[PEN-L:2680] Duke University's literature department

Carrol Cox cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu
Fri Jan 29 08:38:30 PST 1999



> for instance, that productive labour is manual labour, that commodities are
> necessarily tangible objects,

I read vol. 1 of *Capital* 3 years before I even dreamt of ever becoming a marxist, at a time in fact when I still thought that the Korean War was a just war (on the part of the U.S.) and that marxism was an outmoded 19th c. superstition. But even then I recognized very clearly that marx did not define a commodity as a tangible object or labor as manual labor. geez!

And of course this is one of the reasons for seeing the u.s. working class as containing 95% of those defined by bourgeois sociologists and sloppy marxists as "middle class."

I wish once in a while those who wish to overthrow marx would at least read him with minimal care first. This would do very well of course as a critique of *Time* magazine.

Carrol



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