>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.
I'll be most readers - most educated readers - would find vol. 1 of Capital pretty rough going. And that was the vol. that Marx finished.
He didn't just observe. He linked his observations to a theory, and the theory illuminated his observations. Even the most anti-theoretical person operates with some kind of implicit theory. Why the hostility to making it explicit?
Doug