"Oh, I BEG your pardon!" she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
- Alice in Wonderland.
kelley wrote:
> this is serious. what on earth does it matter? which is to say, let's
> move this off into a different terrain coz i'd like to hear about the
> specifics of how one's analysis of kosovo would make a difference as to
> what sort of political practices pursued, policies advocated.
well, it matters to me when i'm accused of lying. it might not matter to anyone else and nor should it; and that's a distraction i fell for, so i apologize. (allow me the luxury of falling for it one last time, below.) but, yes, let's move on.
> ange, theory doesn't dictate practice. but it must shape it, have an
impact, affect it... >somehowerother or you wouldn't be bumming over
differences like this.
the stakes for me here are whether a class struggle perspective is subordinated to, or obscured by, a geo-political perspective in which the only significant 'actors' are either nation-states or capital (usually reserved to defining particular national or regional capitals). and, it's those implications that are still with us in the context of recent discussions on east timor.
that, to put it another way, is about whether or not practice is central to our analyses. if our theory can only grasp the subjectivity of nation-states and capital, then what kind of connections can be made between class struggle (and our politics) and theory? those who tend to opt for an analysis in which the key and only actors were the yugoslav govt, NATO, 'western capital' (you know the list), were the ones who a) were left to decide only which of these ostensible actors to support or defend against the other apparent actors in a determination of which 'side' was more progressive; and b) obscured (for reasons which had to do with the need to subordinate this under the requirements of making 'a' propagandistically consistent) the history of the class struggles in the (ex-)Yu which actually provided an explanation of those events beyond their eventual ethnicist and nationalist outcomes.
and, as far as i can tell, it's the concept of surplus value which distinguishes marxism from economics, as a politics of the class struggle rather than the perspective of capital. i don't care if people who say they're marxists use that term, but i do think it would be strange not to have a sense of that concept (as class struggle) as central to an analysis.
so, in some ways, i'd say the issue is for me in reverse: what kind of theory is capable of being affected by the movements of the class struggle? yes, all marxists will insist that capital is a relation, that class struggle is the motor of history, that the masses make history. but is this simply a rhetoric, or does it affect the kinds of historiography and theory we'd do, the ways in which we'd argue a position or develop an analysis? and the division here between chaz and i (and indeed chris b and i) resolves down pretty much into the issue of whether our analyses are 'lessons' in the concrete possibility of the self-emancipation of the working class or 'lessons' in the powerlessness of the working class accompanied by the promise that something else (nation-states and geo-political blocs) will serve as proxies. the latter seems to me to be a promise that is always a deferred and diverted promise, and one which ignores the extent to which (for instance) the (ex-)Yu workers were organised and resisting the immiseration strategies of the IMF (agreeably implemented by both the Yugoslav govt and the established unions), and therefore the extent to which the Belgrade Govt and NATO were complicit in that immiseration.
carrol,
1. i never said that there was resources and surplus value were mutually exclusive for an analysis. quite the contrary. i said that the former is not the same thing as the latter. economists can do the former quite well, and do so quite often without considering the conditions of exploitation and resistances therein, except in the most reified of ways. i'm a little surprised that we'd be called upon to dispense with surplus value (in the political sense of that term, as marx would use it) in the name of refusing abstraction. all this would do, as it mostly did, is leave economics as the means to comprehend those events -- which strikes me as me as much more abstract, in the sense that derek sayer means 'abstract', for instance.
2. it was hardly a difficult thing to see 'essence manifest itself' in the history of the war in the (ex-)Yu. fact is, this history was generally ignored in the name of arguing for intervention or against because it would, apparently, complicate those arguments to the point where (apparently) no action was possible one way or other. the issue isn't one of rediscovering over and again the basis of capitalist action in the extraction of surplus value, but rather of looking at the specific ways in which various and divergent strategies were enacted on this terrain, which included strategies of composing and decomposing the manifest actors in the movement of the class struggle (eg, the shift from the anti-closure campaigns to nationalist competitions to war to NATO's intervention to create more stable and more compliant bantustans for the EU, etc). ie., a concrete account of the class struggle.
charles,
> THIS IS PREVARICATION. YOU DIDN'T QUOTE MOST OF WHAT I SAID. THE REST OF
IT SHOWS YOU ARE NOT TELLING THE TRUTH.<
what am i not telling the truth about?
what you added to the citations of prior posts does not falsify that, as i said yesterday "in post after post earlier this year, you insisted that the war against Yugoslavia was being waged in order to grab resources and for arms sales. which is why it took a number of posts from me ... in order to get you even to gesture ever so superficially at the class struggle and things like surplus value, and then promptly return to the resources thing."
what will show me that i am wrong is
a) a post PRIOR to this discussion around the 11th of May where you had not, as i said above, "insisted that the war against Yugoslavia was being waged in order to grab resources and for arms sales";
b) referred in more than a superficial way to the class struggle and the labour power of yugoslav workers AFTER this discussion around May 11th;
and c) where you had in fact DISCUSSED (and not simply gestured toward) the class struggles in Yugoslavia, and/or the ex-Yu, and/or even the war itself as part of the class struggle and a deterioration of the conditions of exploitation of yugoslav labour-power PRIOR to this discussion around May 11th.
Angela _________