>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>>> >I have to say it seems odd for a Marxist to complain about insider's
>>> >vocabularly and an assumed common culture. Reification and the
>>> >transformation problem aren't the stuff of everyday speech.
>>> >
>>> >Doug
>>
>>I never did understand what "reification" meant. Can someone enlighten
>>me.
>>
>>Carrol
>>
>>P.S. I think Jim Devine over on pen-l said about all that needs saying re
>>the transformation problem -- and that could be conveyed simply to
>>anyone with an 8th-grade education.
>
>I'm glad to see you're both responding to the point, rather than the
>specifics of the example words I chose. I guess I was all wrong that
>Marxism has its own vocabulary and shared culture; obviously anyone
>with an 8th grade education can understand Capital or History &
>Class Consciousness. Silly me; must be all those evil postmodernists
>over on the shelf.
With all due respect, I'd have to say a topic of Marxism's "vocabulary and shared culture" doesn't really belong in the thread "Where was the Color at A16 in D.C.?" where Chuck0, Alex, Nathan, Max, Justin, Kelley, Carrol, & I are debating the relation among race, democracy, leadership, styles of organizing, relative merits of the consensus model versus other ways of holding meetings, youth cultures, etc. -- hence our lack of interest in your question when it was raised initially. If anyone wants to pursue this subject of Marxism's "vocabulary and shared culture," s/he might do so in a different thread (as Ken & Catherine are happily doing in their dialogue on philosophical understanding of consent and consensus).
That said, between Adorno and a nameless communist militant who died during the Vietnam War without ever having read _Capital_ or _History & Class Consciousness_, for instance, I don't think we can posit much shared culture and vocabulary except perhaps their probably common belief that capitalism is inimical to human well-being (which belief, incidentally, many non-Marxists share).
Yoshie