>The ideological errors of ordinary humans are not
>weird or stupid or irrational at all but the result of spontaneous human
>intelligence doing the best it can to describe the reality of its
>sourroundings. The bartender's analysis of the _appearances_ of life
>under capitalism make more sense than do the analyses of Henwood, Fitch,
>Cox, etc. because the bartender has his eye (quite properly until
>something allows him to learn better) fixed on appearances, while
>Henwood, Fitch, Cox, etc. to the best of their ability are trying to
>understand the reality that expresses itself in but is not identical
>with those appearances.
A: Appearances under capitalism merely tell us that "some people are richer than others, most work but some don't, etc."
B: "[T]he reality that expresses itself in but is not identical with those appearances" is the mechanism of surplus value extraction that Marx analyzed in _Capital_, etc., which allows us to grasp _class relations_, not "class differences," "social ranks," etc.
Without B, merely on the basis of A, one might as well think, for instance, "There are upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, lower-middle class, working class, & underclass. While all other classes work one way or another, the underclass, who are often unemployed, do not work, so it is the underclass who bring down the rest of us." Even if one doesn't sink this deeply into ideology, on the basis of A alone, there is no strong grounds that the poor should complain of the wealth of the rich, for A doesn't say anything about the relation between rich & poor, much less about how capital extracts surplus value from labor.
Yoshie