> Carrol Cox wrote:
> >The history of CAPITALISM can be seen in terms of internal relations;
> >all history certainly can NOT be so understood. This is merely assertion
> >on my part for the present, but the only evidence for the contrary has
> >consisted of philology, of assertions as to what Marx thought. And those
> >assertions have all assumed that Marx's thought was more or less
> >unchanged from the Pzris mss. on. I don't believe that. Marx may have
> >_begun_ by seeing history as the unfolding of some transhistorical
> >subject, but in his mature work he assumes the uniqueness of capitalism
> >as a social system, and his "laws" of history apply only to capitalism.
>
APR: All history can be seen in terms of internal relations. Its just that the internal relations particular to earlier modes of production/life were qualitatively different from each other and from the globally dominant mode of production/life today, capitalism. Marx is very clear that, among the many things capitalism does, it simplifies and homogenizes class relations at the meta-level of capital and labor, profanes all things sacred, etc. before accelerating the extensive and intensive "growth" of capital... a relation which includes, at the very same time, the ever-greater differentiation of intra- and inter-class relations, the ever-greater extension and differentiation of technical forces and relations, and the uneven development of the state and the production of space, nature and struggle. Or at least that's the reading I was taught and teach. There is no need to see the evolution of an ineluctable, teleological and transhistorical subject here. I can't accept the determinism of "capitalism was inevitable because it evolved" because of the agency it strips us of and the nihilism it fosters but it did evolve, is evolving and Marx provides me the best grip on it. The key, again as I was taught and teach it, is that the education/development of the human minds necessary to negate capitalism is not a historical force but a social force... one dependent on people's actions. Hell, we can argue all we want that the forces of production have superceded production relations but unless people DO things collectively to bring about that supercession we're looking at barbarism rather than socialism (however that is to be defined, made real and generate contradictions through action).