doug wrote:
> What is it then? I'm tempted to say politics, but maybe I'm being too
literal.<
it's not politics, unless you expect that to herald itself in familiar language. i'd say surplus value is the spectre that haunts derrida's book on marx.
then again, surplus value (capital as surplus value) is pretty well absent from discussion of things like capital controls, isn't it? as if the nation and its relation to something called global or transnational capital is not for all that a relation founded on the movements of surplus value.
and, i have yet to see any substantial discussion of the situation in east timor or yugoslavia which takes account of the shape and character of class struggles in those places and related terrains other than amongst the so-called ultra-left (not to be confused with max's definition of such). most of this analysis (when it actually becomes analysis and moves beyond delivering the line) has tended to portray nation-states as the only 'actors' or significant variables. and all of these rarely get denounced as either apolitical or ahistorical or even as non-marxist -- though i would argue that the absence of labour (and capital as s-v) is paradoxically most absent amongst those who most emphatically want to pose as marxists in cyberspace.
looks to me like it (labour as the irreconcilable antagonism within capital) is pretty well missing all round.
perhaps lebowitz and negri are right. the problem with marx, or at least received readings of his stuff, is a result of what we might call the 'missing book on the wage' or somesuch...the connection between surplus value and capital as a political-economic figuration. i think it's there, but it's obviously not there in a way that people are capable of reading literally and transposing to an analysis. a bit like people aren't quite capable of reading a politics in derrida's stuff perhaps? and this might go to a problem with historically-intuited expectations and idioms rather than the work, contra lebowitz and negri -- and contra those who find deconstruction so apparently 'disorienting'.
Angela _________