Die Neue Zeit
27th April 2008, 19:22
http://books.google.ca/books?id=tWaYHY6dUFUC&dq
One of Allman's many important contributions to our understanding of Marx and Marxism occurs when she identifies several fundamental misperceptions that continue to plague socialists and liberal critics of capitalism. Both groups often advocate a fairer distribution of wealth, arguing that the current inequitable distribution that characterizes contemporary capitalist societies results from property relations - in particular, the private ownership of the means of production. It is at this particular juncture that Allman parts company with many of her fellow Marxists. Reading capital in a way that is consistent with Marx's use of the labor theory of value or law of value to explain the laws, tendencies, and motions of capitalism and to analyze the historically specific form of wealth in capitalist societies, she identifies - correctly, in my estimation - the real culprit as the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself... True, private property is a factor. But private property, commodities and markets all predate the specific labor-capital relations of production and serve as pre-conditions for it.
I think this, along with a business education background (and the business management emphasis shift from people to processes) has justified at least two of my "heretical" positions:
1) Class relations should NOT be defined as being based on merely ownership relations to the means of production, or even just to the means of production in general - but rather defined as being based on relations to the production process itself (http://www.revleft.com/vb/simplification-class-relations-t73419/index.html);
2) "State-capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people" still employs capitalist production processes, including the wage-labour relationship. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenins-error-re-t74487/index.html)
Thoughts?
One of Allman's many important contributions to our understanding of Marx and Marxism occurs when she identifies several fundamental misperceptions that continue to plague socialists and liberal critics of capitalism. Both groups often advocate a fairer distribution of wealth, arguing that the current inequitable distribution that characterizes contemporary capitalist societies results from property relations - in particular, the private ownership of the means of production. It is at this particular juncture that Allman parts company with many of her fellow Marxists. Reading capital in a way that is consistent with Marx's use of the labor theory of value or law of value to explain the laws, tendencies, and motions of capitalism and to analyze the historically specific form of wealth in capitalist societies, she identifies - correctly, in my estimation - the real culprit as the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself... True, private property is a factor. But private property, commodities and markets all predate the specific labor-capital relations of production and serve as pre-conditions for it.
I think this, along with a business education background (and the business management emphasis shift from people to processes) has justified at least two of my "heretical" positions:
1) Class relations should NOT be defined as being based on merely ownership relations to the means of production, or even just to the means of production in general - but rather defined as being based on relations to the production process itself (http://www.revleft.com/vb/simplification-class-relations-t73419/index.html);
2) "State-capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people" still employs capitalist production processes, including the wage-labour relationship. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenins-error-re-t74487/index.html)
Thoughts?