Date:          Thu, 22 Sep 1994 13:30:20 +0100 (BST)
Subject:       Re Capital



Capital has a double aspect; that of a Form (or series of forms), and 
that of a singularity. Under the second aspect terrestrial capital 
process is not a generic essence, but a unique event, designated by a 
proper name (like hurricance Julie or the Vietnam war). Braudel has 
probably gone furthest in delineating this side of the beast, 
returning capital to its sense of a historically path-
dependent pinacle or head, always organized in terms of a 
geographical segmentation between a central zone 
(Venice, Amsterdam, London, New York ...) and concentric rings of 
peripheralization. He locates it in the third tier of a concrete 
geohistorical apparatus comprising material life (peasant 
subsistence), the market economy (commercial interaction), and 
CAPITAL (high finance, politico-economic grand strategy, monopoly and 
oligopoly power). Anyone who has ever bought a lump of hash knows how 
crazily authoritarian it is to collapse the top two into each other - 
it can only lead (if consistently pursued) to Pol Pot type rural 
fetishism, xenophobia, and heaps of corpses.

De Landa will have lots of excellent stuff about this in his new 
book (due out next year i think).

Schizophrenia = split-head = chopped-up capital. The schizoanalytic 
task: how to dissociate capital from below (rather than attempting to 
domesticate it by way of a appeal to a superordinate 
metaconcentration of power ((the state))).

Socialism is finished, but anticapitalism is just beginning. Death to 
the Human Security System!


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