Joanna wrote: "It teaches us how to recognize the social and historical layers upon which certain apparent 'common sense' notions -- like labor, money, property -- are built. What makes 'Capital' hard is not the jargon, but the depth of the analysis and the intricacy of the relationships it seeks to describe."
Well, I think this is science, that is, really understanding real processes (and the proof is in the practice). I see no reason to cede science to the positivists (still the reigning ideology of science the world over) who think that they can take a exemplar from one region of existence: physics, and use it to explain the alpha and omega. Yawn, barf.
Chomsky's problem with opposing 'smart ideas' and 'theory' is that you no one can ever really settle on what is what. To you it's a smart idea, to me it's an stupid, overly complex theory that I'm sure I'll never need to know.
Moreover, Chomsky's position as I read it in this thread (if this is his position, I'm not sure) has the unfortunate consequence of never allowing us to go beyond the existing categories (that is, theories) bequeathed us by the oppressive world we find ourselves thrown into: wages, interest, profit are just some examples. Thus any new abstractions that we come up with to better explain what is going on (use value, exchange value, surplus value, exploitation, the commodity, gender, etc.) are useless since invariably they will be 'theories', not 'smart ideas' when they are first proposed.
Chomsky's implicit positivism is probably related to his discursive strategy: an endless compendium of facts that speak for themselves. (note: I enjoy reading Chomsky and support what he does).
I would suggest that rather than dismissing the theory of the academy as being useless theory, we rather understand it as one expression of the alienated condition of intellectuals (and society in general), and realize that sometimes they stumble on some serious shit. Funny how we can bash the intellectuals of our day, all the while Marx stole everything he came up with from boug. intellectuals of his day, and then reworked it.
Cheers,
Jonathan Lassen
At 06:45 PM 12/3/2003, you wrote:
>Doug writes
>
>
>"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?"
>
>No, it wouldn't throw it out the window, it would just reduce it from a
>"religious" text or a "scientific" text...to a text that helps us critique
>capitalism in an interesting and useful way. I teaches us how to recognize
>the social and historical layers upon which certain apparent "common
>sense" notions -- like labor, money, property -- are built. What makes
>"Capital" hard is not the jargon, but the depth of the analysis and the
>intricacy of the relationships it seeks to describe.
>
>Joanna
>
>
>
>
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