M-TH: The three questions

[Chris Burford]

Hi Rakesh,

Your three questions

I too would like to have a 
go at the three questions you pose, and I appreciated
Russell's post. 

(Just one question to him why does
he suppose that for Althusser fetishism would undermine
a theory of "interpellation". Discussions we have
had on marxism-psych lead me to think there is congruence.
Anyway see my stab on the subject of fetishism below.)


>>
1. Why must capitalist relations of production take on the (fetishistic)
form of value relations between commodities?

2. What is the status of concepts like value and abstract labor? What kind
of abstractions are they?

3. Why does the law of value bring about a dynamic resulting in crisis
conditions?
<<

Re: 1. I would prefer to avoid the word "must". I assume there
is a dynamic, a probability that this particular pattern 
will reproduce itself successfully in the concrete conditions of the
material world. I am a little bit wary that the word "must" might
invite a logical necessity that is argued out only in the logical
abstract world. 


On the surface however the question is most directly
answered by saying that under capitalism a higher proportion than
ever before of economic activity takes the form of commodity 
production for sale in the market.

Concerning fetishism, I wonder if the concept needs dissecting.

One thread of it seems to me to be explicable in the 
developing school of thought, which I find interesting, of 
evolutionary psychology. This argues that the increased complexity
of human manipulation of nature involved an extension of complex
mental skills in handling the social interaction between individuals
by a process of anthroporphic metaphor. I start to think it is 
not accidental that some of the earliest artifacts that have been
preserved were objects of bodily adornment. It would be trite
to regard such beautiful objects as fetishistic, and yet they
must have been symbolic. To wear a beautifully decorated silver
pin must have crudely symbolised a whole range of wider social
meanings. The exquisitely delicate remains of a saxon burial
have just been unearthed in England. The bronze shield is 
now the second example only to be discovered with a boar's
motif engraved on it. It is assumed the owner was a local prince.


The moral criticism of modern consumer society
(and I assume, perhaps wrongly that Marx's concept is related to 
this) seems to me to be a criticism of the quality of human
relations when there is a ten-thousand fold surfeit of 
such precious articles.

Sorry, the other wing of the *marxist* fetishism argument is 
of course about how industrialised labour separates the craftworker
>from the direct appreciation of his/her craft. Ironically
modern management techniques promoting cooporate pride and
quality circles may partly compensate for this.


2. I agree the question "what kind of abstractions" is crucial



3. "Why does the law of value bring about a dynamic resulting in crisis
conditions?"

I take your point that it is very valuable if answers to this question
can be modelled in mathematics. But I am not sure that the intelligent
democrat necessarily needs mathematics to have an adequate comprehension
of this point. To risk sounding naive, let me have a stab at an
answer: 

    Because under conditions of capitalism, to remain 
stable capitalist enterprises must continue to accumulate 
ever increasing quantities of value. Although the increased
speed of circulation of money during boom times allows some
flexibility, sooner or later this comes up against the ceiling
that the total social labour time of any society is finite, 
and the ever increasing proportion going to capital reduces the
proportion available for the purchase of the commodities
that have been produced in greater abundance. 
Question 3 I would rather have rephrased  to emphasise the
iterative nature of this dynamic, because the crises get solved 
by the destruction or discounting of the stock of capital, but
unless this is done in a miraculously graduated way, or by 
a perfect balance of gentle inflation of the currency, it is highly
likely to cause the economy to judder into crisis in which
a significant proportion of the means of production are thrown
into idleness, with consequent highly negative effects on the
circulation of money and the availability of credit.



Regards 

Chris Burford





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