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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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%