[lbo-talk] Some Observations on Class, was Re: working class?

[Culture Lab]

I don't see how it's in need of much. He wrote extensively about a variety 
of classes and their relations to one another in a variety of texts, 
including _Capital_. Even when he wrote about working class v capital, he 
was speaking to the future, not the present. He was making a prediction, 
which is why there is an extensive literature that addresses that 
prediction, asks why it never came to pass.

Marx also wrote about whether intellectuals would fall down on the side of 
capital or the working class, for instance, arguing that it could go either 
way. He saw the significance of intellectuals, even then, asking whether 
they'd be capitalist tools or not. His answer was that there was no 
proclivity toward one side or the other. It depended on historical 
circumstances.

Gar Lipow might make the argument that we just haven't reached the future 
Marx dreamed of, when the scales would fall from our eyes and it would be 
the masses of the working class, united, and staring down a minority, 
Capital. In the meanwhile, there's nothing particularly dangerous about 
discussing, analyzing, or theorizing. Marx surely did. And, his 
interpreters to English having him using the word _class_ throughout his 
oeuvre.

someone once told me that the difference here -- a marker of how you see 
this perhaps? -- is how you see Marx's ouevre:

There are those who think his writings are of a piece, that the old marx 
can be see as extending and clarifying and moving into a specific set of 
analyses (to address the questions that plagued economists at the time and 
make his mark) the work of the young marx.

Others seem to be embarrassed by the work of the young marx and argue that 
there is a radical break between the two and that the work of the young 
marx really can't help us understand the old.

Me? I think that the use of phrases signifying the existence of more than 
one class in the late Marx is enough to toss that debate into the recycling 
bin of history once and for all.

Alas, this is about the fifth time I've written this since 1998, so 
d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d.

At 10:29 AM 10/23/2005, Victor wrote:


>I do not agree with you that there is no practical value to be had in the 
>investigation of class relations in the US.  I suggest that considering 
>the datedness of Marx's analysis of Capital (the Capitalism  described in 
>_Capital_ is mainly that of England up to the late 1850's, early 1860's), 
>and of his familiarity with alternatives to the capitalist mode of 
>production (mostly the 18th and early 19th century Utopias and Romantic 
>representations of cooperative peasant communities) the original Marxist 
>paradigm is in sore need of revision.

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