> 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 ?
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
> 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.
>
I think we agree that all previous societies were - and all existing societies are - grounded in exploitative relations between classes... Do we also agree that the material content and particular dynamics of those relations (across societies) have been - and are, in comparison to our own - qualitatively different?
This is just like the exchange I am having with Philip it seems to me.
While Marx makes the historical generalization about all hitherto existing societies, my reading of this, is the he does so at a high level of abstraction... a level of abstraction high enough that, when you look at any of his particular studies of specific class relations, you see that the devil is in the details, not the generalization.
The materialist conception of history, it seems to me, generates abstractions like the "all hitherto" passage as a heuristic guide for the kinds of things to look for rather than a suggestion that study will find empirical make-up and dynamic processes of different social formations will be the same.