New rules - reply to Ian

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:

 They hope that they will
> get sex for nothing, and they hope that for the rest people will notice,
and
> they will say that according to the contract, employer is entitled to the
> full labour-power of the employee, i.e. all potential and observable
> behaviours.

That should be "for the rest people will not notice". The structurally
unequal bargaining position of course permits the exchange of the sale of
labour-power and the purchase of labour (the utilisation of labour-power).

The cultural question for the working class of course becomes one of "which
relations do we permit to be mediated by money" and "which relations will we
engage in" but in a structurally unequal bargaining position you may not
have any choice in this. The point is that in modern capitalism, money
ownership exerts power in a very direct way, and the more you deregulate, of
course the more direct that power becomes. The bourgeois notion of
corruption is ultimately rooted in "taking unfair advantage" of somebody
else in the universal market place (i.e. unfair competition), and then this
raises the question of trust which Fukuyama talks about. If deregulation
destroys social cohesion, then trust disappears, and indeed the stability of
rules of communication necessary for trade are corrupted.

The marketisation question then really is how you can devise a system of
social regimentation which consistently treats social relations between
people as value relations across the board, and this requires somehow
forcing people into a behavioural pattern which excludes the social except
through value relations, such that all behaviour is valued and not just
some. As I have explained in a mail a while ago, this is what the Iraq
experiment is all about. To expand the market to a non-market area always
requires an act of primitive accumulation (a private appropriation which
conquers private property rights), and anti-corruption laws are supposed to
regulate that process, so that bourgeois society may grow in an orderly
manner on the basis of fair competition.

In capitalism, we must all learn to look at ourselves not just as marketable
objects, but as consolidated accounts, and if we misperceive what our assets
and liabilities are, then we have a psychological problem of low-selfesteem
and should consult a psychiatrist or the US army. The theorem is that we all
have something to sell, just like prostitutes, and the whole way to expand
the market is to focus on those things you've got that you can sell. What
puzzles the bourgeoisie here is why you wouldn't want to sell some quality
or asset if you had it, and sometimes persuasion is necessary.

Same shit, different story.

Jurriaan