capital is civilization ok or at least it was [C]apital creates bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. Capital is only another name for civilization (John Wade, 164.) Like all productive powers of labor, i.e. those which determine the degree of its intensity and hence of its extensive realization, the association of the workers ⎯ the cooperation and division of labor as fundamental conditions of the productivity of labor ⎯ appears as the productive power of capital. The collective power of labor, its character as social labor, is therefore the collective power of capital. Likewise science. Likewise the division of labor, as it appears as division of the occupations and of exchange corresponding to them. All social powers of production are productive powers of capital, and it appears as itself their subject.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:18:14 +0000
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