Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: 150 years of ‘Das Kapital’: How relevant is Marx today?

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/150-years-of-das-kapital-how-relevant-is-marx-today/
 
 
150 years of ‘Das Kapital’: How relevant is Marx today?
 
August 24, 2017
 
Jayati Ghosh
 
It is quite amazing that Karl Marx’s Capital has survived and been 
continuously in print for the past century and a half. After all, this 
big, unwieldy book (more than 2000 pages of small print in three fat 
volumes) still has sections that are evidently incomplete. Even in the 
best translations, the writing is dense and difficult, constantly 
veering off into tangential points and pedantic debates with now unknown 
writers. The ideas are complex and cannot be understood quickly. In any 
case, the book aims to describe economic and social reality in 
19th-century northwestern Europe – surely a context very different from 
our own.
 
This is a book that has been pronounced dead or obsolete many times, but 
it keeps bouncing back, with the latest recovery in interest and sales 
just after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. So why do so many people 
all over the world still read (or try to read) Karl Marx’s Capital 
today? Obviously, it must have something going for it – and, in fact, it 
does indeed still provide a useful framework for understanding the 
essential features of capitalism, no matter how different its 
contemporary manifestations may be.
 
Consider only a few of these insights. First is the central point about 
capital: for Marx, it is not just a resource in itself, a simple factor 
of production analogous to land and labour, but an expression of very 
specific social relations of production. The social relation between 
employer and worker is what enables capitalist production to take place 
at all. It requires workers to be “free” in a double sense: “free” to 
sell their own labour power (not bound by other socioeconomic ties and 
constraints) and “free” of any ownership of the means of production, so 
that they have no choice but to sell their labour power for their own 
material survival. Even when matters appear to be more complex because 
of the emergence of subcontracting and the “gig economy”, this 
underlying social relation is still critical.
 
The concentration of ownership of the means of production in a few hands 
is effectively what enables capital to play its role in production. But 
this concentration was necessarily based on expropriation from those who 
previously possessed it, such as peasants and small artisans who could 
have produced on their own. This “primitive accumulation” has often been 
a violent process, but it can also occur – and still continues to occur 
– in other more complex ways, because of the uneven development of 
capitalism in different regions and in different sectors.
 
A central, and still very powerful, concept is that of “commodity 
fetishism”: the situation in which relations between people become 
mediated by relations between things: commodities and money. Commodities 
(goods and services produced for exchange) are not simply things or 
objects, because they possess both use value (meeting human needs or 
wants) and exchange value (as a thing that can be traded in return for 
something else). But value then gets seen as intrinsic to commodities 
rather than being the result of labour, and the exchange of commodities 
and market-based interaction are seen as the “natural” way of dealing 
with all objects, rather than as a historically specific set of social 
relations.
 
More broadly, commodity fetishism is the illusion emerging from the 
centrality of private property in capitalism, which then determines not 
only how people work and interact, but also how they perceive reality 
and understand social change. The urge to acquisition, the obsession 
with material gratification of wants and the ordering of human 
well-being in terms of their ability to command different commodities, 
could all be described as forms of commodity fetishism. The obsession 
with GDP growth per se among policymakers and the general public is an 
extreme, but widespread, example of commodity fetishism today.
 
Marx identified three “cardinal facts” of capitalist production:
 
1- Concentration of means of production in a few hands, whereby they 
cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into 
social production capacities;
 
2- The organisation of labour into social labour: through cooperation, 
division of labour and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences;
 
3- The creation of the world market.
 
The third feature is what we now call globalisation, and it is the 
natural result of the tendency of the system to spread and aggrandise 
itself – to destroy and incorporate earlier forms of production, and to 
transfigure and transform technology and institutions constantly.
 
Capitalism is dynamic, constantly generating new types of production 
organisation and economic institutions: not just the factory system but 
more recent arrangements, financial institutions and structures, legal 
systems. The accumulation of capital generates higher productivity and 
transforms systems, but it is also associated with uneven development. 
Marx saw capitalism as being in a situation of continuous 
disequilibrium, because of this tendency of uneven development, which is 
not confined to a single arena, but characterises all social and 
economic relations.
 
Thus, there is an inherent tension between the expansion of the 
productive forces and the ability of the economic system to generate 
sufficient demand for the goods that are produced. There is 
disproportionality between the expansion of fixed and variable capital, 
which makes it more difficult to generate profits. There is 
disproportionality between sectors that emerges in the process of 
accumulation. There is geographically uneven development that 
simultaneously creates both “developed” and “underdeveloped” areas. This 
can be extended to explain imperialism, which can be understood as the 
struggle for control over economic territories of different kinds. And 
the imbalance between money as a medium of exchange and money as a 
measure of value gets amplified by the development of credit and 
finance, creating a higher tendency for crisis.
 
The system generates many conflicts and contradictions, only some of 
which culminate in periodic crises. Since the basic dynamics of capital 
is simultaneously to aggrandise itself and impoverish other classes such 
as workers and peasants, within and across nations, it obviously 
generates class conflicts. But the system also generates intra-class 
conflict, pitting individual capital against other capitals and the 
individual worker against other workers. There is a Darwinian struggle 
for survival constantly at work, so individualism, conflict and 
competition become the driving forces of the system.
 
But these also create what Marx called the anarchy of the market and the 
inevitable tendency towards crises. Overproduction in terms of the 
market (even when human needs of all the people in the society need not 
be satisfied) is a characteristic feature simply because of the way 
individual capitals operate in the drive to generate more profit. As a 
result, the process of accumulation is never smooth. Rather, it is 
uneven and punctuated by crises. Partly, this is the result of the very 
success of capitalism in delivering more economic growth and 
technological advance.
 
These periodic crises are a way of resolving the contradictions inherent 
in the dynamics of capitalism, albeit in a sharp and possibly violent 
way. Because the underlying imbalance is typically one of overproduction 
(relative to demand, not need) such crises usually involve the 
destruction of a significant proportion of existing products and 
productive forces. For Marx, crises under capitalism are never purely 
“financial” or “monetary” – rather they reflect the real imbalances, 
disproportionalities and uneven development that are fundamental 
features of capitalist accumulation, even when they are expressed in 
financial terms. Marx did not talk about the rise to dominance of 
finance, but it can be anticipated from this progression, and 
financialisation also can be seen as an extension of capitalist 
processes into more and more areas of life.
 
A fundamental feature of the capitalist system that Marx described, and 
one that has complex social and philosophical underpinnings, is 
alienation. This does not refer to an isolated experience of an 
individual person’s feeling of estrangement from society or community, 
but to a generalised state of the broad mass of wage workers. Most 
simply put, it can be expressed as the loss of control by workers over 
their own work. This alienation of the workers means that they 
effectively cease to be autonomous human beings, because they cannot 
control their workplace, the products they produce, or even the way they 
relate to each other. Because this fundamentally defines their 
conditions of existence, this means that workers can never become 
autonomous and self-realised human and social beings under capitalism.
 
This alienation, combined with commodity fetishism, creates a peculiar 
kind of unfreedom – which is often not even widely noticed, because 
individual emancipation appears to result from “universal saleability”. 
So every living creature is effectively transformed into property and 
all social relations become transactionary.
 
Of course, there is much about capitalism that is not captured in this 
book: the role of unpaid labour, especially in social reproduction and 
care work within households; the relationship of the economic system 
with the natural environment, and so on. Even so, the strong 
contemporary resonance of many of these concepts means that it is not 
surprising that people still look to this somewhat forbidding book for 
insights and understanding.
-- 
Namib
---
Die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland (Karl Marx)
 
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 150 years of ‘Das Kapital’: How relevant is Marx today?
 
Bentornato Marx!
 
http://metilparaben.it/2017/08/generatore-automatico-di-interventi-di-diego-fusaro/
 
 
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
 
Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is 
often the manufacture of the mere liar.
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 
http://metilparaben.it/2017/08/generatore-automatico-di-interventi-di-diego-fusaro/
 
 
E cosa cazzo avrebbe a che fare quel fascista di Fusaro con Marx?


 E cosa cazzo avrebbe a che fare quel fascista di Fusaro con Marx?
 
Il fascismo è una delle più evolute forme di socialismo.


 E cosa cazzo avrebbe a che fare quel fascista di Fusaro con Marx?
 
Perchè non glielo dici personalmente? E' sul web da una vita (il sito 
filosofico.net
, che è stato il primo bignami di filosofia in italiano sul web, ovviamente in senso negativo, è roba sua). Ma è stato pure sui ng, è su twitter, fb, ovunque, ha un blogghe sul FQ...

 
http://metilparaben.it/2017/08/generatore-automatico-di-interventi-di-diego-fusaro
 
 
http://www.iassp.org/2017/02/08/aperitivo-categorico/
 
 
STRAROTFL

L'istituto e' spettacolare. Chi cazzo paga per farsi insegnare leadership politica da Buttiglione e Veltroni?

 L'istituto e' spettacolare. Chi cazzo paga per farsi insegnare leadership politica da Buttiglione e Veltroni?
 
"il segreto del nostro successo"

 Il fascismo è una delle più evolute forme di socialismo.
 
Degna del fusarobot :)
