Ruthless Critisicm (August 2012): How not to do another New Reading of Marx’s Capital
Von webmaster • Aug. 1st, 2012 • Kategorie: Allgemein, InternationalRuthless Critisicm (August 2012):
Now available in English translation, Michael Heinrich’s commentary on Capital attempts to show how “exploitation and class domination … function,” but focuses on what the verb conveys: capitalism’s “functioning.” This seems like a slight shift, but it’s a big mistake. His critique of capitalism focuses less on why this system of exploitation needs to be abolished than on how capitalist relations remain durable despite their “destructive potential.” His answer:
everyone – capitalists as well as wage laborers, exploiters as well as exploited – is caught up in the “system” and keeps it going.
A strange conclusions for a critique of capitalism! This gives us an occasion to dispute Heinrich’s new reading of Capital and at the same time clarify Marx’s arguments against capital, abstract labor, the fetish character of money relations, and the state.
http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb2884/
How not to do another New Reading of Marx’s Capital On An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich [Translated from GegenStandpunkt: Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift 2-08, Gegenstandpunkt Verlag, Munich]
Karl Marx’s Capital can be an opaque work, even if it strives to develop it’s arguments as simply as possible. It’s no accident that there are 150 years of politically inspired misunderstandings by dubious friends and outright enemies of it’s pages which seem to offer enlightenment about the thrust of Marx’s “critique of political economy” and what Capital is saying; that’s why interpretive commentary is so often necessary, especially as contributions to it’s exegesis come on the market which simply no longer deserve to be apologetically called misunderstandings. (…)
The New Reading of Capital after the end of the workersʼ states
Criticism of the system, but no hostility against capitalists – Capital’s drive to accumulation – Exploitation – The destruction of the health and lives of the workers
Value and abstract labor: Socially generated abstractions – or: no criticism of the rotten role of value-creating labor
Fetish and mystification: How the irrational system gets people of all classes to function by producing a reasonable image of itself
The state – hardly necessary as political rule; as a “specific way of mediating social interconnections,” (202) quite certainly
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/heinrich.htm
cf.:
http://www.kapital-lesen.com/texte/kritik-an-michael-heinrich/
http://neoprene.blogsport.de/images/HeinrichKritikausGSP208.pdf
http://www.libcom.org/forums/theory/heinrichs-intro-capital-13042012
