>It is true that post-Marxists do not see history as a
>teleological process, with an immanent logic that works itself out until it
>is fully and teleologically developed, be that logic the Hegelian geist or
>the Marxian production.
Where do you find Marx being teleological? I've been reading him for the past few weeks, and nowhere I've read does he state that the immanent end of history (in Fukuyama-esque terms) is communism. He does point out that the internal motions of capitalism will bring it to crises no matter how hard the capitalists try to reform the system piecemeal, and that these crises won't, of themselves, usher in socialism. They merely provide the environment/grist for the attempt at revolutionary transfer of (hegemonic) power from capitalism to socialism by way of human revolutionary activity. He does say that, under fully developed communism, the contradictions experienced under capitalism will be resolved (presumably they will be in the process of being rationally "worked through" under socialism); I assume here that he means the production contradictions only which perturb society at large. This is nowhere near Hegel's conception of Universal Mind.
Leo also said:
>To the contrary, they emerge out of very particular
>historical dynamics at discrete moments in history, as one of a limited
>range of possibilities at that moment.
Yeah, I've been thinking that Marx might have made good use of probability statistics. Oh well. Maybe some time in the future, some smart-apple Marxist will use a super-supercomputer to plot historical probability in the same manner weather is plotted today (shades of Psycho-History!).
Leo also said:
>So what post-Marxists dispute is the existence of an immanent historical
>logic, pre-given before the start of human history. Certainly, struggle --
>not simply class struggle, but all sorts of struggles over power -- is part
>of what determines the direction of human history within the limits
>prescribed by a given social formation. What is trans-historical about the
>Marxian formulation is the insistence that human history is the history of
>_class_ struggle, as a consequence of the special status it accords to
>production and the conception of human beings as laboring beings by nature.
Again, please point out to me where Marx mentions anything transcendental pre-existing human history. To my reading, at least, class-struggle is a back-drop, a "meta-struggle" to the various other struggles which have gone on in history, and this meta-struggle between the producers and those who live off the producers has come to a visible head under capitalism. Historical record mentions episodes which, perhaps inaccurately, point this up (e.g. the land reforms of the Gracchi brothers, the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages, and the pre-Marxist "socialist" struggles of e.g. Chartism). Of course this does depend on how one defines human beings as apart from other animals: we do produce our own "subsistence" instead of taking it "raw" from nature (at least, once we figured out how to do it), we use our unique (among terrestrial species at least) human intelligence to create what we need. Marx points out that a class of people came about who, inadvertently (initially?) or not, expropriated what the class of producers created; this has been going on for all of recorded history. I haven't read Laclau and Mouffe for some time now, but I do remember thinking that, while generally agreeing with their observations, they seemed to concentrate too heavily for my liking on too many particularities of society and to forget the larger meta-struggle going on. I'll have to read them again (if only to argue some more with you, Leo).
!{)>
Todd