File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-07-26.024, message 91


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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