The assumption here is one I've been testing in my head ever since I read Postone & Albritton: namely, that Marx wrote a critical political economy (or system of economic theory) rather than, as I am tending more and more to believe, he wrote a critique of politiccal economy. One could say, then, that Marx beat you to it: he too was skeptical of the utility of 'value' as an economic concept - which is why he rejected Ricardo and wrote something very different.
And of course I hold that moral categories as such are anti-human, that they operate only in the defense of the capitalist system. ravi's objection to "dryness" is precisely the longing of the isolated bourgeois individual for warmth and human company. Moralism seems to cater to that longing - but instead is another version of the heart of the heartless world, the opium of the unclear leftist.
Put antoher way, ravi follows Rousseau rather than Marx - as the Hungarian philosopher, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, argues in "Telling the truth about class":
******The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does not want to 'replace' society by annihilating 'rule' and the ruling class as such, but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition of the proletariat. Far from its excellence - extolled by the Rousseauians - it is, on the contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that it has 'nothing to lose but its chains', and that it has 'a world to win'. In the Marxist view it is not the people's excellence, superiority or merit that makes socialism - the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism - worthwhile but, on the contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there is no 'people', there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working class is the result of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not believe in the self-creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel to or alongside capitalism, through the edification of an independent set of social values, habits and techniques of resistance.
Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word, a 'falling away of the veils' which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient regime as 'natural') to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand - in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or 'inner worth'. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything, determined by - among other contingent factors - random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the incomprehensibility, of 'fate', 'the stars', participants in the capitalist economy are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made. To be born noble and ignoble is nobody's fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation appears self-inflicted.
Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the social, and the final unmasking; the final apocalypse, the final revelation can be reached by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen historically, is unique in its energy, in its diabolical force.5 Marx does not 'oppose' capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil. ***** Full at
http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm
Carrol