Capital is wrong (fwd)

George, is this a response to Marx? I could not get it..

btw: Marx gives a critique of the "wealth" approach to capitalism in the
Gotha program. He criticizes the social democratic party priciple that
"labor is the source of all wealth and all culture". With that said, he
smartly says the following:

" labor is not the source of wealth. Nature is just as much the source
of used values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists) as
labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a forces of nature,
human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's
primers and is correct in so far as it is implied that labour is performed
with the appurtenant subjects and instruments.But a socialist programme
cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions
that alone give them meaning.And is so far as man from the begining
behaves toward nature, the primary sources of all instruments and subjects
of labour, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labour becomes
the source of use-values"


Mine

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 18:37:57 +0000
From: George Pennefather <poseidon@eircom.net>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Capital is wrong


In the opening paragraph of Capital Marx proclaims:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production 
prevails,
presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being 
a single
commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a 
commodity.
So the capitalist mode of production can prevail in more than one society.

To say that the "wealth of those societies presents itself as an immense 
accumulation of
commodities" is not true. Much of the wealth is in the form of industrial 
capital which is
not capital in the form of the commodity. This mistaken premise renders the 
validity of
making the commodity a starting point questionable on that basis.

Warm regards
George Pennefather

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