Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Devine, James" wrote:
>
> CC writes: >it would be more
> interesting and more relevant to the future to explore the forms of
> commodity fetishism int he 21st century.<
>
> maybe, given the way that the presidential and other electoral contests have turned into duopolistic or monopolistic marketing events, this is quite relevant.
>

The posts I wrote yesterday were in part just celebrations of being out
of the hospital after three very unpleasant days, but also I have been
mulling over for several weeks what I think may be the wrong handle
people bring to discussing the topics raised in vols. 2 & 3 of Capital.
The approach is always in economic terms (in ref., e.g., to
productive/unproductive labor) rather in terms of a critique of
political economy.

Marx is partly responsible for this himself, with all the arithmetical
rambling in those two volumes and in the Theories of Surplus value. But
those are all unfinished mss., and in Vol. 1 of Capital the arithmetic
clearly constitutes poetic images rather than "economic" analysis.

Not an economics text; not a criticism or analysis of economics; not a
political-economy text; not a criticism of particular theories of
political economy, but a CRITIQUE (and overthrow from within) of
Political Economy, hence necessarily (even in the supposedly more
specific vol. 3) a gaining, from within, of a perspective from OUTSIDE
political economy, where the numbers become illustrations not arguments,
and illustrations of social relations; hence the focus must be on the
relations, not on the empirical accuracy or inaccuracy of the
illustrations.

We live in a historical period when an immense amount of our human
activity consists in distributing paper claims to surplus. I buy
hearing-aid batteries at Walgreens. (I'm making the example false enough
so there will be no temptation to translate into real dollars & cents.)
Supply of the size I need has been exhausted in the display case, so the
clerk brings new supply from the store room. Obviously (in vulgar
materialist terms, such as would fit even a hunter-gatherer culture) she
has made the hearing aids of worth to me (since I can't wear them if
they are stacked up in the storeroom any more than I can eat fish that
are still in the ocean or cut my potato with iron ore that is still in
the ground. But then the clerk spends a number of minutes explaining to
me that if I were to take out a Walgreens credit card instead of
charging on my mastercard I would get 10% off on the batteries. Clearly
this human activity is profoundly different from the human activity of
physically bringing to me the batteries I need. Different _as human
activity_ whether it shows up in the national accounts or not. So even
if the distinction makes no economic sense at all, nevertheless Marx's
distinction between productive and unproductive labor is a profound
truth of history, of human culture.

Now I leaped a few stages there, and left "productive" and
"unproductive" undefined. Those steps ought to be filled in -- BUT NOT
BY TRYING TO MAKE _ECONOMIC_ SENSE. As soon as you try to prove or
disprove this as a statement about technical economics you will lose
completely the profound historical (cultural) importance of the
distinction.

Or to put it another way, to reject Marx's distinction between
productive and unproducive labor (by placing on it the burden of
practical economics or political economy) you will completely lose the
main point of Marx's whole life's labor, that capitalism is a
_historical_ phenomenon. That it is _different_. And it is different
(among other reasons) because of the difference between the two types of
human activity which our Walgreens' clerk has exhibited for us. That
distinction could not have arisen except in a capitalist economy. And it
probably can't be translated into empirically confirmable/disconfirmable
statements about the "actual" economy -- but one cannot let that
interfere with developing one's historical and cultural understanding of
the distinctions in living human activity involved.

Carrol



> jd