periode rather than period of
Kapitalismus. The latter term implies a set of
ideas related to the epoch (as in Socialismus,
Communismus), and in analyzing Das Kapital
Marx may heave been reluctant to conflate the
structural base of the edifice and the shifting
ideologies flown from the balcony.
On August 11, 1868, Marx did introduce a Draft
Resolution on the Consequences of Using
Machinery under Capitalism Proposed by the
General Council to the Brussels Congress.
Marx also wrote in late 1878 to Nikolai
Mikhailovskii that "...my critic...feels himself
obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch
of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe
into an historico-philosophic theory of the
marche generale [general path] imposed by fate
upon every people, whatever the historic
circumstances in which it finds itself..."
(Shanin, 1983:136).
The letter, however, was never mailed by
Marx, perhaps because he had begun to
agree more with the Russian populists about
the historical possibility of an undeveloped
country bypassing Capitalism, although
Marx would have always added the proviso:
IF revolution also occurred in the West.
The word Capitalist in English was used by
Arthur Young in his 1792 Travels in France.
Louis Blanc’s Organisation du travail
contained the first definition of Capitalism:
"...What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the
appropriation of capital by some to the
exclusion of others" (1850, 161-2). William
Makepeace Thackeray as early as the 1853-
1855 serialization The Newcomes wrote that,
"The sense of capitalism sobered and
dignified Paul de Florac...." (1855, 359).
Charles Dickens in the 1855-1857 serialization
Little Doritt (1857, Bk. 1, Ch. 33) stressed capital’s
global dimension: "It had reached this point when
Mr. Merdle came home from his daily occupation
of causing the British name to be more and more
respected in all parts of the civilised globe capable
of the appreciation of world-wide commercial
enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and
capital."
In 1861 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared that
"Land is still the fortress of capitalism" in La
Guerre et La Paix.
"Capitalism" never entered into ordinary legal
and economic theory, only being popularized
by radical movements at the turn of the century.
In 1877 A. Douai in Better Times (1884, p. 10)
pointed out, "This institution of private capitalism
is of a comparatively recent origin."
It is that historical dimension that apparently
made the concept so radical, since whatever
had a beginning might also have an ending.
R. H. Tawney was one of the first to point out
the way in which the concept was shunned in
mainstream legal and economic language
(Bottomore, 1983, p. 64). John Kenneth
Galbraith in his American Capitalism noted,
"For many years this term...has been regarded
as vaguely obscene. All sorts of euphemisms --
free enterprise, individual enterprise, the
competitive system and the price system
-- are currently used in its place" (Galbraith,
1952, p. 4).
While a Harvard professor might create an
embarrassment with such a vulgar term, a high
school teacher using the word at the time
Galbraith wrote in 1952 would probably have
faced more serious repercussions.
With the political culture of Capitalism returning
to the repression and censorship of the days of
Joseph McCarthy, while the economy rediscovers
the business cycle Marx explained 135 years ago,
this might be a good time to learn from Das Kapital:
Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie.
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Excerpted and revised from:
Walt Contreras Sheasby, 2000, Corporation
Capitalism: How the System Hid for a Hundred
Years,
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2000/msg00478.html
http://www.greeninformation.com/
CORPORATIONCAPITALISM1.htm
REFERENCES
Blanc, Louis (1850), Organisation du travail, 4th
Edition.
Bottomore, Tom, ed. (1983), A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Dickens, Charles (1855-7), Little Dorritt, Published
monthly in Punch, London: Bradbury.
Douai, A. (1877, 1884)), Better Times. See Oxford
English Dictionary,
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/OEDdef.htm
Galbraith, John Kenneth (1952), American
Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Marx, Karl, (1967), Capital, Vol. 1, Chap. 24,
Conversion of Surplus-Value Into Capital, New
York: International Publishers.
________ (1976), Capital, Vol. 1, London: New Left
Books and Penguin Books.
http://melbecon.unimelb.edu.au/het/marx/cap1/chap24
________ (1969), Das Kapital: Kritik der
Politischen Oekonomie, Stuttgart: Alfred Kroener
Vertlag.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1861), La Guerre et La
Paix, (2 vols.), Paris: Dentu. See Oxford English
Dictionary,
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/OEDdef.htm
Teodoro Shanin (1983), Late Marx and the
Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.
(Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye
Zapisky [Notes on the Fatherland].
Sombart, Werner (1930), Capitalism, in Seligman,
Edwin R.A., Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, New York: The Macmillan Co.
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1855), Newcomes,
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 10,
Issue 57, February 1855.
Walt Contreras Sheasby