"This is an amazing and unique work of art." – Martin Nicolaus.I had my first inquiry from someone who wanted to buy a copy of my new pop-up book. This presented me with a dilemma because I had never intended to sell copies of the book. The rationale for not selling appears in the book – on pages eight and eleven. The nature of capital is that "real wealth must take on a specific form distinct from itself, absolutely not identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." And......real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.Real wealth thus cannot be measured in money. Any price I attached to the book would be arbitrary. Why not ,885,000? "But you
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"This is an amazing and unique work of art." – Martin Nicolaus.
I had my first inquiry from someone who wanted to buy a copy of my new pop-up book. This presented me with a dilemma because I had never intended to sell copies of the book. The rationale for not selling appears in the book – on pages eight and eleven. The nature of capital is that "real wealth must take on a specific form distinct from itself, absolutely not identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." And...
...real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.
Real wealth thus cannot be measured in money. Any price I attached to the book would be arbitrary. Why not $62,885,000? "But you are not Andy Warhol!" O.K., then $62,885? $6,289? $62.89 plus shipping? A banana duct taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million last week.
In The Unknown Unknown Marx, I wrote: Toward the end of his 1968 essay, "The Unknown Marx," Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx's enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that "expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital." Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be "[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; rather, he means excess productive power more generally."
Marx's enumeration of those barriers – the infamous 'fetters' on the development of the productive forces – provides the text of page eight of my book.
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| Page eight of Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading |
"It "would require a book," Nicolaus then observed, to present "a proper analysis of the implications of these rather cryptic theses." In lieu of that analysis, he offered a synopsis that "these four ‘limits’ represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."
My contention is that the decoder ring for those 'cryptic theses' appears in the enigmatic statement, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." The paragraph in which that statement appears gives a concise explanation of what it means. Two paragraphs earlier, Marx had quoted from the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulities, "Wealth is disposable time and nothing more..."
Marx's amendment of the phrase from identity to contingency is decisive. Disposable time is necessary for the development of wealth but not sufficient. This contingency returns with a vengence in the four barriers, culminating in the assertion that "real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself... to become an object of production at all."
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| The whole development of wealth... |