Eric writes of "t the absolute separation of private and capitalist economies": The word "absolute" is his, not mine and not Marx's. The separation is an abstraction, but an abstraction by which one tries to 'honor' the concrete, which is placed but not grasped by the abstraction. In contrast, it seems to me that the abstractions "biopower" and "multitude" are bstractions which deny the concrete.
What I'm after is a sense of the scope and limits of theory ("theory" to be defined later). It seems to me that Eric in these two posts is insisting that _everything_ can be theorized, and if a theory is not a TOE it is nothing. (Note: I said "Eric's two posts," not "Eric." I know he doesn't think this,but I think these posts imply it or are dependent on it.)
Most of life escapes theory, and I'd rather speak of "private activity" than a "private economy." (Of course that's what "economy" meant in Greek; hence the coinage "political economy" by those confronting the aberration of capitalism.) I think the capitalist economy is theorizable from a historical perspective: that is, in order to theorize it Marx "looked back on it" as a completed entitity from ahypothetical future in which the wages system no longer existed. At that point, he claimed, human history would begin: and of course it would be totally untheorizable.That is why Paul Sweezy argued there could be no "science of socialism," socialism being the realm of freedom. It is also why there can be no Revolutionary Theory or Revolutionary Party
It was this effort to theorize all of human life that I found obnoxious in Hardt & Negri -- and in those "feminist econmists" who attempted to assimilate "daily life" to economic theory. And it is the mistake someoe made some weeks ago in speaking of the difficulty of escaping the "totality." We live most of our daily life _outside_ the totality or rather 'would-be' totality of the capitalist economy.
Not quite sure of where to go from here.
Carrol
Eric Beck wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 12, 2010, at 11:30 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
> >
> >> Carrol's insistent recitations of Marxist cant about the absolute
> >> separation of private and capitalist economies are almost enough to
> >> make me flee into the arms of Hardt and Negri.
> >
> > You can also make a detour into feminist economics.
>
> I was going to put in something about that. Didn't Carrol used to run
> a mailing list that fused Marxism and feminism? Given that background,
> it's a little mindboggling that he can be so sure about that
> distinction. Carole Pateman, anyone?
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