>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>
>On the left most broadly conceived, for over a century the ruling
>commonplace has always been that Marx was right up to 25 years ago, but
>now things have changed, and the capitalism Marx knew is utterly
>transformed ....
CARL: "Presto, capitalism seems to have changed again and reverted to classic form in the last three and a half months. Post 9/11, we now have in-your-face imperialism that is indistinguishable, IMO, from the 19th-century original. Now that we're living under the global dispensation of Uncle Sam as No More Mr. Nice Guy, it's reasonable to assume that Marx's insights into the overtly brutal system that he witnessed will have new relevance."
Carl be serious "indistinguishable"?
I can't help getting the shits a little - nothing Carrol has ever said suggests a tempering of capitalism, but a change, but whenever anybody suggests a change then it is suggested that such a change can only be for the better and hence their observations are capitalist apologetics.
Carl this is how I read your reply, but Historical Materialism is a self-negating concept of capitalism - Marx expected it to change hance he spent so long discovering its essence in order to show just how versitile it was. What Carrol is clearly refering to is the superficial and gleaned phrases often stuck together as Marx's conception of Capitalism which has appeared to work right upto the last 25 years years and now seems so out of place.
Comic book Marxism, has been a joke for some time, but recently it has become an intellectual embarrassment. Unless we really do embrace the need to thoroughly understand the actual changes wrought by history then we will have practically killed off Marx's real work (we are in the process of doing this now - destroying the intellectual heritage because we cling to its outdated cultural heritage).
Now to place a straw-argument up, which Carol never made that Capitalism must have become humanized, and then counter-pose that to the idea that the proof is apparent in some eternal return to classic Capitalistic personality - not only misses the point but puts an inherently ahistoric viewpoint (one which I suspect you don't actually hold).
Carrol is stating something that is critically important: that we have to return to basics, we have to re-understand our world, that we have to accept that many of the truths we have taken as pre-given have been falsified by history and I would add the task is urgent.
If this is post-Marxism, good enough, post-Marx I think not!!
Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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