--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
>So,
> although economy is
> the real site and politics is a theatre of shadows,
> the main fight is
> to be fought in politics and ideology"
Since their departure from the Krisis group, the circle around Robert Kurz and Roswitha Scholz (and their journal Exit!) have been broadening their critique beyond the immediate concern of political economy to encompass a critique of ideology and a general theory of modernity.
One interesting part of this is their rejection of the orthodox Histomat lesson of the history being a history of class struggle, with the basal relationship between classes determining the ideological superstructure. Instead, they are developing a theory of a history of fetish relationships, with periods of of history having a fetish that structures production and mediates social relationships. For modernity, this would be the "value-separation" fetish (Wertabspaltung), which separates spheres of existence that previously formed an organic unity (such as economy and politics in feudalism, or economy and household) by constituting a structurally masculine sphere of the value relationship and a structurally feminine private sphere that subsumes activities which by their very nature cannot be organized according to the logic of value.
This, to me, is a very nice way of subverting the mechanistic claim of economy's determining power "in the last instance" by showing that it is only in modern society that the economy is a separate sphere from other activities.
I will translate some excerpts from Gerold Wallner's article "Die Leute der Geschichte" when I have some time.
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