[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 3 03:02:18 PDT 2009


Alan Rudy


> shag
> don't know if charles is paying attention but in regards to his last
> post castigating carrol for not realizing that marx's claims about
> class were transhistorical, it's hard to tell how you're using it, but
> carrol's using it differently. plus, there's this, from Heartfield:
>
> ^^^^
> CB: How is carrol using it differently ?
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This may be a step backwards... Marx's claims about class are NOT transhistorical. Marx's position is exactly like Geertz's. The history of all hitherto existing societies IS the history of class struggle but the classes are not the same, they exist in the same numbers, the dynamics between the classes are not the same, the ideological legitimations and ideologies of resistance are not the same, the dynamics of the production of nature, labor and culture (and other Abstractions) is not the same, there was no (Abstract) Value before capitalism and, therefore, the labor theory of Value appropriate to capitalism makes no sense when - and cannot legitimately - applied no non- or pre-capitalists societies... this is the unbelievable mistake liberals (like Weber) always make, they equate capitalism with markets when the history of markets has nothing to do with capitalism because capitalism is a mode of production predicated on the hegemony of wage labor ("social labor" is a very specific technical term for Marx describing a historically unique network of relations, not a description of the fact that folks make shit together)... and, as it does everything else, the hegemony of wage/social labor completely transforms markets, their meaning, dynamics and consequences.

^^^^^^ CB: Well, obviously I disagree with this. The reason Marx and Engels say it the way they do is that they are pointing to the commonality in the concepts exploiting and exploited classes in different historical periods. They are making a transhistorical generalization just as a reading of their words as having a plain meaning would give.

That's why they state it as a generalization ! The point they are making is that there is a transhistorical generalization here.


>From an anthropological standpoint, see _The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State_. Private property takes different forms in different historical periods or different modes of production , but has the same substance, that's why he uses "private property" to refer to all of them.

I guess there _is_ a problem with taking the quotation marks off of Marx and Engels. It gives rise to interpreting them the exact opposite way from which they intend.



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