Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 11:25:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marcus Wilker <marcus1-AT-vcn.bc.ca>
Subject: Re: surplus value



What do you think of this reading of "those pages"?

D&g grant two seemingly contradictory arguments.  First, the capitalist
argument:  interest is natural; surplus value has nothing to do with the
exploitation of workers (e.g., capitalists could just as happily "exploit" 
non-human machines, or "exploit" in a merely formal way)--this argument is
pushed to the limit where it must be conceded that the profit the company
makes, and the place on the company's balance sheet where wages are
inscribed, is measured in something completely different than the dollars
that the workers earn (the occassional formal translations from one to the
other are thus raised as a question).  But also the marxist argument: 
captial's surplus value derives from the exploitation of workers.  Thus
d&g insist on the marxist connection, but grant that it is a connection
that capital, in its pure self-relation, has no inherent reason to make. 
Instead, this connection is the work of a vast machinery of
anti-production that polices capitalism from within its very production: 
human machines are constantly put to work in the exploited positions of
capitalist production.  The "point", then, is to insist on a very
different cause of exploitation:  not the pure surplus value of the
capitalist profit, but the anti-productive, regulating, policing machinery
by which human desire is inscribed in it.