gurrier said:
The malign spirit explanation ignores the fact that there are considerable numbers of people who spend their entire lives actively working to ensure that those with wealth retain and increase their power. They are the people with wealth and power (capitalists) and the people who work in those non-productive jobs which are responsible for mantaining the division of wealth and power in the world (eg managers, judges, police, military, most academics, etc.) The current division of power and wealth is a consequence of the active and conscious actions of these people. If they stopped acting in such a way, it would soon disappear or change radically. Describing such an effect as a 'spirit' is bonkers.
This really will be my last contribution for a couple of days. Z-Word, Garfield, Fruitloop and others have made truly excellent points, to which I will return individually. The last sensible hold-out (the drivelling Nino obviously doesn't count) to this stage of my argument is the ever-stubborn Gurrier. Gurrier, you are wrong to say that "money" (the term is imprecise: what you mean is "fianancial value," but let's stick with "money" for convenience) is controlled by the conscious intentions of individual people. Even though people are the necessary conduits through which money works, they make their decisions based on the requirements of money. The "economy" (another misleading term, since it implies a discrete and separable element of society) is run by and for money, not people. Money is an independent and autonomous force with the ability to reproduce, the power to rule the world, and the ability to control the minds of its inhabitants.
Yes, as you say elsewhere, an individual could just give all his money away. That would change nothing. Other people would simply take their place. Nor is class struggle an adequate explanatory model. A hundred or so years ago, when society was divided into easily identifiable social classes, you could argue that capital was incarnated in the bourgeoisie, while labour was incarnated in the proletariat. But in the age of pension schemes, savings accounts and home ownership, this conditon no longer pertains. Almost everyone in the West *both* sells their labour-power (their time, their life) for wages--and is thus a proletarian--*and* simultaneously receives some income or benefit from investments--and is thus a bourgeois. Everyone contains the standpoints of bougeois and proletarian within their own consciousness. And yet this fact in no way obviates the contradiction between capital and labour, since that contradiction is a *logical* opposition, a dialectical contradiction.
This becomes yet more interesting once we grasp what money *is.* Money is dead labour-power and, as I have shown earlier in this thread, labour-power is human life itself. Money is dead life: it is *death.* The rule of money over people is the rule of death over life. There is no way to understand this opposition without recourse to metaphysical concepts and, in the Western tradition, the power of death, the force that negates life, the *enemy* of human life, is known as "Satan." It really would be a great leap forward in your understanding if you could abandon your superstitious horror of metaphysical terminology. You would then be able to place the struggle between capital and labour (or to be more precise between value and labour-power) in the context of a far older contradiction, one that has been studied and analyzed to no small usefulness by the greatest thinkers of three millennia. You must understand that human wisdom did not begin with the materialist thinkers of the eighteenth century. Otherwise, despite your undoubted political commitment and intellectual energy, you are forever doomed to huddle shivering in the corner with Nino and his ilk, a prospect that I would not wish on my worst enemy.
