> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:13 AM, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Vol. 1 of Capital is ultimately "about" capitalism as a "stage" in the
> > historical process conceived as a set of internally related "educational"
> > "stages in the development of the human mind", the "educastion" taking
> place
> > within the successive forms of the "labour process" understood as
> "schools".
>
> This is a rather forced Hegelian reading of Capital. While there may
> be passages where Marx slips into this kind of anthropological
> metaphor, I don't think it's what it's 'all about'. Really, it's more
> of a realist sociology of the economic sphere of capitalism, which
> can't be collapsed into a fairytale about a somehow representative or
> singular 'human mind'. Wasn't this the point of Marx's critique of
> Feuerbach?
>
> Mike Beggs
>
I'm with Mike. It seems to me that there are only "stages" if there's some sort of teleological history - and Marx certainly stressed potential, opportunity, and contingency more than a singular historical trajectory. It also seems to me that, thoroughgoing materialist that he was, Marx couldn't possibly have accepted a method that put an abstract human mind at the center of history without a kind of relational approach where "words like bats" are constantly redeveloping the meaning of the human mind as a bodily, sensuous, social and situated agency.