>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 08/31/99 07:29PM >>>
Marx by contrast developed his categories out of the economic material of his day. These reflections of the economy in the minds of the bourgeois were not just illusions, but real forms of existence of capital, as reflected in thought.
I would say that you can just reactivate Marx's categories in relation to the material, but you will still be repeating his results rather than his methods. The greater challenge is to develop theory out of the empirical categories of the economy as it is presented to us today. That means taking the ordinary economic thinking of our own day, and trying to capture the real movement and relations under the fetishistic terminology under which present-day production is reflected in thought. (((((((((((((
Charles: I agree with this. However, since Marx era, capitalism has empirically, that is in fact, gone through a development which was factually examined by Lenin as imperialism/state monopoly capitalism. Marx's categories have to been understood as already freshened up to that extent. The socalled use of ossified Marxist categories usually ignores that Leninism is exactly a major aspect of the intellectual project of using updated categories, the complete opposite of dogmatism.
The logical extension of Leninism is to empirically update Leninism's categories. The bourgeois category of "globalism" suggests that there is evidence of transnationalization of capitalism even beyond the shape of imperialism. All fresh minded Leninists are trying to take account of this evidence. Much Soviet and other communist party economic analysis does exactly this. Of course, all of it doesn't , but the pretense that all of it treats Marxism as ossified categories is hugely false.
The implication that most Marxist-Leninists of 1999 are using old, outdated categories of Marx is false.
This is updating is done with
much of the data from bourgeois sources, economists and government stats, including much brought to this list.
After all of that, some of Marx's categories do not go out of date or fail to correspond to the data until capitalism ends. Some basic aspects of capitalism have not changed. Or do you have data to demonstrate otherwise ? Haven't seen any presented.
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I would say that the most important contemporary economic discussions are not about financial instruments, or labour processes, but about the environment. Environmentalism is the most developed and ideological discussion of economics at the moment. It is the only discourse in which production processes, global economic relations, class are discussed. Through the prisms of pollution and the environment, the most extensive discussion of socio-economic relations is taking place. But the form of that discussion is deeply fetishised, which is why it is such a pisser that so many here seem to assume the validity of the categories of environmentalism. People who would automatically see categories like 'Capital' or 'profit' as deeply mystified seem to take their modern-day equivalents - 'appropriate technology', 'environmental risk', 'pollution' or 'species diversity' - as if they were transparently self- evident terms.
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Charles: Don't the original Marxist categories of class struggle and abolition of private property hold the key to the environmental problems ?
Charles Brown
In message <37CC5863.A005A834 at mail.ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox
<cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes
>I would like to see more discussion of the intersection and
>overlapping of bourgeios and marxist economic categories,
>but I don't quite see why it has (at least to begin with) to
>be cast in terms of who does what worse.
>
>Carrol
>
>Fabian Balardini wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 31 Aug 1999 17:24:23 Doug Henwood wrote:>
>
>>>Marxists love to play with the categories of national income
>>>accounting, but I can't imagine any who'd denounce the general
>>>project as fraudulent crap.
>
>>so what is your alternative to handle data then????
>
>>You are the one who prefer burgeois categories as opposed to marxist
>>categories derived from them, as you have made clear a while ago on the
>>exchange on productive labor. This means that you believe everything is
>> fine with the Keynesian categories and the theoretical framework behind
>>the measurement of GDP.
>
>>I don't understand why you now turn around and accuse Marxist
>>economists of 'toying' around with these categories when you are
>>doing the same or worse because you are not even challenging these
>>categories.
>
-- Jim heartfield