[lbo-talk] The postmodern prince

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

> This would throw, oh just to pick a random example, most of Marx's
> Capital out the window. So all the phenomenal categories of visible
> capitalism - wages, interest, profit, dividends, rent - are all you
> need to know, and their sources and uses completely transparent to
> the uneducated eye. How can such a smart man make such a deliberately
> shallow argument?

I don't think he's arguing that the categories are immediately transparent
at all.  I think he's arguing that you can explain what they confuse and
obscure with simple, ordinary language.

In my view, Marx's expose of where profit comes from via the explanation of
the working day is, in fact, probably the best illustration of Chomsky's
point you could come up with.  Somebody intoxicated on Big Theory would
ramble all over the place about the contextuality and structural
over-determination of the hegemonic discourse-enshrouded intersection of
structure and action at the locus of the productive process.  Marx simply
showed what happen behind the scenes.

I was trained to think Marx needed Hegel to do what he did.  I now think
that's untrue.  Marx needed Engels, who was the one who showed the power of
looking behind the scenes.

Chomsky is right, IMHO.  Show me any Complex Social Theory that's necessary,
and I'll translate it into English for you, provided it's intelligible at
all.