James Heartfield wrote:
> As for the exterminating Angel's attempts to turn Marxism into a
> sacred cult for true initiates only, all I can say is that those
> who did read him well, like Rosdolsky, Mattick, Grossmann, Yaffe,
> Altvater etc., (but not Holloway, Postone, Dumenil and Levy, etc,)
> did precious little with their greater understanding.
Moreover, to make the use Marx makes of the "value form" the part of Marx worth preserving is to keep the bath water and throw out the baby. That use consists in an axiomatic deductive argument claiming to demonstrate an "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" that of necessity leads to the absolute immiserizatipm of those subjected to wage labour. Marx gives this immiserization a key role in the creation of subjects with the capabilities and the will required to transform capitalism into the penultimate social form from which all barriers to the full human development required for the actualization of "freedom" have been eliminated. It generates the "crisis" from which this form will emerge.
Immiserization of this kind, however, is not only not required for the development of such a subject, it's radically inconsistent with it.
Other aspects of Marx's account of the way the capitalist labour process works to devellop the capabilities required for its transformation also won't survive critical examination.
For instance, Marx accepted Adam Smith's argument (which Hegel had also appropriated) that the specialization and division of labour was destructive of the "intellectual and moral powers" of those subjected to it. He also appropriated Hegel's "heretical idea" that the most efficient "labour" would be the labour of the "universally developed individual," Hegel's "educated person" "able to do what others do".
He claimed, however, as some of the passages I've recently quoted indicate, that mature capitalism undermined the specialization and division of labour found in the "manufacturing" phase he identified with early capitalism so that mature capitalism worked to some degree to "educate" workers in Hegel's sense, an "education" to be completed by the labour process which would characterize the penultimate social form. (Among other things, in the penultimate form of the process "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished".)
"Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>
Marx pointed to the US as exemplifying this apect of mature capitalism. It was "a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another, the particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant". This worked to create "civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks". In Capital he quotes a French worker recently returned from San Francisco in support of these claims:
"A French worker wrote as follows on his return from San Francisco,: "I could never have believed, that I was capable of working at all the trades I practised in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but the printing of books ... Once I was in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their jobs as often as their shirts, then, upon my faith, I did as the others. As mining did not pay well enough, I left it for the city, and there I became in succession a typographer, a slater, a plumber, etc. As a result of this discovery that I am fit for any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusc and more of a man." (A. Corbon, "De l'enseignement professionnel," 2nd ed., p. 50.)" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#n227>
The capitalist labour process, however, in the Taylorist and other forms developed since Marx does not work to "educate" those subjected to it in the way Marx claims.
The most important salvageable part of the labour theory of value is the ontological idea that human "sensuous activity" objectifies reason so, that, for example, "means of production" are "the power of knowledge, objectified" and true "wealth" is the developed capability for fully "free" activity. This, as Marx points out, is a sublation of "idealism," a sublation in which the objectification of reason - of "ideas" - is made the defining feature of human "sensuous activity" in its fully realized forms of the instrumental and end in themselves activities that define the realms of necessity and freedom of an ideal community. The key features of this sublation are summarized in the Theses on Feuerbach.
Marx's Capital then, whatever its imperfections, is an account of capitalism as part of the historical process through which, by means of an "incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers", "freedom" in the sense of the radical "humanist" enlightenment is made practicable and actualized.
This baby has largely gone missing from "Marxism".
As Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" demonstrates, "poststructuralism" attempts to murder it.
In this endeavor it enlists as weapons the anti-humanist ideas often mistakenly identified with "enlightenment", e.g. Hume's derivation of radical skepticism from scientific materialism and his related fragmentation of the self into a "flux of impressions and of reactions to impressions, each impression a distinct, self-sufficient existence" and Darwinian biology (in the Foucault essay Nietzsche is quoted mistakenly claiming that the radical enlightenment's idea of "human being" is refuted by the fact of evolution: "We wished to awaken the feeling of man's sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance." http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/ nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm).
Ted