[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 3 06:52:52 PDT 2009


shag


>CB: How is carrol using it differently ?

sorry! I missed your response b/c I didn't recognize your from name, c b. :)

This will have to come in parts, I think, but I pointed to what Heartfield said about the use of direct coercion v. the indirect compulsion of the market. I think Carrol is referring to that, and to Postone development of this distinction in a chapter called 'Abstract Labor' in a section called 'Abstract labor and alienation'.

^^^^ CB: Yes, I'm familiar with that distinction. The idea is the bourgeoisie are sort of slick compared with the feudal ruling classes and the slave owning ruling classes. They use the doubly "free" labor trick. Because wage laborers are "free" of ownership of means of production, they _must_ get a job to make a living , so the employers have indirect coercion on them, sort of veiled coercion, in contrast with feudal lords and clergy sending knights out to brutalize the peasants if they don't give tribute and tithes of surplus product.

However, that doesn't get around the transhistorical claim that Marx and Engels explicitly make in the first sentence of _The Manifesto_. The problem with all these claims that _Marx_ doesn't make a transhistorical generalization on class struggle, exploitation and oppression is that he very clearly does make a transhistorical generalization in that sentence. Actually, he and Engels make them elsewhere, too, but since the thread title is Marx without quotation marks , I hesitate to start nailing it down with quotes. On the other hand, how else can the issue be settled with respect to Marx's position on transhistorical generalization.

With respect to labor, there is a big fat paragraph and a small one in _Capital_ where Marx discusses what he considers the transhistorical, human species characteristics even , of labor. Of course, labor , production, relations and means of production change and develop, but one of Marx's main points seems to be that he uses the same terms to refer to something in different periods that, in his theory and thinking, has an essential commonality or transhistorical commonality. In fact, I wrote an outline post of an essay on this on Thaxis. Maybe I'll bring it here. This is Marx's fundamental _materialist_ and historical materialist discovery, as mentioned by Engels in the eulogy at Marx's funeral. Marx considered his basic insight and discovery to be exactly: ruling classes deny ruled class self-fullfillment of material necessities of life unless surpluses be forked over to the ruling class, i.e. exploitation; and that ruled classes instinctively resist, struggle, against this, _throughout history_; that this is the substance underlying the various forms.

I've read your thinking below, and I promise I'll mull it over some more, but I gotta say how we, Carrol and others around here, are so long lingering on this issue of historical specificity or anti-transhistoricality in Marx. That arises in Marx in his struggle against the bourgeois ideologists claiming that _capitalism's_ categories are eternal or human natural catgegories. Marx spends a lot of time demonstrating that private property, selfishness, and all the Social Darwinist stuff are not eternal human categories. Why ? Because Marx wants to abolish private property and exploiting/exploited classes and establish communism, as we well know. If private property is human nature , then that would be impossible. But that private property and exploitation aren't human nature doesn't mean they aren't transhistorical in the sense of occurring in different forms in different historical periods short of the whole of human existence.

This is not an entirely obvious point. The one change in _The Manifesto_ years after 1848 was a footnote added to that famous first sentence , an anthropological footnote added by Engels in which he clarifies that history is a history of class struggles _after_ the end of the ancient communal society which did not have antagonistic classes.

^^^^^^

Postone's argument is that capitalism is a new development. By that he means that, in earlier forms of social domination, the compulsion is a function of direct, personalized, concrete forms of domination. He opens by saying this:

^^^^^ CB: My thought here is that the change in the form of domination does not go to the essence, which is _exploitation_. In capitalism there is still extraction of surplus product. Marx uses the term "surplus product" in _Capital_ as the transhistorical category, reserving "surplus value" for the form of surplus product in capitalism. Also, important is that the exploited resist exploitation in whatever its historical form. Resistence to exploitation is transhistorical , too. Thus, class _struggle_ is transhistorical. This implication, though they don't say it explicitly, is that it is human nature to resist being exploited. What ever the varying "cultures" , different socially constructed consciousnesses of slavery, feudalism and capitalism, human nature is common in them all in that the exploited resist their exploitation. We can infer that resistence is human natural, instinctive, because it's not likely that the ruling class developed culture of those periods would teach or nurture the exploited classes to resist being exploited. On the contrary, all their training , religion, etc. influences them to accept their exploitation. Despite training to accept being exploited, resistence and struggle breaks out in every era, for example the slave uprising led by Spartacus. This is Marx and Engels main point in _The Manifesto_.

^^^^^^^

"Proceeding from the category of the commodity and the initial determination of labor as a social mediation, Marx then develops further determinations of the capitalist totality by unfolding the categories of money and capital."

This social mediation, though, is not one in which individuals are located in relation to one another. Rather, this social mediation is unlike earlier forms because it takes on a "life of its own." As such, it is completely independent of the "individuals it mediates. It develops into a sort of objective system over and against the individuals, and it increasingly determines the goals and means of human activity." (p 158)

^^^^^ CB: My thought here is that the new thing about capitalism is that it has developed a trickier way to hide exploitation. All this apparatus of money (wages) and capital (legitimation of the capitalist's ownership of the means of production and appropriating the products of production) is meant to trick the workers into accepting the capitalists skimming off the surplus. However, for Marx, it is still substantively exploitation. Marx's whole point in _Capital_ is to expose that exploitative kernel amidst all the bullshit of capitalist "legitimizing" its form of private property i.e. capital.

^^^^^^

And this is where I think it's interesting, if only because I've been arguing with Carrol about this for years, and now he's starting to get it!
:) Postone says next, "Marx's critical theory...entails a complex analysis
of the reciprocal constitution of system and action in capitalist society which does not posit the transhistorical existence of that very opposition -- between system and action -- but grounds it and each of its terms in the determinate forms of modern social life."

^^^^^ CB: As this one of your key points maybe you could reiterate. I think the action that Marx wants to get to is system changing action by the working masses. He wants to expose the three card monte nature of the whole wizard of oz capitalist system, he wants dorothy and her crew to go behind the wizard's facade and see that he's puny little conartist.

^^^^^

So, you see, Postone is not at all interested in developing a conception of absolute totalizing structure where individual action accounts for nothing. But moving on, about the totality, which is new, he writes,

"this form of domination is not grounded in any person, class or institution;"

I'll stop there, to let it sink in. His position here is taking a side in the basic arguments we have repeatedly on this list. I'll try to, as Jenny wrote recently, run some examples through my claim as we go along,

^^^^^ CB: Ok run some examples.

^^^^^^

but for now, I want to look at what else Postone says:

(so this domination is impersonal, abstract, objective; it is not grounded *IN* a person, class, or institution; rather,):

"its ultimate locus is the pervasive structuring of social forms of capitalist society that are constituted by determinate forms of social practice.[1] Society as the quasi-independent, abstract, universal Other that stands opposed to the individuals and exerts an impersonal compulsion on them, is constituted as an alienated structure by the **double character of labor in capitalism.** (my emph) The category of value, as the basic category of capitalist relations of production, is also the initial determination of alienated social structures. Capitalist social relations and alienated structures are identical."[2]

^^^^^^ CB: I'd say the perception that it is a "system" and not any persons who are opposed to most of us is part of the trick , the misdirection. It is , in fact, people , a class that opposes most of us.

More later



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