Comments on: Circulating Perspectives

By: N Pepperell

N Pepperell — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:50:15 +0000

Hey Nate! Thanks for this. I’ve been skimming back through the second and third volumes recently (mainly while procrastinating to avoid something I seem to be having a helluva time writing on the first volume… ;-P), but I don’t know those texts anywhere near as well as I know the first volume. For what it’s worth, though, what you’re saying seems fair to me – also since Marx’s notion of what is required to “reproduce labour power” is a deliberately open concept – like the working day, the reproduction of labour power is positioned as something open to historical shifts and to determination by conflicts of various sorts, such that the indeterminacy of this category then opens up the potential particular kinds of conflicts (not that you were specifically talking about conflicts – just where my mind went). Those drugs, though: those might be perfectly functional for the reproduction of labour-power. Sabotage supplies, okay – I’ll grant you – not so much… ;-P

In this post, I wasn’t so much trying to make a distinction between Marx’s categories and what happens in actual practice (although my phrasing probably suggested that’s what I was up to), as following up, very indirectly, and after a really long delay, on a question that someone had asked in another discussion, on what might be an example of how you could theorise the way in which the same social context could be generative of multiple and conflicting perspectives – so, how could you possibly move beyond the assertion that there is multiplicity, difference, etc., and speak in more determinate ways about the kinds of multiplicity, difference, etc., that might plausibly be expected to arise in some specific context. The example above isn’t exactly comprehensive – it’s not as though these are the only conflicting practical orientations Marx discusses in Capital – but I was just trying to give a quick and dirty example of how an analysis like this might be “do-able”, without this requiring some kind of very heavy-handed deterministic theory.

From memory, I think I didn’t explain the context in the post, because the context was a half-remembered question from a discussion that was no longer “live” when I wrote this, but that had stuck in my head as something I wanted to write about…

By: Nate

Nate — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:24:15 +0000

NP,
Fabulous stuff. One thing, which I think would support your point maybe – I agree with you on money as money referring to the m in simple circulation c-m-c, but I think that simple circulation isn’t intermingled with the circuit of money capital m-c-m’ only in actual practice but also in Marx’s categories at least some of the time. He writes in v2 of Capital (ch 3, p93 in my edition) “Productive consumption (which essentially includes the individual consumption of the labourer, since labour-power is a continuous product, with certain limits, of the labourer’s individual consumption) is carried on by every individual capital.” So the simple circulation which is repeated every time a worker spends her wages is productive consumption, and thus is inside the capital relation even if the ends appear to be outside. (I harp on this because of my interests in housework and unwaged labor; it should also be noted that some expenditures by the laborer aren’t productive consumption like drugs that make you hungover the next day at work or the purchase of materials to sabotage the workplace with.)
take care,
Nate

By: Roughtheory.org » Fragment on Textual Strategy in Capital

Roughtheory.org » Fragment on Textual Strategy in Capital — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:14:23 +0000

[...] I discussed one example of this at the end of the recent post on Marx’s discussion of the general formula for capital. Another, more famous, example can be found in the discussion of commodity fetishism in section 4 [...]