> So sure, "individuals" make history, but talking about individuals or
> endlessly prating that agency is important (it's all important) is
> pointless. We can only talk abut history (and ultimately only talkd
> about individuals) by talking about those "large social forces."
Again, you ignore that, for Marx, "the ensemble of the social relations" works to develop the "minds" of individuals, "mind" being understood as the potential to actualize "self-conscious reason", i.e. as the potential for "enlightenment" in the sense Marx is critically appropriating from Kant and Hegel.
Thus, "the ensemble of the social relations" that was the mid- eighteenth century Indian commune "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies". This found expression in an extreme form of religious self-estrangement; it "brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow." It also found expression in an extreme form of "despotism", "Oriental despotism". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
In the text that, like Althusser, you're attempting of make use of here as a basis for the interpretation of Marx you're defending, Marx himself, as I've several times pointed out to Robert Wood, repeats this idea of the relation of "the ensemble of the social relations" to the development of "mind", of "enlightenment". The "ensemble of the social relations" of masses of mid-19th century French peasants also restricted the development of "mind" "making it the unresisting tool of superstition" and "prejudice". As in the case of the Indian peasant commune, Marx makes this lack of "enlightenment" and "judgment" "responsible" for "despotism", in this case the despotism of the "Bonaparte dynasty".
"The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. — Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. — Ed.] " <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ ch07.htm
>
The restricted development of "mind" Marx attributes to mid-19th century Indian and French peasants is not an "identity" in the sense of post-structuralism. The latter has no logical space for the ontological and anthropological ideas underpinning this attribution, the ideas constitutive of "historical materialism".
The same is true of Marx's treatment of the "class of the proletariat". This does not make "class" an "identity" in the post- structuralist sense. It's an "ensemble of the social relations" that, in contrast to the "ensembles" of mid-19th century Indian and French peasants, gives "the greatest impulse ... to the integral development of every producer" (this 1877 claim and the 1881 analysis of the Russian peasant commune in terms of the same "historical materialist" ideas further demonstrating that Althusser's interpretation is mistaken).
The following 1864 passage elaborates this idea of "class" - of the "worker" - in terms of the same "historical materialist" ideas, associating "alienation" at "the level of material production" with "alienation" "in religion at the ideological level" (as does the analysis of "commodity fetishism" in Capital).
"at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social - for that is what the process of production is - we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically this inversion is the indispensable transition without which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive forces of social labour, which alone can form the material base of a free human society, could not possibly be created by force at the expense of the majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided, any more than it is possible for man to avoid the stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself. What we are confronted by here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement." ("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866 Marx, Appendix to Capital, vol. I, Penguin ed., pp. 989-90)
Since most "Marxist" treatments of "class" also ignore this essential feature of Marx's own treatment, they, like the post-structuralist treatments, misinterpret Marx's, a matter of some significance given that Marx's turns out to have been badly mistaken.
Ted