>I recollect Draper suggesting that class 'in itself'/'for itself'
>formulation is Hegelian residue in Marx,
and Jim replied:
>>Yes, and he could have added Kantian, too - but then that would be no
bad thing <<
below, a passage from Balibar's "In search of the proletariat: the notion of class politics in Marx", _Masses, Classes, Ideas_, pp. 135-36. The essay is an interesting and i think careful reading of the uses of 'proletariat', 'masses' and 'class' in Marx's writings. I'd cite the parts more relevant to this if i hadn't lent my book out, but the following might give an idea of the ways in which he would see the above issues.
"... what these still allusive analyses demonstrate is that Marx's 'political' theory and action have no proper space in the ideological configuration of his time. For this configuration is itself a 'full' space, devoid of any gap in which a specifically marxist discourse could have established itself alongside, or opposite, other discourses. This is why Marx finds himself reduced to playing these discourses [Lasalle and Bakunin in particular] off against one another. In the same vein, practically, all of his political 'art' consisted in building more and more massive organisations of the working class movement, while playing different tendencies off against one another in an attempt to dilute their antagonism and add to their strengths, at least for a while.
Now, this space is entirely structured by a series of oppositions that can be translated into one another: first of all, state/society, but also capital/labour, state/capital, compulsion/freedom, hierarchy/equality, public interest/private interest, plan/market, and so on. The only possible 'game' in such a space is to substitute one antithesis for another, or to identify alternatively with one of the terms against the other. Such is the game unconsciously played by all interested sides in the struggles in which the constitution of the labour movement is at stake. It is also the game Marx played, sometimes form a defensive posture . . . and sometimes, when he thought he could choose his own ground, from an offensive posture, starting from a theory which he thought allowed him to dominate the way the cards were dealt, the conditions of the game (the genesis of the 'ideas' that compose it, and the material basis of their constitution). Let us just suggest here that when Marx and marxists think they have mastered the political game which they inevitably must play, this game in fact escapes their control and comes back to haunt them.
However, this does not mean that one should be content merely to record and illustrate the inscription of marxism in the space of the 'dominant ideology' and the effects in return of this ideology upon marxist discourse [as] . . . vacillations, contradictions, uncertainties. This would be a little too easy. And under these conditions, it would be hard to understand why marxism, or something obviously central to it, did not end up being digested, and blended into the banality of the dominant ideas. On the contrary, marxism has constituted for a century one of the most permanent anchoring points for any critique of social domination (if necessary by passing through a prior 'critique of marxism' in its official form).
It seems to me that there are both theoretical and factual reasons for this critical function. The political 'game' is not static. It is a process that must confront the unexpectedness of an excessive reality that contradicts its own representations. As a consequence, what is significant is the conceptual displacements, the effects of twisting of the dominant discourse that, in a given conjuncture, makes its coherence vacillate. It is indeed the case that, if no discourse can be held outside of the existing ideological space, every discourse in a conjunction or in a given relationship of forces is not, for all that, reducible to its logic and does not thereby function as a moment in its reproduction. The fact is that in the conjunction in which we still find ourselves today, marxism, or something of Marx's discourse, produces this twisting effect, and the decisive concepts, above all those in _Capital_ which explain the logic of exploitation, figure as foreign bodies in the space of the dominant ideology."
Angela _________