[lbo-talk] Mechanical Marxism: A useful concept?

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Sat Dec 16 17:16:13 PST 2006


On 12/16/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> "Mechanical marxism" is probably more useful, and can be described in
> more or less intellgible terms. It consists in the reduction of social
> relations to the 'things' related, denying the reality of the relations.
> The clearest example of mechanical marxism is any empirical definition
> of class as opposed to class as a relation and a process.

Your definition is interesting. Someone whose work I admire claimed that the Japanese have a word for what you're describing: "ma."

"Now, the Japanese have an interesting word that is called 'ma'. Spelled in english just m-a, ma. And ma is the stuff in between what we call objects. It's the stuff we don't see. Because we're focussed on the noun-ness of things rather than the process-ness of things. Whereas Japanese has a more process, feel-oriented way of looking at how things relate to each other. You can always tell that by looking the size of a word it takes to express something that is important. So ma is very short; we have to use words like 'interstitial,' or worse, to approximate what the Japanese are talking about."

-- Alan Kay, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" keynote

(This is in the context of his 30 year long apologia for coining the misnomer "object-oriented programming." Since this term wrongly emphasizes noun-ness.)


> > Well, I already offered some evidence which suggests Chomsky
> > consciously disagrees with vulgar marxism.
>
> I find your use of "vulgar marxism" utterly unintelligible so I can't do
> anything with this.

Actually, we have fairly similar definitions. I took vulgar marxism to be a synonym of economism, which was defined by the book Chomsky recommended:

"Broadly speaking the term 'economism' means attributing greater importance to the economy than is warranted. It can take the form of assuming that dynamics in the economic sphere are more important than dynamics in other spheres when this, in fact, is not the case in some particular society. It can also take the form of assuming that classes are more important agents of social change, and racial, gender or political groups are less important 'agents of history' than they actually are in a particular situation."

-- Hahnel, _The ABCs of Political Economy_

Tayssir



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