>Marx is arguing that capitalist social relations presuppose independent
>agents; what's the problem here? I guess we've been through this
>before on the list (the agency/individualism/independence stuff),
>but this seems like a pretty basic Marxist point.
Not just that, but to accuse Marx of not fully understanding that "independence" as a socially created arrangement is to miss one of Marx's major points. I thought that passage captured the complexity of the realities and illusions of capitalist individualism - and its potential for something better, meaning more explicitly social - rather beautifully, for less than a paragraph.
Doug