Hi Folks,

Just a few off the cuff remarks.

It seems to me that there has been a tendency -I believe Yaffe in the seventies
to be a case in point- to view capital and its laws as an independent phenomenon
with the state tacked on to it --almost as an afterthought. This conception of
capital tended to magnify the significance of the laws of capital and present
them as a stand alone reality hardly, in a sense, in need of anything else for
their operation and development. Consequently they tended to view the state as a
necessary, although important, evil tacked on to capital. In this sense they
constitute, perhaps, the left mirror image of neo-liberalism.
Once this perspective is adopted it becomes impossible to adequately analyse the
character of contemporary capitalist society. It is this that helps explain the
failure of this form of Marxism to explain  the contemporary economic situation.
Like the neo-liberals the logic of their position tends to suggest that the
solution to capital's problems is solvable if the state is subject to an
enormously strict diet involving  substantial cut backs on its unproductive
consumption of surplus value --only then capital can surge forward. However to
advocate this course of action is evidence of a misunderstanding of the
character of the relationship between capital and state in the contemporary
world. Capital never has and never can operate essentially independently of the
state --the two are inseparable. The character of the state as it exists today,
give or take a little, is implied in the way in which capital is today. This is
not to say that the state cannot be reorganised. Indeed it has been, over the
recent past, reorganised. However this reflects the actual changes  in the way
capital itself has developed over the recent past too.

This brings me to the class struggle. The character of the class struggle is
expressed through the way in which capital develops. The state as it exists
today is an expression of the character of the class struggle. In a sense the
specific character of the contradictory (internal) unity between capital and
state is an expression of the specific character of the class struggle. Since
capitalism implies violence and is grounded in violence --exists in the context
of violence-- it cannot simply operate according to the law of capital in some
kind of quasi-scientific objective way, that to all intents and purposes, is
entirely independent of  people.

For individuals, such as Yaffe, Marx's Capital is essentially merely a theory
that exists to straighten out bourgeois political economy. Political economy is
viewed by them as, in effect, a rather neutral category that is the site of
ideological struggle over its meaning as a category. For me, on the other hand,
political economy is a bourgeois category, a fetishised category if you like, in
need of elimination. It is a category that implies violence, violent conflict,
the class struggle and thereby the state. Marx's Capital constitutes part an
ongoing critique of the category political economy. It formed part of the
struggle to eliminate it and thereby establishing communism.

Warm regards
George




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