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 No.5969

So I know what capital is but what gives capital it’s characteristics? And if capitalism is capital reproducing itself in ever expanding processes, then what is it? Does this mean that capital only producing commodities which is what the end product of capital is? No this can’t be because that would be engaging in commodity fetishism. If generalized commodity production is then a phenomena of capitalism then in appearance capitalism looks like a world of exchange values and use values in which is the limits of bourgeois economy because on the surface commodities seem to rule life. But if commodities are nothing but a phenomena and nothing but something taking place in the surface then what is actually capital doing?

If the subjective essence of capital is labor then the product or the commodity appears as the central issue and generalized commodity production the fundamental issue of capitalism. But what then is the objective essence of capital and capitalism?

Capital could only be capitalism if it reproduces itself and so the true essence of capitalism is a social relation. And even more fundamental is the conditions for such a social relation to exist. Predicate to the existence of capital is the deprivation of the means of production from the immediate producer whether that be the land, tools, machinery etc. but that’s not the only deprivation, capital itself must be deprived of labor itself: people. And so the fundamental conflict appears to be dead labor vs living labor and those two being deprived of the other. Capital (dead labor) is useless without the labor process (living labor) but in order for capital to be capital it must continue to keep itself separate from living labor and living labor separate from it, with commodity production being the mediator between the two. And so the true essence of capitalism is capital reproducing a social relation continuously in increasing size. So if capitalism’s objective is to reproduce this social relation why do so many people take commodity production as the true essence of capitalism. Or “changing hands” into that of the state? If the point of communism is to abolish this relation of production to a production in common then it follows that capital will seize to exist in contradiction between dead and living labor. We have seen historically that it doesn’t matter which hands capital is put in, it still exists as capital and reproduces capital relations, so what is it with the misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism and it’s social relations and taking commodity production as the fundamental problem and nothing but a mediator that exists in the surface?
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 No.5970

>But what then is the objective essence of capital and capitalism?
Fossilized labour son
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 No.5971

>>5970
Stalin is my favorite corporate CEO.
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 No.6161

>>5969
That seems to effectively be saying capitalism will cease to exist when commodity production ceases to exist. The split between dead and living labor is in the commodification of labor’s product. You end that commodification, ie you end private appropriation of the product, then you’ve ended commodity production. You end exchange of commodities, dead labor can’t be hanging over us in the way it does now. But it’s only a part of the story, you haven’t necessarily ended surplus value extraction unless you end class. Value didn’t dictate the economy before capitalism, though it existed in limited commodity markets. But surplus extraction still existed, and it wasn’t based on the commodity markets. So class society is separate from commodity production, ending commodity production isn’t ending exploitation. But conversely, ending class exploitation isn’t ending commodity production, as exploitation is ended in the worker co-op form, but commodity production is maintained. So value still regulates human social reproduction.

These two things are in relation to each other. Commodity production is the means by which class exploitation occurs. Commodity production is downstream of exploitation, it is produced out of a historical searching for opportunity to exploit a surplus, and it was produced out of the given historical circumstances of that searching. Ending class exploitation opens the door to ending commodity production, though likely not all at once. Commodity production is a tool to exploit a surplus, so if you end the class doing the exploiting, the tool is only as valuable as it is useful to the continued existence of the classless society. Hence, worker cooperatives are a transitionary social form. Commodity production may still produce private incomes for classless producers, and therefore there will be divisions, but as long as the classless producers have relatively equal political access, then the private incomes of the few are subordinate to the interests of the many, which by nature of markets are always going to outnumber the wealthier few. However, the issue with capitalist social relations in this respect is that the rich few are a social class that has dispersed dictatorships within the economy. Political participation is limited to the state, which is actually an oligarchy of the private dictatorships, empowered by surplus extraction to reach stratospheric heights of wealth differentials. Such differentials are not possible without the class distinction that produces a surplus. So the classless producers can actually exert a more effective political control over all of society, despite the much more modest wealth differentials that would still result.

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