> While stringing together quotations, Ted Winslow replied
> "These aren't Marx's ontological premises."
>
> Yet nothing you say--or rather quote--speaks against my reading of
> chapters 23 and 24 of Capital
The interpretive claims I made and supported with text, speak against your interpretive claims that Marx's ontology allows for the treatment of a social entity, a class, as a locus for the realization of value, e.g.as "a potential bearer of ethical claims," independent of the individuals constituting it, i.e. they speak against the following interpretive claims (which also misidentify "individualism" with "atomism"):
> But how indeed can a class suffer an injustice if its members have
> not? How can Fruit be tasty if the concrete fruits do not taste
> good? What kind of crazy ontology is this? And so what if the working
> class is treated unjustly if workers as individuals are not treated
> unjustly?
> I have been arguing that the subject who is unjustly treated or
> appropriated in violation of our codes, rooted in fair exchange, is
> not recognized, given our atomistic social ontology, as a subject, a
> potential bearer of ethical claims. For this reason capitalism is
> indeed just because it cannot recognize and de-constitutes the
> aggrieved Subject in the name of humanism and the individual, in the
> name of abstract universality and singularity. The aggrieved subject
> is also practically deconstituted juridically and politically.
> But the generalization of commodity exchange requires that we be
> interpellated as autonomous individual subjects, wear the masks of
> juridical subjects. I refer here not to fundamental ontology in a
> Heideggerian sense (being whose being is a question for it) but the
> rather more pedestrian social ontology. And collective subjects can't
> be recognized as concrete individuals who could say WE have not been
> treated in accordance with the laws and codes of exchange, the basis
> of bourgeois morality and law.
>
> As Marx writes; "To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we
> consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its
> renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the
> individual worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class
> and the working-class confronting each other. But in so doing we
> should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity
> production."
>
> The collective subject has no place in noisy marketplace, the Eden of
> innate rights of Man, freedom, equality, property and Bentham.
Ted