Carrol Cox wrote:
> > it's the only way i know to talk about a revolution within capitalism, to
> > distinguish real subsumption from formal, and to allow me to talk about this in
> > ways that unsettle many of the presumptions about marx's analysis of
> > capitalism,
>
> This banality of "revolution within capitalism" comes up about every half century.
> It gives academics something to chew over in the coffee room.
oh now carrol. are ya saying this is a banality, as in so banal that it requires no comment; or that it is an already-established and working presumption amongst marxists, hence it already informs the way marxists talk about capitalism; or are you simply saying it is a thingummy that would only interest academics; or what?
if the first and/or second: i am reminded again that many marxists do not think this banal insight is of any particualr relevance, and in many cases is not a working assumption at all, in all the discussion over 'the pomos'. much of this discussion you will admit has been underpinned by the presumption of a distnce between 'culture' and 'economics', or what is another version of the same thing, by the distance between 'real class struggle' and 'aesthetics'. or, in another form, that productive labour equals manual labour; the working class are those folks who work with their hands (not their heads)..... maybe this hasn't informed your comments on butler or other designated pomos (i'd have to go back and look to be sure), but it has certainly been the the big theme of this entire discussion.
if the latter, it seems to me that this precisely is what capital v1; the 'missing chapter' namely 'immediate results of the labour process'; and large whacks of the grundrisse are mostly about. the phrase 'revolution within capitalism' are marx's exact words.
you honestly don't think this is relevant to anything other than academics hey? if you mean something different, then you'll have to specify why this phrase is not of much interest. i'm prepared to hear why, but 'academics chat about it' doesn't quite have the pavlovian response in me you might have wished for.
angela