Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 02:52 PM, n/ a wrote:
> [clip]
>
> maybe i missed something and i admit to not following every sentence of
> the exchange between you and justin, but that's sure the way it's
> seemed to me. you seem predisposed to see marxism as economic
> determinism at its core, and then try to dismiss arguments that marx's
> general outlook is not so simple, and particularly his view of the
> revolutionary state, on the grounds that you were just talking about
> the marxist-anarchist debate, which comes back to how marxism is
> economic determinism at its core.
>
> i'm surprised luke hasn't chastised you, already, for the circularity
> of this logic. ;-)
>
This makes the point more clearly than I did.
But, incidentally, an essay that was of immense help to me in my early study of marxism was written by an anarchist, Fredy Perlman, "Introduction: Commodity Fetishism," in I.I. Rubin, _Essays on Marx's Theory of Value_, tr. Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972). But perhaps he wasn't anarchist enough for our anarchist cadre on lbo. I haven't reread Perlman's essay for quite some time, and doubtless I would find elements in it to disagree with, but it is richly suggestive. I liked (and like) particularly well the following paragraphs:
****
Marx's principal aim was not to study scarcity, or to explain price, or to allocate resources, but to analyze how the working activity of people is regulated in a capitalist economy. The subject of the analysis is a dtermined social structure, a particular culture, namely commodity-capitalism, a social form of economy in which the relations among people are not regulated directly, but through things. Consequently, "the specific character of economic theory as a science which deals with production relations which acquire material forms" (Rubin, p. 47)
Marx's central concern was human creative activity, particularly the determinants, the regulators which shape this activity in the capitalist form of economy. Rubin's thorough study makes it clear that this was not merely a central concern of the "young Marx" or of the "old Marx," but that it remained central to Marx in all his theoretical and historical works, which extend over half a century. . . . (Perlman in Rubin, p. xi)******
And earlier:
**** According to Rubin, "Political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with _production relations_ which are established among people in the process of production." [Rubin 1972, p. 31] In terms of this definition, political economy is not the study of prices or of scarce resources; it is a study of social relations, a study of culture. Political economy asks why the productive forces of society develope within a particular social form, why the machine process unfolds within the context of business enterprise, why industrialization takes the form of capitalist development. Political economy asks how the working activity of people is regulated in a specific, historical from of economy. (p. x)****
I imagine that the form of "economic determinism" which our anarchist friends probably have in mind (and which they have probably inherited from general gossip rather than from reading much of Marx) is that of base and superstructure. If they want to study seriously the scope and limits of this metaphor, the extent to which it is actually grounded in Marx, and (ultimately) its inadequacy, they might read the works of Edward Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Ellen Meiksins Wood (esp. her _Democracy against Capitalism_ and _Peasant-Citizen and Slave_.)
Carrol
> j