if capital is a social relationship, then...

Provided that the concept of totality is retained this is fine. Capital and capitalist social relations posit each other reciprocally; both exist only in so far as they exist for their other. Capital and value are essentially imaginary, notional things - but they require materialisation in the physical world. Likewise, the physical world creates the ideal of value. This means that capital and value are entirely subject to material actions - were we (as a whole) to behave differently, capital would cease to exist.

...but if as a result of this all that is advocated is little enclaves of supposedly free and authentic life, then all that is achieved is the perpetuation of spectacle rather than its abolition. Collapsing this critique into lifestylism, or even into the ludocrous 'nice capitalism' versus 'nasty capitalism' idea (organic food, pand cola not coca cola etc) achieves nothing. However, it should be retained as the essential truth of any revolutionary program, i.e. the demand to create qualitatively new modes of life, and should find a place within the general practice of addressing the totality of social relationships.

Is capital ONLY a social relation?

I mean, if someone not familiar with the term ask what 'capital' meant, would you say "its a social relation"?

Yeah, but I'd expand on that and say that this particular social relationship is based around the production of value.

...and I think you'd have to emphasise that what is important here is not the production of use-values, which are essential to any social formation, but value as a separate, independent form.

Social power is alienated human power. We may be contingent upon it, but once 'we' realise that it is in fact contingent upon us, that it is in fact our power, then it supposedly disappears in a puff of smoke.

...although I think if you were to tell that to someone who'd just been drafted, or sent to prison, or simply someone forced to do a shitty job, they'd probably tell you to piss off.

so its not: capital is there, workers are there, and they conflict.

?

That's a good description, cheers.

I'm reading lots of Hegel at the moment, so I apologise for the terminology I'm about to use - but, no, it's not the case that 'capital is there, workers are there, and they conflict.'

Firstly, looking at capitalist social relations (i.e. not 'workers' per se, but the whole social structure) you can say that these relations and capital are distinct from one another, but are distinct only in so far as they are part of a unity. The unity is capitalism as a whole. Each is only in so far as it is for the other.

Fundamental to this is the equally reciprocal relationship between capitalist social relations and wage labour. There is nothing innate in human biology that dictates we should sell labour power for a wage - but we become wage labourers due to the demands of capital, and as a result we create capital. Capitalist social relations and wage labour exist in the same unity as described above - both are only in so far as they are for the other.

...but because we are not inherently wage labourers, but rather human beings with our own aspirations and desires (i.e. other to the aspirations and designs of capital, which we work for), there is a counter dialectic going on against this. Just as the human subject is posited as wage labourer by capital, so too is this contested by class struggle.

Capital therefore creates its own necessary conditions of existance (it makes human beings into wage labourers) but in so doing necessarily creates the conditions of its own supersession (in co-opting human subjects into labour it causes struggle).

No that's not what he said at all

I suppose I could see it help unity too, like preventing poeople from running off and becoming liberals etc.

yeah, but in a round about way. The distinction between use-value and exchange-value does imply class distinction, but only by virtue of the way in which exchange-value is produced.

Commodities are produced so that surplus value can be produced. Surplus value can only be produced through labour (as it is the only commodity that creates value). Therefore exchange-value does imply a distinction between labour and capital, labourer and boss.

...although this isn't to say that use-value is inherently 'natural' and 'good', while exchange-value is necessarily bad. use-values are historically determined (i.e. specific to a given society at a given time). As such, within modern consumer societies we are presented with use-values that are anything but useful, purely for the sake of exchange-value. Use-value ceases to be simply the neutrral bearer of exchange-value, but becomes formed in accordance with its needs.

But it would be much more straightforward simply to say that capitalist social relations are not the same thing as capital. Producing capital, creating more value is impossible without capitalist social relations. Therefore capital is not a social relation per se, but cannot exist without the social relations specific to it (i.e. class distinction).

It could be seen as an attempt, at marginalizing some forms of commodity imposition, no? Both fail. If if not then fine, Catch, did literally just state that there is no point worrying about what new relations you form when you SMASH the old ones. What activity did he mean exactly?

I suppose the answer then is yes, do try and form little pockets of non-commodified activity?

And I don't know why I'm being lectured on ethical shopping, its not like I own a corenershop or anything

Sorry, why isn't capital a social relation exactly?

Leeds

Sorry if I misunderstood... could the same criticism be made of activists who try not to be too activisy though? Is it the institutional attempts that you think are bound to fail? What is the difference?

And could somene explain why capitalism isn't a social relation exactly?

Cheers

So, you are saying that: anti-activism is different to adbusters (both in this instance being examples of new uncomodifed relations) because anti-activism can spread to other groups? Why is it that some uncommodified relations can spread and others cannot?

well...the sum of capitalist social relations is caital, in so far as 'the sum' is read as 'the result of.' Anyway, glad to help. The following might be of interest:

The reason I was interested in the phrase ('capital is a social relationship...') is due to its 'detournement' (appropriation) by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. In one of the earlier theses in the book, Debord writes that "The spectacle is not a collection of images - it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." This is an appropriation of Marx's original words, which are as follows: (from Volume 1 of Capital, in which Marx talks of the expansion of capital and its domination of new societies via colonialism)

"First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things."

So you can see from this that (as was said above) capital is not a thing in the sense that it is immaterial; it is entirely reliant upon capitalist social relations for its existance.