Re: Fictitious Capital Website (related ideas) Reply to Louis

[MARIPOWER716@xxxxxxx]

i know this has been much discussed on the list before, but i am
slowly getting the message.

in equation-speak:

    commodity production/profit = wage-labour + inexpensive materials

and i gather that the abilty to fulfill the materials side of the
equation utilizing colonial/imperial tactics then was present RIGHT AT
THE INCEPTION of the capitalist mode. whereas its somehow come to be
thought that modern colonialism and imperialism arose only AFTER
certain capitalist countries got too big for their own britches
(national boundaries).

but when Lou mentions gold and silver, its hard to know how that fit
in with early commodity production.  were the capitalists that hard up
for a common currency? or was it simply stolen loot used to jump start
new factories?

les schaffer


Comment.

Brother, it is I who is slow. After a couple decades it became clear what
Marx meant by the bourgeoisie creates its own gravedigger.

>commodity production/profit = wage-labour + inexpensive materials<

Well, commodity production arose before capitalism - bourgeois property
relations, and this means that real flesh and blood individual producers began
exchanging articles of consumption to get from another person something they did
not make themselves.  Individual producers really mean individuals and these
individuals really owned their tools and instruments or "productive forces."

In the early days profits as such did not have the same meaning - imbued with
the small social substance, as profits today, because what entered into
exchange was a very limited amount of items of consumption - use values, and the
field of play was not dominated by a mass of society divorced from the land
producing things to be exchanged. Production was for consumption and only
incidentally - or in a limited manner, entered the realm of exchange. To 
"profit" did
not have the same meaning as today because there really is no thievery
involved in a fair exchange, even when you cannot determine what is fair.

Nor did there exist an independent form of value serving as a means to make
all products created exchangeable for one another.

Even the limited "skilled workers" - artisans, making gobbles, clay tablets
to write on, chairs and personal effects and even creating spices for the King,
while the traders carved out trade routes, were in the main paid in a form of
wealth connected to the land and ownership of land, even when coins existed.
Everything is connected - interactive, with all the features of an era and
epoch. The coins allowed exchange but not the dominance of ownership rights in
the sense of bourgeois property and the universal exchange of everything.

Incredible historical forces played themselves out and one of them can be
observed as the transformation in the primary form of wealth from land to real
money - gold and silver, or as Engels calls it - movable wealth, and not simply
the paper that would result form Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.
Money was once "real" - meaning that - that, . . . . operating as money -
money man, had value (worth) and as such involved real people doing real work to
mine gold and silver.  Value is the socially necessary amount of labor time of
a thousand slaves working "X" amount of hours in the gold and silver mines to
produce "X" amount of gold. Someone has to capture or negotiate to get the
slaves and this means they have to have a ship that is built by someone to get 
to
the areas of slave catching  - social labor in formation, and the mission has
to be financed by someone because men will not travel the sea and risk life
and limb without the promise of a better life. In High School the circuit of
slavery we were taught was "slaves-gold-liquor-slaves-gold-liquor" but more was
involved.

A thousand little questions make up the issue and having a ship means nothing
without navigation or science. Science and navigation means a center of
learning and someone has to build the buildings or centers of education. 
.Someone
has to design the building  and create a plan to organize all the materials or
just write down all the materials needed for construction.

To negotiate to get slaves means that you must have something to offer that
sets the basis for negotiations to take place or force. That something is
commodities or products of consumption that the other man does not have.  Or
superior overwhelming force as death, - many will sue for peace to preserve a
civilization, and the prospect of death in itself can inspire he who has a
reputation for being uninspired. In other words in the most naked meaning, 
imperialism
is the export of a superior mode of production to a less developed area.
Imperialism grows out of the development of the division of labor in society and
the consequent development of the means of production and not the minds of men
as fundamentally or abstraction.

Gold and silver is not your "bird nest on the ground."  You cannot get lucky
and more than less pick up a gold mine, like one pick up eggs for the
occasional bird nest that falls on the ground, leaving its eggs unbroken. Sure, 
anyone
- except me, can get lucky and find a gold nugget.  You can of course
discover a gold mine - because you know where to look and know what real gold 
looks
like (accumulated knowledge passed on to you through books or family), and then
someone has to work to extract the gold. The other recourse is to take an
existing supply of gold through force or larceny by trickery.  To take by force
means you has superior firepower - armaments, or what is the same a superior
mode of production or fighting capacity, which generally equals superior mode of
production. Larceny by trickery means the person you engage has a rough set
of equivalents in their possession to make the object of exchange make sense.
Or you cannot fools him on the basis of trade - only kill him.


>Commodity production/profit = wage-labour + inexpensive materials<
means an entire historical process has and is in process within pinpointing
the shape of production.

Wage labor is only incidental in the life of society during a time gone by
and no (social) man as part of a family unit could conceive of or had a desire
to hire himself out for wages - except soldiers and then the primary form of
wealth was land and not "wages," and/or until a certain division of labor took
place in society and hurled - literally, a mass of men on the world stage as
ready made laborers, more than less detached in a certain way from family,
friends, tools and the land - mother earth, whose spontaneous bounty (produce),
more or less inhibited exchange and the intellectual desire and physical motive
to be a "wage laborer."  "Something" always has to happen to make something
else happen.  A thousand and one things happen at the same time but generally
something changes in the material power of production occur that makes social
revolution take place.

The transition in the form of wealth from land to gold and silver is
historically profound. Why this happen and how it happened and its impact is 
different
questions. The lust for gold and the key to immortality - "the fountain of
youth," and unlocking the mysterious of existence were powerful forces that
transformed and gave modern imperialism its "modern." Imperialism was already
there because we are taking about the export of a superior mode of production 
to a
less developed area or the material result of a superior mode of production
to a less developed area.

>Commodity production/profit = wage-labour + inexpensive materials<
means an entire historical process is working itself out. What is it that
makes raw materials "inexpensive materials" has to be understood. In a few words
" if it is inexpensive to you it is inexpensive to me," if all things are more
than less equal. We are dealing with a process at the point of transition and
gold and silver were very important.

 "Capitalist production only then really begins, as we have already seen,
when each individual capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number
of laborers; when consequently the labour-process is carried on an extensive
scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of products. A greater number of
laborers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you will,
in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity
under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and
logically, the starting-point of capitalist production. With regard to the mode 
of
production itself, manufacture, in its strict meaning, is hardly to be
distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the handicraft trades of the guilds,
otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one 
and
the same individual capital. The workshop of the medieval master
handicraftsman is simply enlarged."
"Thus the laws of the production of value are only fully realised for the
individual producer, when he produces as a capitalist, and employs a number of
workmen together, whose labour, by its collective nature, is at once stamped as
average social labour." (Capital Vol. 1 Chapter 13)
This is to say the role of gold and silver as money drives forward commodity
production and this really accelerates the break up of feudalism or landed
property as the primary form of wealth. Imperial conquest already existed. Gold
and silver are movable forms of wealth and land is not. As movable forms of
wealth with value - some one has to mine the gold and mint the coins, this money
is important because the means for universal exchange has to exist for
capitalist commodity production to emerge from simple commodity production. The
development of capital already presupposes the full development of the exchange
process (exchange- value) of commodities and consequently its independent
existence as money. Yes, gold and silver were extremely important as a store of 
value
or an independent form of value.

Capitalist commodity production - a bourgeois property relations, emerged on
this basis. What is called the transition from feudalism to capitalism no
longer makes sense in that form of presentation. The transition - no matter how 
it
takes place or how the actors caught up in the process appear, is from landed
property relations where the primary form of wealth is land to bourgeois
property relations where the primary form of wealth becomes money possession.

Melvin P.