Modern Industry as a Subject Sample Clauses

Modern Industry as a Subject. The question I will try to address is whether the rise of industry in its modern form is associated in the Manuscripts with the subjectification of a specific form of private property. I will argue that Xxxx’x analysis of the system of private property overlaps with his first attempt to analyse the category of capital. By analysing the relationship of private property in the present-day economic system, Xxxx appears to be attempting to investigate both the general nature of production under private property and the specific form of commodity production. Xxxx declares that production creates the “self-conscious and self-acting commodity...the human commodity” [EW, p.336]. On the one hand, later political economists, like Xxxxxxx and Mill, recognise that capital regards the “human productivity” of its investment as an irrelevance, even harmful to the real aim of production: interest and yearly savings [EW, p.336]. On the other hand, the recognition by classical political economy (Xxxxx et al.) that industrial wealth is based on the wealth of labour implies that labour might play a role as a subject within industry. Later in this chapter we will consider the subjectivity of labour, but presently we are concerned with analysing whether modern industry as capital plays the role of a subject, or a quasi-subject, in the Manuscripts. Political economy, suggests Xxxx, regards labour, “abstractly as a thing”, as a commodity [EW, p.293]. Furthermore, as he points out, any commodity is forced to obey the laws of competition [EW, p.321]. The significance of making an analysis of a system determined by the conditions of competition is that it is no longer under conscious human control. Such a system, as Xxxx argues in the Manuscripts, emerges historically from the roots of private property in land, and, once developed, appears as the “naked rule of private property, of capital” [EW, p.319]. At this point the relationship between property owner and worker “should be reduced to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploited” [EW, p.319].20 Industry has become a war, and it requires increasingly large armies that can be summoned and destroyed at will [EW, p.294]. This “perpetual war”, says Xxxx quoting Xxxxxx Xxxxx, “in the view of science, is the only means of achieving peace; this war is called competition” [EW, p.294].21 Xxxxxxxxx Xxxxx'x propositions on the accumulation of capitals and the competition amongst capitalists, Xxxx finds that, from the standpoint of p...