Marxism and Bodies

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Jan 11 22:21:58 PST 2003


Marta Russell wrote:
>
> I would like to hear what people say too. One of my concerns is that
> the body is only conceived in terms of work. The worker is the
> central place of body. It is a work-based model of social membership.
> For people who may not be able to work this poses a problem because
> they are marginalized by a world in which productive capacity equates
> with worth.
>

A few preliminary responses, sort of off the top of my head.

1. "Capacity equates worth": The error, at least in part, is the assumption that one needs to establish "worth." I had forgotten the following until my son reminded me of it a few weeks ago. It seems that when we started giving him an allowance, I had said, "This you get for existing," regardless of what you get or don't get otherwise (or something like that).

But it is true that under capitalism "worth = value," and for non-capitalists, capacity to produce surplus value.

2. Once we get both worth and value out of consideration, don't you urge that conditions in which the disabled can engage in activity be created. And activity does involve body, if no more than blinking one's eyes to signal yes or no. (Measurements of worth, remember, being excluded.)

3. "Work-based model" can be ambiguous. It is not a model (i.e. something that exists abstractly to be imitated) that is involved but the fundamental condition of survival under capitalism, the sale of one's labor power. That _does_ generate an ideological expectation: that the individual (cf. Marx's phrase "dot-like existence of the worker undercapitalism" in the _Grundrise_) has no social existence until by his/her own "initiative" she enters into productive relations.

Getting too sleepy to continue.

Carrol



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