> This seems to come pretty close to saying that Marx thought that the
> development of capitalism was a retrograde step, which would require a
> reading of large tracts of "Capital" which was not so much dialectic
> as bloody perverse.
Capitalism *is* regressive, the worst thing to ever happen to the human race -- but also progressive, and the best thing to ever happen to the human race (I'm paraphrasing Jameson, who also points out that this has an internal analogue: capital reproduces other, subsidiary modes of production, e.g. slavery or the patriarchal division of labor, within and through newer modes of production). *That's* the contradiction which Marx's mature works illuminate; that the same system which produces astonishing wealth and achievements, also produces horrendous exploitation and misery. Otherwise, you're back in a moralizing mode, that rich people are just somehow evil, and the poor are good, and what should be a social history turns right back into natural history: the rich are evil because, um, well, it's only natural that money corrupts. This then feeds right back into a whole reactionary set of ideologies, about how the poor are just lazy, how the welfare state curbs initiative, etc. -- the usual Anthony Giddens Third Way line. A certain orthodox Marxism has only quoted the Marxian dialectic; the point is, as Marx himself ceaselessly insisted, to *think dialectically*.
-- Dennis