Speaking just for myself, I think there are many non or pre-capitalist basis for various institutions and practices in capitalist, for example, patriarchy, but that these beome shaped by capitalist social relations. And vice versa, you wil say. Quite, but I remain a historical materialist because I do think that for many of the questions that interest socialists, capitalsim is the central framework for analysis. That is why Ia m not a post-Marxist in the sense that you are, whether or not I am a Marxist in some sense or another. --jks
>From: LeoCasey at aol.com
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>, <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu>
>Subject: Re: Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
>Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 14:52:17 EDT
>
>Justin:
>
>The provocation and the red herring is, unfortunately, in your perception,
>since -- by the time I finished reading your reply -- the position I had
>taken in my original post was unrecognizable to me.
>
>To begin, there was a context to what I wrote. The thread and my
>intervention was clearly focused on the modern epoch -- the capitalist
>epoch in Marxian theory -- so the notion that I was making some
>trans-historical statement that applied to pre-capitalist epochs and/or
>social formations is clearly a misreading of what I said, and of the thread
>itself. The discussion focused on how to understand and how to integrate
>Marx's analysis of class relations under capitalism with Foucault's
>analysis of disciplinary power in the modern period. If that wasn't clearly
>enough delimited, certainly my introduction of Poulantzas' _State, Power,
>Socialism_, with its analysis of the contemporary state and contemporary
>political strategies of the socialist left, should have left no confusion
>about what I was referring to.
>
>Nor did I say that Marxism sees other power relations -- gender, racial,
>etc. -- as a form of capitalist class relations. For one, I can't even
>make sense of the thesis you are attributing to me: it is like saying that
>an apple is a form of an orange. For another, since I was responding to
>Yoshie, I was referring to arguments she had made. As I read her arguments
>-- and I am happy to be corrected by her if I misread them -- she believes
>that the explanation for the existence of other, non-class forms of power
>relations, from those of race and gender to those demarcated by Foucault's
>notion of disciplinary power, lies in the capitalist system [mode of
>production] and its class relations. In her view, capitalism needs or
>requires such disciplinary power apparatuses as the asylum. By contrast, I
>do not think that capitalism needs/requires the asylum, or that the asylum
>needs/requires capitalism, just as I do not think that capitalism requires
>racism, or that racism requires capitalism. There is, in my view, no
>necessary, functional relationship between those two forms of power, simply
>a contingent, historical relationship. The relationship is not one of
>essence and necessity, but of articulation and contingency. I may be wrong,
>but as I understand the position Yoshie has put forward here, she sees the
>relationship as necessary and essential. What Foucault does for her is fill
>in the gaps in Marx's analysis of capitalism as a system, by providing
>historical, local analyses of institutions and practices which are a
>necessary, functional part of capitalism, but which Marx never addressed.
>For her, Marx [the analysis of class relations] does not fill in gaps in
>Foucault's theory [the analysis of disciplinary power]; Foucault [the
>analysis of disciplinary power] fills in gaps in Marx's theory [the
>analysis of capitalism as a social system]. That was the position I was
>engaging.
>
>Now, I do not particularly care by what criteria individuals choose to
>consider themselves Marxists are non-Marxists. If you want to call yourself
>a Marxist, or a historical materialist in the Marxian tradition, that is a
>matter of self-identification, and it does not make much sense to argue
>over it. But it does seem to me that there is a core to Marx's analysis,
>and to the Marxian tradition that was built upon that analysis, and that is
>worth clarifying. This core involves, however you want to express it, the
>primacy of class relations in human history. [All hitherto history has been
>the history of class struggle...] For the Marxian tradition, it is only in
>reference to capitalism as a system, with its dynamic of class struggle,
>that one can make ultimate sense of other relations of power, from racism
>and sexism to the asylum and the prison. As far as I can see, that is the
>logical corollary of the primacy of class struggle in history. And that is
>what I meant by the phrase that "capitalism is the defining essence of all
>power relations." Certainly, formulations that the class struggle [or the
>economy] is determinative only "in the last instance" allow for
>considerable mediation and complexity in explanation, but, by their very
>terminology, they still accord trans-historical [that is human history as
>we know it, bracketed on one end by 'primitive communism' {hunting and
>gathering societies} and on the other end by 'communism proper'] primacy to
>the class struggle.
>
>If I had to locate myself on the terrain of theories of power relations, I
>would define myself, following Laclau and Mouffe, as a post-Marxist, rather
>than a Marxist, precisely because I do not see power relations as an
>unified, closed field, defined by some primary, essential contradiction.
>There is a lot to be gleaned from Marx's analysis of the capital-labor
>relationship, as well as from figures in the Marxian tradition, such as
>Gramsci, who worked to develop a radical democratic political theory based
>on class relationships. Class struggle has been a central, albeit far from
>exclusive, terrain of radical democratic struggle in the modern epoch, and
>for the foreseeable future it will remain quite important. That is why, in
>part, one chooses to call oneself "post-Marxist": it not only reflects a
>political trajectory, it also allows one to identify with a lot of valuable
>theoretical analysis in the Marxian tradition. But it is also
>"post-Marxist" because it has moved beyond that central core of Marxian
>analysis, and sees a much more contingent, much more historical, much more
>articulated field of power.
>
>At 09:37 PM 06/18/2001 -0400, you wrote:
> > >or one can dispense with
> > >the Marxist premise that capitalism is the defining essence of all
>power
> > >relations, and see what Marx and Foucault can tell us about a more
> > >contingent, more articulated field of power.
> > >
> >
> >Leo, you have been so reasonable for so long, and now this unnecessarily
> >provcative red herring. There is not a single Marxist here, not even
> >Charles, who thinks that "the defining essence," whatever that is, of
>"all
> >power relations" is capitalism. Even a class reductionist would not be so
> >narrow (what about feudal or slave relationships before the rise of
> >capitalism?). And even a fairly ortho Marxist need not be a class
> >reductionist.
> >
> >A historical materialist like myself (as I have explained, I doubts about
> >the utility of the "Marxist" label, and don't care to either fight _for_
>it,
> >or because of it) is perfectly happy to say that there are all kinds of
> >power relationships with all kinds of different bases. It's just that if
>you
> >want to understand class societies, including our own capitalist one,
>class
> >relationships are particularly salient for a lot of purposes, e.g., if
>you
> >want to figure out who runs the government and why, or why the press lies
> >the way it does, or why voting for Democrats somehow fails to being long
> >term large scale improvements beyond holding the dike. Do I insist, or
> >suggest, that sex oppression is really capitalist exploitation under its
> >skin? Of course not. That dog won't fight. So why bring it up?
> >
> >- --jks
>
>Leo Casey
>United Federation of Teachers
>260 Park Avenue South
>New York, New York 10010-7272
>212-98-6869
>
>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
>It never has, and it never will.
>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
>-- Frederick Douglass --
>
>.
>
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