>>> rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 01/24 7:52 AM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
Charles:
> How do you read the first sentence of The Manifesto.
Angela: 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.
Charles: I'd say for Engels and Marx, contradiction IS the substance of things. For dialectical materialists change is substance and contradiction is the content and essence of things, human and natural. The phrase "The history of all hitherto existing society IS a history of class struggles" is serious. ( to me). That's why I can't go with your model of Marx's theory. I think the Manifesto is serious, not story telling. In fact, given Marx's emphasis on practice as the real test of theory, I'd say The Manifesto for forming the party is more serious than some other more theoretical discussions. __________
>Angela:
> 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. ________ Charles: Marx makes it pretty clear that productive labor and use-values are panhistorical or as he says in that same chapter,"it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather is common to every such phase. " Doesn't that sound panhistorical to you ? It's exchange-value that is unique to capitalism. Actually, I disagree with your last sentence too. In communism, production will be for use. Exchange-value will disappear as in the museum with capitalism.
Don't you think the human biological features are panhistorical ? Or are you saying nothing human is panhistorical ? ____________
Angela: 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}}}
Charles: You aren't saying that I am saying the same thing as Smith and Ricardo ,are you ? Did Smith and Ricardo claim that class struggle was the panhistorical motor of class society, which is what I have been saying to you in this exchange ? What is natural is production for use , "the everlasting NATURE-IMPOSED condition of human existence", as Marx puts it. Capitalism is production for exchange-value. However, even capitalism cannot exist if it does not as an aside produce for use, food and other natural necessities. Also, I am arguing that class society , capitalism-feudalism-slavery, are irradicable or can be abolished. Therefore, I couldn't be arguing that capitalist relations of production are a natural necessity; and I am not arguing that. Capitalism is an artificial naturalism, just as all class society is. The class struggles objectfy the working classes, making a natural like dynamic. Thus, as Marx says in the First Preface to Capital, he analyses the history of human society "as a process of natural history." __________
Charles:
> 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.
Angela: 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 it 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. _______
Charles: Yes, I have just realized from another debate that this naturalization of social facts which Marx does fight, has a sort of confusing paradox in Marx. Because he also says very vulgar biologist sounding things. For example, and you can find this in the Preface to the First Edition to Captial, though I am sure you have read it already, "My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history ,..." (!) wow !! that's vulgar. "Natural history" ??? and this is not the only quote like this.
But I figured it out. He doesn't mean capitalism, feudalism or slavery are natural , biological reflexes, like eating. No. He means that in societies with class oppression, the oppressed classes are OBJECTIFIED and animal-LIKE ( and so are the oppressors by way of the Hegelian master-servant dialectic). So, class struggle operates as if we were animals or like a natural history. Our goal in ending class society is to get back to being fully human as in pre-class society, but on a higher level of technique, extracted from class society history. Racism and male supremacy are also "as if naturalizations" like class oppression, making us like objects , not subjects. The section on commodity fetishism in Capital is a statement of the psychological process of this artificial objectification or naturalization or reification in capitalism
These "as if naturalizations" are not panhuman, but they are transhistorical over the historical era of class oppression.
All Power to the People,
Charles
be well, angela