> You can discuss social forces without mentioning particular people; in
> fact almost _all_ discussion of social forces/social relations is done
> without reference to particular people.
What do you mean by particular people?
It's true that the claim "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections" refers to people in general.
However, the claim based on this that "the ensemble of the social relations" that was the Indian peasant 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" refers to particular people, the individual members of those communes.
Similarly, the claim that "the ensemble of the social relations" that will be "communism" will create and be created by the "real intellectual wealth" constitutive of the "rich individuality" that is the "universally developed individual" also refers to particular people, the individual members of a "communist" "ensemble of the social relations".
How can these claims (Marx's) be made consistent with "poststructuralism", specifically, with your and Eric Beck's claim that: "Life is about the interaction of forces, and people only matter as indexes to those interactions."?
Also, leaving aside that Postone's interpretation of "dialectic" in Marx ignores its relation to Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception", how can this claim be made consistent with his following largely accurate interpretive claims:
“Marx regarded the industrial mode of production developed under capitalism and the intrinsic historical dynamic of that society as characteristic of the capitalist social formation. The historical negation of that social formation would, then, entail the abolition of both the historically dynamic system of abstract domination and the industrial capitalist mode of production. In the same vein, the developed theory of alienation implies that Marx saw the negation of the structural core of capitalism as allowing for the appropriation by people of the powers and knowledge that had been historically constituted in alienated form. Such appropriation would entail the material transcendence of the earlier split between the narrowed and impoverished individual and the alienated general productive knowledge of society by an incorporation of the latter into the former. This would allow the ‘mere worker’ to become the ‘social individual’—one who incorporates the human knowledge and potential first developed historically in alienated form. …
“For Marx, the social individual represents the overcoming of this opposition [‘the opposition of the atomized individual to the collectivity’]. This notion does not simply refer to a person who labors communally and altruistically with other people; rather, it expresses the possibility of every person existing as a full and richly developed being. A necessary condition for the realization of this possibility is that the labor of each person is full and positively self-constituting in ways that correspond to the general richness, varigatedness, power, and knowledge of society as a whole; individual labor would no longer be the fragmented basis for the richness of society. Overcoming alienation, then, entails not the reappropriation of an essence that had previously existed but the appropriation of what had been constituted in alienated form.” Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, pp. 31-2 http://books.google.ca/books?id=nMnnVbwOQ4EC&lpg=PA158&ots=sKMbyXf1NT&dq=%22Time%2C%20Labor%2C%20and%20Social%20Domination%22&pg=PA31#v =onepage&q=&f=false
“within the framework of Marx’s analysis, labor can be constitutive of the social individual only when the productive forces’ potential is used in a way that completely revolutionizes the organization of the labor process itself. People must be able to step outside of the direct labor process in which in which they had previously labored as parts, and control it from above. The control of the ‘process of nature, transformed into an industrial process’ must be available not only to society as a whole, but to all of its members. A necessary material condition for that full development of all individuals is that ‘labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.'
“Marx’s notion of the appropriation by ‘the mass of workers … of their own surplus labour,’ then, entails a process of self-abolition as a process of material self-transformation. Far from entailing the realization of the proletariat, overcoming capitalism involves the material abolition of proletarian labor. The emancipation of labor requires the emancipation from (alienated) labor." p. 33
Ted