[lbo-talk] War and Morality

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Sep 27 09:34:13 PDT 2006


joanna wrote:
>
> One of the biggest snow jobs was that everything was diff after WWII.
> One of the outstanding things about Pynchon was that he argued against that.
>
At the right abstraction (roughly, that which deals with commodity fetishism) nothing has changed in the last 300+ years -- as can be determined by an extensive enough comparative consideration of Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, & Pound. But all abstractions are true, they only differ in relevance. From the viewpoint of life conditions _as_ experienced by the bulk of white workers (and this is one of many valid abstractions) the world had been rather extensively transformed. This is also true of large numbers of small farmers (the remainder of the 19th-c petty producer & small capitalists classes). There really is a difference between a kerosene stove, an icebox, and an outhouse on the one hand and an electric stove, indoor bathroom, a refrigerator and a freezer on the other hand. Pynchon, from my reading of him, grasped capitalism through the lens of commodity fetishism, so he could grasp the continuity.

For Plato there were false appearances behind which hid a true reality. For Marx, the distinction was between _true_ appearances and the reality which explained those appearances. That is, commodity fetishism is a material reality, not just a psychological error through being fooled by appearances.

Carrol



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