[PEN-L:32488] Re: Re: Stallin Stalin 3 of 3

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/22/02 10:09:06 PM Pacific Standard Time, soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> I said:
>
> >I don't mean to say that we are not experiencing
> >an evolutionary leap in the mode of production,
> >because I personally don't have sufficient data
> >to conclude either way, but maybe we can explain
> >this shift of capital from production to speculation
> >using a more comprehensive theory, which does not
> >exclude advanced robotics.
>
>
> I just wanted to add that such a theory should look at capitalism
> as a system at the world scale. To put it differently, such a
> theory should be not only a temporal but also a spatial theory.
>
> Best,
>
> Sabri



I have been thinking about repositioning the question - for the past twenty years, and writing about this matter for about a decade as the "evolution of the industrial system" as oppose to capitalism. There is no way I am going to resolve this matter for many reasons of which one is that I lack the intellectual discipline. 

The shift from productive capital to speculative capital as a conception houses two problems. The first is in the realm of theory. I believe the shift was from mercantile capital to manufacturing-industrial capital to industrial-finance capital, - phase . . .shift . . .flip . . .finanacial industrial capital . . ..to supranational capital to domination of the world total capital by its speculative section. 

Here is an example: the stock market and investing in stocks, bonds and interest capital is very old and involves speculation. This is not the meaning of speculative capital as dominator. General Motors through its financial agency daily engages in speculation as does DaimlerChrysler. Yet, all students of economics seek to explain a George Soros as the personification of a specific property in current economic relations. 

The other problem is that social production still takes place in every country on earth. We are experiencing an unprecedented revolutionization of the material power of the productive forces that is reconfiguring society in a manner we are not accustomed to or have a precedence for - except as the historical abstraction. That is to say we are passing from an industrial formation to something new that has not yet taken shape. 

"Shape" involves human will and politics. Another problem arises. We cannot know exactly what we are talking about until a new form has arisen, but the new form does not correspond to any of our thinking but instead is an absurd approximation of the complex of interactions of millions of individual will and everyone ends up saying, "what the hell is that." 

Yes, capitalism or rather the industrial system of production and its various modes of accumulation must be look at on a world scale, in its actual historical evolution and as the historical abstraction. 

In place of the word robot - which predates the advent of computerization by decades, perhaps another description is needed such as advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process. 

I hate I ever used the damn word "robot" but other Marxist was using the term to make a point to the working class and organize the intelligencia and so I followed. Is this not proof positive we are in transition: we don't know how to say what we want to say because transition by definition is instability of  perceived form.  

The temporal and spatial collide and become one another during a period of transition because of interpenetration of opposites. Stated another way time and space are the same thing once the relationship is defined.  Stated another way, the relationship between things is understood qualitatively after the emergence of a new qualitative feature that makes one say, "oh a new relationship is talking place." 

Not capitalism on a world scale but the industrial systems on a world scale and its two distinct modes of accumulation. 

If we where not on the same page we would not be rappin. 


Melvin P.