> 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.
I would agree. Marx developed intellectually in an atmosphere in which Hegel was the Big Cheese, philosophically, and everyone had to speak Hegel-speak to be taken seriously (much as every English-speaking philosopher had to use positivism/linguistic-analysis-speak for a few decades to be taken seriously). But as he matured in his thought, I think he tended to drop all the dialectical fancy footwork. It was the 20th-century French (or French-writing) intellectual types who brought back all that Hegelian stuff.
Mind you, a little dialectic can be illuminating here and there, but there is no use making a fetish of it, the way many Marx commentators tended to do.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt