‘Social Self-Alienation and the Profit-Rate’s
Fall’ --
A [Rare] Glimpse of Seldon’s pre-F.E.D.
Work.
Dear Reader,
The F.E.D. General Council has just
approved, for public presentation and review by the Office of Public Liaison,
some components of Karl Seldon’s pre-F.E.D.
body of work.
I am happy to be able to share with you the following
excerpt from that body of work.
For more information regarding
these Seldonian
and Marxian insights, please see --
For ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian
insights -- specimens
of ‘dialectical art’ -- see:
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel Detonacciones,
Member, Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.],
Participant, F.E.D.
Special Council for Public Liaison,
Officer, F.E.D.
Office of Public Liaison.
Seldon --
“The Cause
Of The Fall of Capital Analyzed From
The Point Of View Of The Developing Historical
Subject/Human-Social Individual.”
“The real and
most radical root of “fictitious capital” is the fiction that capital itself is.”
“That root is both the false consciousness about wealth of
capitalist social individuals, and the social practices of capitalist society,
which mutually [re-]produce one another.”
“The central ideology of capitalism is that capital in
itself and by itself is profitable, is productive, is self-expanding.”
“Capitalist practice is first and foremost behavior as
if this were so.”
“This attitude, inherent in capitalist practice, whether
fully conscious or not, is most nakedly manifest in capital’s interest bearing
form, M--M’ in Marx’s notation --
which Marx rightly calls the most fetishistic, most insane capital value-form,
wherein capital is presented as if it compounds [its] value by time
alone.”
“Interest-bearing capital or debt-capital, as bank capital
and state finance capital, is, as we have seen (and are seeing), the
finally dominant form of capital (in the form of usurers’ capital,
interest-bearing capital was also prominent in the “antediluvian” prelude to
capitalism proper -- to industrial capitalism).”
“Capitalist consciousness involves a totemization or
fictitious, fetishistic valuation of only the objectified forms of human
‘subject-ivity’*
(means of production, weapons, accumulated monetary wealth and hoards, goods in
general), together with a denigration of human ‘subject-ivity’ in its direct
form; a fetishization and over-valuation of external wealth over against that
wealth’s actual source in human, ‘subject-ive’ creativity and human
‘subject-ive’ ‘agent-cy’.”
“Capital is this ‘fictitious’ valuation placed upon the
objective result of human laboring activity, of the ‘subject-ive’, productive,
creative process, enforced as both a social law and a social consensus.”
“Capitalist society measures profit as return on fixed
capital (“investment”), not as return on labor-power.”
“Capitalist society neglects and even cannibalizes its true
resource: self-expanding labor-power;
self-expanding productive, creative force.”
“This is the root cause of “fictitious capital” (which is
thus doubly fictitious).”
“This is the ultimate cause of capitalism’s demise.”
“The continual and final devaluation of accumulated (fixed)
capital has itself being this fundamental self-devaluation of humanity -- prevalent
ever since capitalism’s inception -- to avenge.”
Capital (capitalist ideology; capitalist praxis) locates
wealth in an illusory manner. Hence
capitalism falls when its real wealth outgrows any possibility of maintaining both
this wealth and this illusion.”
“Real wealth is self-expanding use-value. Capital takes into its accounts only
self-expanding exchange-value. Hence its
economy can work only so long as self-expanding exchange-value --
self-expanding, accumulating capital-value -- is able to serve as an
adequate proxy for and mirror of self-expanding use-value -- i.e., for the
‘self-expansion’ of labor-power, the ‘self-expansion’ of the subject, of
human-social subjectivity in nature.”
“Fictitious value is merely the symptom and outcome of this
essential fiction, the radical mis-location of value --
·
the undervaluation of humanity by
itself;
·
the elevation of the
object/product of human labor over and above the laboring human subject”
·
self-alienation.”
“Thus self-alienation itself is the
essential cause of capital’s downfall.”
“The wage-relationship itself; the alienation and exile of
labor-power (labor-power being the actual basis of productive force or
productivity), combined with the husbanding and hoarding of its accumulated
result, e.g., fixed capital, is already the seed of this fall, a seed which must
germinate in the proportion that capitalism itself self-unfolds.”
“Allegorically: at night, after the shift is up, labor is turned out into the cold, to
fend for itself in the street. And that
labor is “laid-off” when the hard times come, consigned to waste away. But the machinery is locked tight away, kept
high and dry, out of the cold and rain, and secured behind the heavy factory
doors.”
“The essential wealth of humanity, as such, is itself
as the subject within nature; is its own combined (or inter-)subjectivity.”
“This truth had to be ‘real-ized’, that is, made
material, objectified -- brought into empirical manifestation --
historically, through the vast human labor of human history.”
“Humanity had to come to discover itself, as it were hidden,
among the vast cluttered terrain of objective value, as itself at the very center
of all value.”
“The cheapening of the elements of constant capital, that
is, the growth of the productive force, is the immanent cause of capital’s
crisis.”
“But the productive force is a measure of subjectivity.”
“It is the development of the producers, of the working
class, of human potency within nature (albeit disguised under a growth of subjection)
-- the growth of socialized creativity -- which “growth of the
productive forces” connotes, and which becomes the out-growing of the
capitalist phase of human growth.”
“In exchange-value terms, this process eventually expresses
itself as the self-de-valu-ation of value,
as the self-contraction of capital-value; as negative profitability.”
“The development of social subjectivity means that the value
of any fixed objectification of humanity drops ceaselessly relative to the
burgeoning wealth-creating power of the living movement of human-social energy;
the objectifying fecundity of human-social praxis.”
“This cornucopia of human sensuous-cognitive activity can
fix itself momentarily in, and throw off from itself, an indefinite series of
transitory self-objectifications, without ever becoming eternally identified
with and limited to any one of these ‘supersede-able’ self-objectifications.”
“All human-social self-objectification, all objective
wealth, is devalued continually in the face of the potentially unlimited and
self-evolving creative power of the living fire of human-social energy.”
“Wealth must thus be re-conceptualized as subjective
wealth; as the subject itself; as ‘subject-ivity’ itself.”
*[by
‘‘‘subjectivity’’’, we mean ‘subject-hood’; ‘subject-ness’; the
‘subject-quality’ of humanity within nature.]
