From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 09:56:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Summary of rts2, pp. 12-14, and the ways of acting of capital State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 117777 Michael Sprinker Professor of English & Comp Lit Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 15-Jul-1996 09:42am EDT FROM: MSPRINKER TO: Hans Ehrbar ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU ) Subject: Re: Summary of rts2, pp. 12-14, and the ways of acting of capital I don't want to side-track the discussion into a technical dispute in marxology, but I do wish to raise one point in that vein: to wit, it's no good, in my view, citing the GRUNDRISSE against CAPITAL. The former is a "rough draft" (if I recall the German title) only, and much that it says was either rejected outright or greatly modified when Marx came to compose CAPITAL. I think the distinction between money and capital is one of those instances where the mature Marx insisted on a distinction that the early Marx would have been more loose about. But to the more important matter of the functioning of natural laws. Yes, as a good Bhaskarian, I understand that a law can operate without anyone recognizing its existence, and that is no less compelling for people not understanding or even knowing about it. But social laws are somewhat different, I believe, >from natural laws. The latter operate more or less eternally (leaving aside the nice problem of whether the expansion of the universe is modifying the physical laws of nature): Emc2 governed was as much a law in Aristotle's time as it was in ours, even though no one in Greek antiquity was aware of the fact. But the necessity for capital to expand is only a law under capitalism; it was not a necessity when feudalism dominated production in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, nor will it, ex hypothesi, be one with the advent of socialism. The last points I made about the Second International and reformism are the relevant ones: if one holds theoretically that people always desire money, then, as Bernstein et al. believed, some aspects of capitalism are more or less eternal, and that socialism is merely a modification of the distribution mechanisms in bourgeois society. Marx and Engels thought differently, that communism would usher in a whole new way of life, with utterly new productive relations which would not require human beings to be grasping, hoarding, selfish. In short, we won't all be cursed by the desire for money after the revolution, but that is to take the notion of social revolution rather seriously. M&E may have been wrong, of course, but since we have no experience of what life would be like in a world without capitalism, only local instances of its temporary retreat, it's much too soon to judge whether they were or not. Michael Sprinker
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