tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post3518311098526572513..comments2024-03-27T09:14:27.496+00:00Comments on All That Is Solid ...: Racism and Capitalist ExploitationPhilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298147857234479278noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-69131008304758111772017-08-04T13:31:23.150+01:002017-08-04T13:31:23.150+01:00Phil, Thanks for the plug. I will be publishing t...Phil, Thanks for the plug. I will be publishing the third Volume of my 21st Century Translation of Marx's Capital, hopefully by the end of this month. I will shortly after be publishing the three volumes in one book.<br /><br />Next year I will be publishing Theories of Surplus Value, and I am currently in the planning stage of a five book work on Imperialism, starting with the development of commodity production and exchange, unequal exchange, and colonialism.Boffyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-39613857038069248402017-08-04T10:18:59.579+01:002017-08-04T10:18:59.579+01:00Hi James, I recommend checking out Boffy's blo...Hi James, I recommend checking out Boffy's blog. He has written very extensively on Marx's Capital and has a greater familiarity with the material than I do.<br /><br />As for primers, you're more than welcome to have a flick through the pages at the top of this blog - there's stuff on Marxism in there you might find useful. I'd also recommend Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, which remains the best introduction to Marx I've come across.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06298147857234479278noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-37153857358617004282017-08-01T12:17:53.157+01:002017-08-01T12:17:53.157+01:00Reading this material requires a lot of knowledge ...Reading this material requires a lot of knowledge of difficult material. Any chance of a series of primers for ill-educated Carbynistas?James Semplehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01680969214027391169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-67603692683352711432017-07-31T09:49:17.058+01:002017-07-31T09:49:17.058+01:00There are a few minor errors in relation to the de...There are a few minor errors in relation to the description of the formation of profit, but only minor so I won't waste space on them.<br /><br />Let me deal with other points.<br /><br />1. Engels, in Anti-Duhring, sets out that the ability of any ruling class to extract surplus labour is not based upon force. No amount of force can extract a surplus where the level of economic development/productivity does not make such a surplus possible. It is the development of the material conditions of production, and productive relations that create the conditions for those same relations to be reproduced. Force is used to keep a ruling class in power, when those underlying relations, including the dominant ideas that flow from them, break down.<br /><br />2. The daily struggle of labour and capital over the level of wages, does not represent class struggle, as Marx sets out in Value, Price and Profit, and as Lenin also sets out. Such struggles are merely industrial, sectional struggles. In fact, as they set out by means of such struggles over wages, the workers are socialised into bourgeois ideas, the basic idea being of the need to sell their labour-power as a commodity at the highest price, like any other commodity-owner. The slogan should rather be abolition of the wages system.<br /><br />3. The black US Marxist sociologist, Oliver Cromwell Cox, I think has it right in his book "Race, Class and Caste." He argues that modes of production prior to capitalism had no need of racism, because they were built on ideologies that accepted that inequality was the natural order of things, and that society was organised in ranks down from God, to the Sovereign and ultimately the serf or slave. Capitalism needed racism, because it unlike these previous modes of production is based upon the bourgeois notion of "Egalite, Fraternite, Liberte". So, how then explain the lack of those things for millions of colonial slaves other than by a claim that they are in some way sub-human?<br /><br />4. However, those colonial empires were actually as Meikins-Wood suggests actually developed not by industrial capital but by Mercantilism, i.e. the symbiotic relation that existed for some time between feudalism and merchant/financial capital. Merchant capital and interest-bearing capital are based upon unequal exchange, Buy Low/Sell High. That was the principle that colonialism was based on.<br /><br />5. Industrial capital, which became dominant only in the 19th century, stands in opposition to these early forms of capital, as well as feudalism. It does not extract profit on the basis of unequal exchange, and indeed itself suffers from it at the hands of the merchant, money lender and landlord who bite into its profits. Industrial capital creates its profit in the production process itself, and increasingly it does so, via the creation of relative surplus value, by driving up the level of social productivity.<br /><br />Racism and other forms of bigotry actually stand in the way of industrial capital achieving its aims of maximising the production of surplus value, and capital accumulation. It inherits them from these past modes of production.<br /><br />Its no wonder, then that the vast reservoirs of bigotry in today's society, whether in the shape of Trump's supporters, or with Brexit in the US, comes not from the bourgeoisie, but from sections of the working-class, and of the small capitalist, as well as the declassed layers who still look backwards to the glory days of Empire.Boffyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com