Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> Yeah, there's certainly no benefit in recognizing how innovative the
> materialist conception of history that grounded and made possible the whole
> terrain of Marx's work was, its always better to stick with forces vs.
> relations without appreciating the relational epistemology upon which their
> analysis is based.
I agree with the general thrust of this, and even with most of the propositions taken in isolation. But I disagree with the "logical" connections asserted, e.g., that Marx's Critique is BASED on his historical epistemology, though I also agree pretty much with that epistemology. But while the Critique migh have been made _possible_ by the epistemology, it does NOT depend on the epistemology nor is it _based_ on that epistemology. It was a sort of ladder to the critique, and in principle other ladders are available.
It was a ladder in the sense that it is only by looking backward on capitalism, as history, that one can (at least to begin with) see it as that, history, a completed totality. It is NOT a toatlity 'from the inside,' nor in fact is it a totality, but rather a historical phenomenon which by its nature always _tends toward_ toality. And it is that ensemble of tendencies which makes it available for dialectical analysis. As I have indicated before, I don't think feudalism, for example, or the bronze age palace economies can be analysed by this method: they are not totaltiies even in tendency, and social relations are external rather than internal as in capitalism.
Nor, contra julio, is human history dialectical.
Carrol
>
> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
>
> > At 12:27 PM 5/4/2010, James Heartfield wrote:
> >
> >
> > Which to me sounds like a reasonable shorthand for what Marx spent most of
> >> his time writing about (apart from the word 'philosophy', which study, he
> >> compared to wanking).
> >>
> >
> >
> > Can we have a quote where he compared philosophy to wanking? Or if it is, that can only be known at a point in the future that will never arrive: when human history (existecnce) has ended but some human can look back on it as complete and decide then whether or no it was a dialectical totality. Such a 'human' would be a god, not a huyman.
Carrol