surplus and other stuff

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Sat Jan 23 10:08:44 PST 1999


Angela, On the below, I would suggest the analogy of homology from biology, genus-species, or family-genus-species. Class society is the genus , and slavery, feudalism and capitalism are its species. In the argument against Ricardo and Prodhoun, Marx is correcting an error that doesn't distinguish between the differences between species, slavery,feudalism and capitalism. But surely "class struggle" is used by Engels and Marx in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ as a feature of the "genus" class society,common to all of its species, slavery, feudalism, capitalism. This is why the famous first line of The Manifesto is "The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggles," All making class struggle a transhistorical category. The one footnote of that line , added by Engels modifies it such that it is "all " after the breakup of the ancient communes. So, the "genus" class society is part of a "family" which includes genuses "class society" and "ancient stone age cultures". The latter is without male supremacy, but the whole "genus" of class society has a common thread of male supremacy as it has a common thread of class oppression.

How do you read the first sentence of The Manifesto.

Also, in Capital , in the Chapter on "The Labour Process", Marx discusses the panhistorical features of labour. For example, all human labor, from the ancients to the proletarians, has imagination, when the bees and the spiders don't. There are other universal elements of labor he gives, if you would like me to copy some of it ? Humans are an animal species and they have some characteristics that are universal to our species that Marx recognizes. Marx does not hold that human nature is absolutely historical.


>>> rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 01/23 9:32 AM >>>
hi charles,

Charles Brown wrote:


> Marx has
> the category "surplus product"in
> Capital to encompass both
> the surplus-value of capitalism
> and the exploited wealth in
> feudalism and slavery. All CLASS
> societies have exploitation in
> common. This is a transhistorical
> category ( though not pan human
> because of the pre-class societies).

well, we're gonna disagree here. my reading of marx is that he begins a critique of political economy precisely by refusing the ways in which ricardo (for instance) insists on distinguishing between the form and essence of labour, that is, makes it into a transhistorical category. he commends ricardo for formulating the labour theory of value (i.e.., as the decisive premise of capitalism), but rejects the ways in which this is regarded only as a particular manifestation of labour as a transhistorical category. for marx, it is the content of labour in capitalism which is also specifically capitalist.

by distinguishing forma and content, essence from appearance, ricardo is able to generate putative solutions to capitalism which still preserve the capitalist form and content of labour: i.e.., redistributive solutions which allow the (ostensible) essence of labour to be revealed (through redistribution and/or a transfer of ownership to a social register) and abolishes only the appearance of this labour conceived as a transhistorical. where marx finds fault in this is exactly by insisting that you cannot distinguish between essence and appearance, that is between the particular form of labour as it exists under capitalism and its 'essence'. time and again, marx insists there is no such thing (he calls it a phantom) of labour as such.


> Charles: The category that corresponds
> best to "racism" or national chauvinism
> is the state. The conquest of other
> peoples by armies arises within the
> complex patriarchal family-private property-
> state.

i'm not sure what you mean here. are you saying that racism is inseparable from the processes of colonisation and the emergence of the nation-state? ________

Charles: Yes.on analogy to the above, racism is a characteristic of the "species" capitalism, which grows out of the state characteristic of the "genus" class society. ___________

if so, i agree. but colonisation and the nation-state as we experience it is qualitatively different from forms such as the roman empire and the city-states of ancient greece - there is not a difference in degrees of this or that quality, they are incommensurable. ________

Charles: Disagree. By the way, in the chapter above or another Marx uses the word "commensurability" to make just the opposite point that you do, I think it is about labour. Anyway, the states of Greece and Rome are like species of the genus state, and the capitalist state is another species. So, the Greek and Roman states are both different and the same as the capitalist state, just like species of the same genus have things in common and things different. __________

i am not interested in buttressing a notion of progress and its antithesis (tradition). maybe i'd go further. i think that once you claim that sexism and racism and homophobia (maybe we should call it homofascination also?) are things from the past, then they become beacons for those who want to protect themselves against the ravages (real ones, it aint that smooth is it?) of so-called progress, and we give succour to those (like rorty) who claim that capitalism is good because ti's the most rational. it occurs to me to ask the question in this context of why the major struggles of today are pitched as struggles between rational, modern capitalism and traditional identity, including various fundamentalisms. now, we can try and revive the progressivist joy of capitalism, which i reckon just makes us the allies of the neo-liberals, or we can begin to explain to ourselves the existence of sexism and racism and nationalism.... without splitting their essence from their appearance (asif they are either epiphenomental or functional to capitalism but not creatures of it). _________

Charles: I gotta go, so I'll take this and study it. Could you translate this into Marxist concepts ? I would see the new and the old in dialectical relation. The new sublates the old, that is overcomes and preserves it. For example, we are still animals in that we are mortal. This is a preservation of the old in us. But we have also overcome our animalness in other ways. In fact much of human "progress" is measured by how much we overcome our animalness. Capitalism,sexism,racism,and homophobia/fascination did not come into being all of a sudden like who is it who springs from the head of Zeus, Minerva ? They are dialectical sublations of the past.

Also, there is spiralling. Communism this time repeats some of ancient communism on a higher level. In this sense, "tradition' is preserved.

Capitalism is mainly an old irrationalism now. Socialism is the rational struggling to overthrow it. Just as the patriarchal family, private property and the state ( a "genus") came in together, they go out together. The socialist revolution overthrows patriarchal family, private property and the state as a complex. This is a revolution at the "genus" level. The previous ones were at the "species" level.

________

i have to admit that it is tempting at various times to do both, as evidenced by (alternately.) claims to a lost past that was taken away (finding comfort in tradition) or claims about the eventual necessity of overcoming these things because they are, anyways, things from the past. both are idealizations made in the present, dreams of the past or future depicted in the here and now, and so carry the burden of this, as marx went to great lengths to insist. there is a dialectic here, for sure. progressivism and traditionalism do a regular two-step. but dialectics isn't about designating one side of this, the thesis or antithesis, as history or future, essence or appearance, as marx's critique of hegel shows. you don't get to celebrate the good side against the bad side, applaud the revelation of essence against appearance, unless you want to tell (implicitly or otherwise) idealist stories about the present, in which essence and appearance are necessarily (not contingently) linked.

_________

Charles: I don't use exactly this terminology nor exactly in this way. Methinks I don't think the way you are sketching out ,but if you think so, please reiterate in the terminology above, which is how I think of it. It is difficult for me to make the translation from what you are saying to what I am saying, so I can't see how your critique is directed at my position. But maybe, so let me know.

For communism,

CB



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