> Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> These guys see Marx as economistic, and productivist
>> and industrialistic. There are so many things wrong here, but they are
>> fairly subtle. Capital is not a social relation, it is a
>> material-semiotic
>> relation.
>>
>
> I imagine there are many readings of Marx; for me, the notion that capital
> is a social relation is one of the lynchpins of ol' whiskers' critique of
> capitalism. Perhaps I misunderstand your terms. In what sense is a
> "material-semiotic relation" not a social relation? (How can you have
> semiotics without social relations?)
>
> Miles
>
Most people - and, from how they talk about it, the authors - mean by "social relation" something delimited by the boundaries of human-human relations, where nature is the real, qualitatively-different foundation of those relations and culture is the ideal, analytically-discrete expression of them. From the quotes Shag put up, these guys think about power, and capital, in classically "social" terms... terms which are sometimes historical but almost always insufficiently material, embodied and cultural.
For me, Neil Smith's Uneven Development was utterly and completely convincing in its account of the capitalist production of second natures - where the materially historical processes and relations of capitalist development produce new ecological natures, new human natures and new social spaces... while naturalizing/reifying each one. Each one is simultaneously treated as transhistorically universal AND analytically distinct such that the natures, bodies and cultures unevenly and synthetically produced through capitalist development are treated as the purview of qualitatively different and reductionist scientific disciplines... Nature studied over there across the river, Society analyzed here near downtown and Culture ghettoized around the old campus' green commons. These guys feel to me like "social" scientists...
A