Charles Brown wrote:
> How do you read the first sentence of The Manifesto.
as a pretty fine bit of story-telling.... but anyways, saying that history is the history of antagonisms, class struggle is not the same thing as saying that the content, form, essence of these struggles was the same.
>
> Also, in Capital , in the Chapter on "The Labour Process", Marx discusses the panhistorical features of labour.
i didn't read this as an analysis of the panhistorical character of labour, but rather as an explanatory prelude to a discussion of the production of use-values, means of production and the transformations (qualitative) that capital performs on the labour process itself (elaborated in the rest of part 3, and especially parts 4 and 5 on relative and absolute surplus labour). there is here a quite promethean view of labour and its relation to nature, but that is not as far as i can see a claim that labour is panhistorical, that is, use-value is not the transhistorical essence hiding behind the appearance of exchange vale in capitalist society, only to be thus redeemed (revealed) by a future socialism.
moreover all this is preceded by the discussion in part 1, esp pps 85-87 in my edition (1978), which derides smith and ricardo for clasping onto the use-value of commodities as a separable instance of their exchange value, never once asking why the value-form exists in the first place, the "differentia specifica of the value-form", and hence enabling what marx argues is a naturalisation of capitalism. (the footnotes in this bit are just as interesting as the text,especially the joke at the end of this chapter}}}
> 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.
i did not meant that racism etc. had no past, no history, nor that it merged ready-made. merely that the organization of each relation is qualitatively different depending upon the mode of production, both in content and in form. but as i read your comments above, i can't help thinking that you parallel nature with the past in such a way that sexism etc. is simultaneously made into a thing from the past and natural (or at least beastly); and partly this is what i was alluding to: that tradition is often invoked as something closer to nature (and more often than not a quite reified view of nature anyway), and that is is precisely this move that provides so much of the tenacity for racism and sexism. that we can deploy this, however implicitly, and even when we speak of the need for progress, catches us immediately in the grip of the work that racism and sexism do: a naturalization of social facts.
be well, angela