[lbo-talk] Marx -- Schmarx (download NOW and save £995!)

Tom Walker timework at telus.net
Sun Apr 10 12:16:24 PDT 2005


Michael Perelman wrote,

>I am also a fan of this pamphlet, but I was confused by the Bolivian connection.

I should mention that my FREE .pdf file represents a savings of £995 off the price of the 10-volume set of "extremely scarce and difficult to find" materials (which includes the 1821 pamphlet) scheduled to be published by Routledge this year. How do we do it at Work Less? VOLUME! VOLUME! VOLUME!

http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/source%20and%20remedy.pdf

Just to add a bit of context (or a teaser): a key exhortation from the pamphlet appears in the notorious Grundrisse "Fragment on Machines" in a passage regarding what Postone calls the "growing historical nonnecessity of value-constituting labor," which is in turn interpreted by Postone as "essential to Marx's understanding of capitalism's fundamental contradiction as between what is and its own potential (rather than between what is and what also is)."

What Postone calls here the contradiction between "what is and what also is" could alternatively be named class struggle: the contradiction between capital and the proletariat, the basis of traditional Marxism. In other words, Postone is saying that what Marx is saying is that class struggle is only more or less a sort of prolegomenon (a classroom exercise) to the _real_ historical drama that is not simply an intensification or climax of more of the same -- "the final conflict" as the words to The Internationale© would have it.

Going out on a limb, one might say that the "final conflict" is cognitive and has to do with the establishment of a kind of dialogic knowledge/thinking in which the notion of "intellectual property" would be not only apparently an oxymoron but indisputably so.

The Sandwichman



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