interview with Istvan Meszaros

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Mon Sep 27 11:30:13 PDT 1999


If I might offer an answer to Carrol's "how so ?", by the fact that Marx founded a historical materialist method to be applied to tributary modes. As far as I know Marx was the first that we are aware of to propose a materialist analysis of all societies.

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



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