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.
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Not sure why you split your answer in two like this, seems like it’d make it harder to respond to the whole thing.
No, I think China
spoiler
is a big country in East Asia with a very big population.
Never contradicted this; I said repeatedly that the capitalist mode of production is the prevailing mode of production in our society. Prevailing in the context Marx uses it means domination, means supremacy. It does not mean being the only one that exists at any given moment, however, so all of my points wrt that still stand.
This is correct, Marx does not refer to capitalist societies in general much in Capital (as I said in my post, thank you for agreeing with me.). However to further clarify; Marx does discuss the capitalist mode of production very, very generally and abstractly (and with references to moments that are externalised from the capitalist mode of production i.e. performed in other modes of production so that the costs can be externalised.) As I said in my post, Marx does not examine “capitalist societies in general” because such societies don’t exist; the world we live in is one in which “the Capitalist mode of production prevails,” as Marx says.
Yes, I mentioned a similar point in my post, comparing mentions of “capitalism” to “capitalist mode of production,” so it should be clear that I didn’t deny Marx’s use of the term “capitalist.” ‘Capitalist’ is a different word from ‘capitalism,’ however. ‘Capitalism’ has very little (none that I can think of offhand at least) meaning apart from the abstracted system as a totality, my criticisms of it I talked about apply. ‘Capitalist’ has several meanings. One is the individual (i.e. someone engaged in capitalist production/circulation/etc), another (as appears in the previous bracket) is an adjective modifying the following noun (e.g. circulation), again, not the abstracted system as a totality. What this means is that the big abstract noun here is, for example, circulation (i.e. the way in which use values are moved between producers (but not including how they’re distributed after movement) which is modified by the adjective ‘capitalist’ to indicate that this is a specific mode of circulation, distinct from other mode of circulation.
I did not claim the capitalist mode of production (and circulation etc) could exist with other modes of production “forever,” I claimed that it exploits them for cheap use values when they exist alongside capitalist modes of production/circulation/etc. Capitalist production and circulation have a constant need to expand as you say, but it isn’t constant and it seizes onto new areas bit by bit in most cases, which leaves it still existing as capital snakes its tentacles into it and starts re-organising production, distribution, etc, along capitalist lines. For example, in the case of the fur trade in the interior of Canada, we can speak of European influence in territories with no direct contact with Europeans as the European demand for furs sees their neighbours seek them out in trade, which sees changes (quantitative) in terms of how much hunting is done (and for what), However this change has not yet changed the mod of production; the furs that are hunted by nations further inland are traded outwards towards Europe (which then included them in circuits of commodity capital accumulation in Europe at the time) in return for European goods. These European goods slowly replace self-made goods, creating a dependency. The continuing needs of Capital accumulation (i.e. growth) demand ever more furs, which leads to a need for production to be re-organised from whatever mode of production was previously used in favour of one that extracts the most from a given area per unit time (disregarding “externalities” like “who will repopulate the beavers/bison/etc”). If groups refuse to re-organise to accommodate the needs of European capital accumulation, they were faced with groups who would invading their territories (and eventually Europeans themselves, of course.) An introduction to the history of the colonisation of the plains is Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains. An introduction to the theory of the development of underdevelopment can be found in Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
This is the manifesto, yes. The manifesto is a pamphlet based on a catechism written by a 20something Engels in a hurry and then turned into something less Christian by a 29 year old Marx in the span of 2 weeks, so, so much stuff in it is contradicted by later Marx, or even better by later Marxist(s) who have done actual empirical research into the stuff Marx was only speculating from armchairs in ‘48 At best, he was speculating based on what early 19th century writers wrote; do you have faith in the empirical skills and good faith representations of history of early 19th century european writers high off their asses on liberal and/or christian ideology? I really, really don’t. If you do, go read Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Britain. It’s completely unrelated to this discussion, but he trashes British (and Broader European) scholarship in such a way that both shows the issues with uncritical regurgitation of sources, as well as provides insights into how to do actual investigation. Also go read Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, iirc (been a while since I read it) it talks about the issues of Eurocentrism, liberal ideology, etc in scholarship even in the 1990s. Reading Both makes it abundantly clear that liberal brainworms are endemic to liberal society (and (secular)Christian ones to secular(Christian) society). Marx was very good at identifying and criticising them, but, as we say “you are not immune to propaganda.”
With my criticism of the manifesto out of the way, yes, capitalist production (again, why are you saying ‘capitalism’) aims to expand, but not because it seeks to “draw everyone into circulation” (this is idealist, capitalist production ), rather because it aims to constantly profit which because of how relative surplus value works, demands constant growth which demands constant inputs of both labour and ‘raw materials’. Totalizing force is very early Marx, along with the idea that capitalist ‘development’ of the colonies would follow from imperialism (e.g. the 1853 New York Tribune Article on India, idk which month/week offhand). By 1857 (another New York Tribune article, you have the euro-communists being too proud to learn english to blame for the articles going so ignored in theoretical discussion) he has realised that capitalist production, rather than ‘developing’ the colonies in the same way, ‘developed’ them specifically to meet the needs of Capital accumulation. In India, what this meant was actually destroying their industry, and then increasing taxation on peasants (guess how they were producing stuff? Definitely wasn’t the capitalist mode of production).
It’s almost always a slow process tbh. Exceptions exist etc, but generally capital seizes onto stuff piece by piece, often without doing anything more than unequal exchange at first. At first the exchange is of the non-capitalist group’s excess use values for European goods. Europeans benefit from the ability to control what they bring and access to a ‘bigger picture’; they will almost always get better deals. Over time, the non-capitalist group’s production, while still not a capitalist mode of production will become more oriented towards the needs of european capital while slowly embracing capitalist ideas of consumption, distribution and circulation. It is only at the point when a system of capitalist consumption, distribution and circulation exist (i.e. that a wage labourer can obtain all their needs through commodity exchange) that the capitalist mode of production can begin. 1/3
No, other modes of production exist within capital and exchange with them as they are slowly consumed by capitalist production/circulation/etc. They don’t exist as autonomies, this is outdated scholarship (outdated even by late Marx people rly need to stop recommending the manifesto just read Capital he really worked hard on it plz ppl read Capital). Even today there are peasant communities who hold their land collectively, produce goods collectively, distribute them collectively, etc, but they are folded into larger global systems that demand they buy fertilisers and GMO seeds which means they need to produce for exchange value (and this transformation warps the mode of production and slowly changes it into a capitalist-approximating mode of production but not the exact same thing bc capital does not remake the colonies in its own image; it remakes the colonies in the image of underdevelopment to serve the needs of the imperial core). There are also peasant communities that aim to become more self-sufficient, as you’re describing, but this is generally motivated not by unwillingness to trade with neighbours (historically peasants actually do travel in their area and exchange goods) but rather because they’d like to stay the fuck out of the capitalist hellworld europe made. I don’t have many sources for stuff on peasants offhand because I learnt it from a class with a author who’s involved (afaik he goes back to India in the Summers and uses his research funding to research the enemy (i.e. multinationals and such)) in a peasant struggle. This class looked over the history of development of underdevelopment and imperialism, particularly in relation to peasants and other non-capitalist modes of production. Some good books that look at similar themes (but these are NOT citations for the above) are Kapoor and Jordan’s “Research, Political Engagement and Dispossesion,” “Open Veins of Latin America* by Galeano, Gordon & Webber’s Blood of Extraction, Engler’s Canada In Africa, and Patnaik & Moyo’s Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era. For an interesting, though less related bc it’s not about peasants, look at how the process of destroying the AES mode of production in Poland, Dunn’s Privatizing Poland is very interesting (though with some bad takes) read. Process of pauperization is different from this; you’re conflating the process of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ (accumulation by dispossession) with subsumtion.
For clarity; are you proposing that, the moment the nehiyawak traded a beaver pelt to a european on the banks of Hudson Bay, the entire nehiyaw mode of production was “destroyed” instantly? Are you unaware that this process took centuries? Are you unaware that this process was not one step, but several, preceding at times slowly and at times more quickly? Are you unaware that this process proceed not in one direction, but dialectically in a conflict between modes of existence, and that at some times the conflict leaned one way and sometimes another? I suggest you read Mays An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States it goes into the conflicts in the American context. Also recommend Cree Narrative Memory by McLeod as examination of that conflict from the position of the colonised.
No more than talking about a “capitalist mode of production” implies individual factories are their own modes of production. I am calling the widespread, generalised production of crops on land ‘owned’ collectively by a family, wherein the products are distributed (excepting whatever is extracted in rent/taxes/etc) among that family and consumed by that family with the main mode of circulation between families and villages often (but not always) taking the form of specific gifts, services, etc, rather than money and exchange value. On the Origins of English Individualism has a good description in the opening chapter of my criteria, though I disagree with some of the book’s later conclusions (and especially it’s framing of individualism as good).
Centralisation of capital is “concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.” I.e. it is capitalists expropriating each other. You mean to say they are an independent class of capitalist-farmers? This would require them to 1. own land 2. produce on that land in the capitalist mode (i.e. with wage labour) and then 3. distribute the products in the capitalist mode (i.e. owner gets the products, wage labourers get none of the products (they get wage)) and then 4. consume (whether productively or unproductively) the products as they choose. To my knowledge, before the post-2008 neoliberal landgrabs (still ongoing afaik) in Africa, there were actually still peasants owning their lands as families in Kenya, but selling their goods to big capitalists, paying rents/taxes to government or local authorities. To my knowledge (I still haven’t read We Feed the World yet but I’ve read papers in that class which made similar points so I feel relatively comfortable gesturing towards it for further reading) a lot of our (global north) food is actually produced in this manner (in the global south), even today. Family ownership of land (not “father owns and then son inherits”, actual familial ownership) is not the same as capitalist ownership; for one it often does not involve the right to alienate that land, hence why much of the landgrabbing is heavily resisted. This is not the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist that Marx defines as the centralisation of capital in chapter 28 of Volume One; it is the process of ‘so called primitive accumulation’ he discusses in part 8.
This isn’t true as an absolute (or even general) rule, historically, but that would be digressing too far (and I’d have to get books from the library to check citations which I don’t feel like doing).
No. Domestic production is not wage labour and it’s not performed to produce exchange value, it’s performed to create a use value (labour power, in the final analysis) i.e. it is not carried out in the capitalist mode of production (which uses wage labour and produces for exchange value particularly surplus value). This is the term used by Delphy in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression; her use of it is to show how much labour is done in the household (for free, generally by women) to produce the use values that the capitalists appropriate gratis (similar argument to Marx’s discussion of capitalist appropriation of nature as “free,” basically) as a contribution to marxist-feminist theory. She also does some very important theoretical work in the book with what class means. Her book is not a rejection of class struggle, it is an examination of a form of exploitation Marx was too high on patriarchal ideology to notice. Another book I’d advise reading to get a better grip on the production capital doesn’t want you thinking about is More Work for Mother by Cowan; it examines the domestic labour process from a similar standpoint to Marx’s examination of the industrial labour process in Chapter 13-15. Not going to respond to the other points in this other than to point out that, for expressing “I don’t know modern theory, please explain what these terms mean” you sounded very aggressive here. I would advise, when engaging in good faith with other leftists, you try and actually ask questions and clarify rather than act like a liberal on twitter who’s just looking to start trouble for fun.
“Feudal society.” Friend, the same criticism I applied to ‘capitalist society’ or ‘capitalism’ applies here. “Feudal society” would be literally everything in whatever society you’re talking about, and so it would include merchant-capitalists, but this does not mean merchant capitalists are operating using the feudal mode of production; the merchant-capitalists are not land-owners, they do not get anything from the peasants on that land without trading for it (i.e. mediated through exchange value i.e. not feudal mode of circulation) because they are not land owners.The entire structure of feudal mode of production based on relationships and services explicitly defined in qualitative terms (as discussed by Marx in Volume One), merchant-capital operates very differently from that, even in this era. It has to interact with feudal mode, yes, the individual merchant capitalist can wear multiple hats, the individual merchant capitalist moves between different modes of circulation production distribution consumption because, in all societies, there exist multiple means of all of those things. In their role as merchant, however, the merchant would only be doing merchant things. If he manages to buy land, marry into the aristocracy and kept being a merchant while receiving tribute from peasants on that land, he would be engaging in two (many more actually bc domestic would be here too) modes of production at the same time, which is how it usually is (although from what I know, historically if they could become a noble, merchants would stop doing merchant things) in reality. In Capital Marx explicitly says, very early on (before he’s even discussed the working day), that he is only considering individuals in their roles in the capitalist mode of production; this is why he brackets out personal consumption and brackets out so much complexity (often explicitly saying he is doing so because Marx was not trying to describe reality, he was trying to describe the capitalist mode of production which is the prevailing mode of production in our society which means it has the largest influence on the structure of our society, but it is not the only structure (even the totality of volume 3 (production, circulation, distribution and credit) explicitly brackets out everything falling outside of that from the immediate analysis, he does not say they do not exist.
Yes, this is partially correct. You’re neglecting the role of the cities in producing manufactured goods, however. Many peasants don’t make all of their own tools; generally they trade with other people, whether peasants in their or other villages or travelling merchants or some other such way, but they usually do have a lotta stuff that was produced outside their particular family (which is the basic unit of the peasant mode of production as I define it, production and consumption united in the family).
Yeah my bad here. The phrasing was very bad I think. I mean to say that, when possible, capitalists would prefer to appropriate use values without providing what would be (in the capitalist mode of production/etc) an equivalent exchange value as possessed by the use value. I.e. they would prefer to take stuff and pay less, or even nothing for the use value. One example is something “furnished by Nature gratis”; i.e. the ideological belief of capitalists that they can consume the natural world with reckless abandon because it has no value unless altered by labour and as such can be appropriated for free. Similarly, as Delphy shows in Close to Home and Cowan shows in More Work for Mother, female coded/domestic labour is appropriated gratis, allowing for the production of use values with no “value” in terms of the capitalist mode of production. Another example is how the commute to work gets labelled as outside of your labour by your boss despite being a clear and necessary part of getting your work done; they’ve placed that labour, the labour of reproducing your labour power at the till at 5 AM, outside of the capitalist mode of production so that it becomes ‘natural’ that the commute is completed with no need to compensate the worker for the transportation.
Prices never ever equals value, it’s a reflection of exchange value which is the value of the labour that would be required to reproduce the commodity in given condition. Marx is very clear about this so I’m unsure where the confusion is coming from. Value can and does differ significantly from exchange value and price; that’s the basis of relative surplus value which is the basis of the constant search for new technologies. Capital not controlling production is irrelevant to the functioning of commercial capital; the basis of capitalist production is the profits from commercial capital and accumulation by dispossession. You don’t seem to realise that medieval and earlier societies can and did have different prices for given commodities at different cities, towns and villages based on the value required to produce (production includes transportation see vol2 ch6) that commodity in that place and time. A good book on how medieval English markets worked, for example, is Masschaele’s Peasants, Merchants and Markets (although i would disagree with classifying the peasants in this book as peasants in terms of using the peasant mode of production/etc) 3/3