[PEN-L:27404] capitalism and thiefdom

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: capitalism and thiefdom

[was: FW: [PEN-L:27401] Re: Re: Re: Capitalist thievery inhibits capitalist recovery]

Chris wrote:
>>Capital is not theft in marxist terms.

Joanna wrote: >But, doesn't it start out with "primitive capitalist
accumulation" -- that is, theft? And, when we look at more recent
capitalist formations: eastern europe, FSU, as well as the global
privatization of social "capital"., does it not also look like theft?<

Justin writes: >In a sense, but it's not useful to look it it that way.
With ordinary theft, you restore the property to its owner. With
primitive accumulation, that means what? Going back to precapitalist
production relations? What's wrong with capitalism is not that it is
based on theft but that it is based on exploitation, which involves
unnecessary unfreedom (coercion and domination and alienation at work),
injustice (unnecessary inequality), and general bad  effects in terms of
unnecessary suffering due to unemployment and poverty. <

In volume I of CAPITAL, Marx seems to have followed the moral strategy
that Cornel West ascribes to him (in his dissertation, published by
Monthly Review press): instead of trying to develop a moral philosophy
of his own, he assumes a bourgeois system of ethics applies, i.e., that
every commodity sells at value. Given that assumption, he is able to
show that capitalism _in practice_ violates its own moral theory,
exploiting labor despite exchange at value. (BTW, John Roemer tries to
translate Marx's contrast between theory and practice into modern
orthodoxy lingo, replacing trade at value with trade at perfectly
competitive prices. His models don't work very well, however, since they
are based on Walrasian -- i.e., excessively idealized -- conceptions.)

Anyway, we shouldn't assume that the world works according to Marx's
idealized vision of volume I. Marx himself drops the assumption of
exchange at value in volume III, while illuminating the process of
"primitive accumulation" at the end of volume I. We can go further,
acknowledging the generalized immorality of capitalism -- fraud as
normal, business as usual -- while agreeing with Marx that even when
capitalism does involve living up to its own moral standards, it is a
fundamentally immoral system (exploitative, dictatorial, and
alienating).

In other words, capitalism is based on both systemic exploitation _and_
individual theft.
JD