I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
Volume two of Capital explicitly deals with money-capital and commodity capital; i.e. merchant Capital. Marx says: “we shall only be considering the merchant as capitalist, and merchant’s capital, later on” (Vol2p209) and he does so extensively in vol2 and vol3. The focus of the first four chapters, which examine money-, productive- and commodity- capital separately, and then as a whole (although leaving out money-capital for the most part in volume2). The circuits of capital are all necessary, and the existence of developed merchant capital is a prerequisite for industrial capital; unless there are wholesale merchants to buy your mass produced goods and do the work of selling them, you need to do that yourself which interrupts the production process. Marx actually goes in great detail as to the elements of capitalist circulation (including merchant-capitalists) that are required in order for even small scale capitalist production to begin, let alone industrial capitalist production. Marx is very explicit in referring to the merchant as possessing capital, performing capital accumulation, hiring wage labourers who surplus value can be extracted from (Marx explicitly says this on pages 209-210 of vol2).
This isn’t accurate to Volume One. In chapter 13 Marx details extensively the division of labour in pre-capitalist modes of production. He extensively examines the history of division of labour, from Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Middle Ages to the 1700s to prevailing of the capitalist mode of production. In chapter 13 and 14 Marx further shows that in the beginning of manufacturing, the peasant modes of production were first formally and then real-ly subsumed into capitalist production/circulation/distribution/consumption; the agent of this subsumtion is a capitalist; and you’ve been hoodwinked by reified bourgeois abstractions into thinking that “capitalism” as an abstract system exists and into thinking that capitalism is when wage labour and division of labour.
All productive capital is capital, but not all capital is productive capital. Vols 2 and 3 are about commodity and money capital, respectively. You have a warped view of production. In Marx’s terms, literally everything is production, even resting and relaxation is production that reproduces a labour power. Marx’s constant, repetitious reminders that when he is examining production, productivity, he is talking specifically about production that is within the capitalist mode of production and is productive in the sense that it produces surplus value (vol 1, p644) need to be kept in mind in every line of text following, because unless he says otherwise he is assuming that you will see “productive labour” and understand he means “labour that produces not only the value of the labour power (which is different from the value of labour (labour doesn’t have a value)) but also surplus value” following, because Marx is accepting capitalist terms for sake of argument. Law of value applies to all societies where the capitalist mode of production predominates, it doesn’t matter if a particular bit of capital has entered capitalist production in the last week or 2 seconds ago, it’s value is determined by the average socially necessary amount of labour required to produce that commodity in the place and time it is found (this is why commodities may increase or decrease in value based on location). Products being sold at their values is a very easy, but critical misunderstanding. Products are not sold at their values; the price of a commodity is an approximation of its exchange value which is a reflection of value which is determined by the amount of labour embodied in it. (And it needs to be noted this is a capitalist mode of production definition of value, not something that exists constantly outside of history. Other societies have had other laws of value, there have been variations in capitalist laws of value.) Prices of production is very, very different from embodied labour time; it appears in volume 2 as Marx is talking about how capitalists view production. He argues that the capitalists view “profit” (their term for what marx calls surplus value) as arising from the difference between price/cost of production and how much the commodity is worth, and then they pat themselves on the back saying the profit comes from them making the sale rather than from the production process.
I don’t know much about the history of Arabia so I cannot speak to the specifics, but again, you should be thinking in Marx’s terms (i.e. in terms of modes of production, circulation, distribution and consumption) rather than in these idealist terms of “capitalist society” “capitalism” etc. So the question should be, where the Arab merchants capitalists (Yes, see above writings on merchant-capital) and then asking to what extent their mode of circulation and fledging capitalist productions had spread through Arabia? Sounds tedious and academic and not useful for praxis? It is, you should be reading about local news and your own government’s actions and analysing the people doing oppression instead of researching any of this, this is not going to change anything.
Would like to know where he says this; it’s not in Volume One at least. Marx mentions Rome only twelve times, none saying this. With regards to slavery in Rome, Marx says “The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves.” This is not a “most of the time” statement, this is not a claim to knowledge of how societies “should” or “usually” develop, because by the time he wrote Volume One Marx had mostly abandoned colonialist and eurocentric ideas of unilinear progress, in terms of History Volume One is concerned with the arisal of the industrial capitalist mode of production in England, he is not writing a general history of the world or of how things “should” “normally” “progress.” 2/2
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The words “subsumed” “subsumed” “subsumption” don’t appear in volume 2, but if you could provide me with chapters and page numbers I’d be happy to be proven wrong. As far as the substance of this argument, I’d advise re-reading chapter 10 of volume two and noting that he constantly refers to the merchant as possessing capital, holding capital, using capital (i.e. as a capitalist.) I could be wrong on the definition of commercial capitalist, but that isn’t a key foundation of my argument so I’ll accept that merchant-capital and commercial-capital are different for purposes of this discussion. I’m also unsure what subsumption would mean in relation to the law of value; when Marx uses the term in volume one, it’s with regards to the subsumption of labour into capitalist production.
Rate of profit isn’t equalised in the industrial capitalist production of England that Marx was examining in Capital — what makes you think the rate of profit would need to be equal for a ‘feudal society’’s merchants to be capitalists? If the rate of profit were equal, it would be impossible to generate relative surplus value; the drive of capitalist production towards increasing the share of constant capital in production to the detriment of the rate of profit would not exist; the entire tendency of the rate of profit to fall rests on there being differing rates of profit both between and within industries.
See above, not sure why you think rate of profit is equal, if it were the mode of production would stop functioning.
I started vol3, but the incompleteness of it made me take a break that I haven’t returned from yet. Anyway, I searched vol3 and I think this is what you are talking about: “Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands for a system of robbery, so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping slaves, and colonial conquest; as in Carthage, Rome, and later among the Ventians, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.” This is more absolute than I thought it would be (which i will justify to myself with this being a rough draft written relatively early compared to the other parts of Capital), but I’d note the phrase “when it holds a position of dominance.” This isn’t a statement about the nature of merchant capital generally, it is a statement about the nature of merchant capital (all capital in my view, but the statement is specifically merchant capital) when it holds a position of dominance (i.e. not in Medieval England, etc, (although slavery very much was an institution at the time, not the dominant one tho)).
Friend, I’ve talked extensively about why you shouldn’t be using the term ‘capitalism’ in a serious theoretical discussion. I haven’t studied the history of the Colonisation of South America to respond to the specifics, but do you have any books I could read on the topic? (Not Open Veins of Latin America, I’ve already read that). If/when I get around to reading it and it shows you’re correct, I’ll try to remember to update you. The original point you were making (in the comment i was responding to) with regards to merchant capitalists was “a merchant is a different thing than a capitalist, merchants don’t produce anything for once[sic]...” You seem to be lying about what you said. This isn’t comradely behaviour, this doesn’t bring us closer to an understanding of the existing conditions— it obfuscates them. Ignorance helps nobody.
As I said, I don’t know enough about Arabia to respond to specifics. Do you have anything you’d recommend reading on the topic of ‘Ancient Arabia’ (this seems awfully vague, but i’m assuming its jargon specific to the field.)? I’m always looking to learn more. I don’t particularly care to discuss what this other person was saying; I have enough to discuss with what you’ve said. I would note though, that ‘capitalism’ 200-300 years ago looked incredibly different from ‘capitalism’ today, just as, if we define these older societies dominated by capitalist modes of circulation as ‘capitalism’ (we define the abstractions, they aren’t god-given), we would expect them to look very different, only keeping in common the laws(tendencies) of capitalist circulation/production/etc.
Vol 1 ch.19 “Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of realized labour, with living labour would either do away with the law of value which **only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production…” This means that, before the capitalist law of value developed on the basis of capitalist production there were other means of determining values, unless you’re assuming no values at all existed prior to the development of capitalist production (in which case capitalist production couldn’t develop, because without capitalist circulation wage labourers cannot find their means of sustenance at market and pay for them, i.e. wage labour isn’t possible (and that’s why people lose their land slowly, often even after they work for wages for the majority of their food, you still see people gathering stuff from forests, growing stuff in gardens, until they lose that too). Capitalist law of value has changed over time imo, though I could be misunderstanding what the term means. As I was using it here, by variation in laws of value I was thinking most concretely of the (slow, too slow, insufficient) increase in the value of women’s labour. I don’t care much about the definitional battle, so if that’s called something different, I don’t really care much.
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