CB
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 09/27/99 09:34AM >>>
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Yet for Marx the critique of
> capitalism did allow retrospective insight into the modes of production
> that had preceded it. So while Marx did not provide a teleological
> explanation for the emergence of capitalism, he was able to turn his
> critique of bourgeois Robinsonades, of rugged individualism, of the
> individual under capitalism free to amass wealth through means uncontrolled
> by the society into a sweeping historical critique of the bourgeoisie's
> precursors . . . .
How so? Granted that the past becomes intelligible looked back on from the present (and the present intelligible only by looking back on it from a hypothetical future), but to claim that Marx's critique of capitalism made possible his critique of tributary modes seems a non-sequitur -- or at best a rather vapid generalization. You do seem to drag teleology back in, perhaps through an echo of bourgeois theories of the inevitability of Progress (and hence the non-existence of history).
Carrol