Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > The local bureaucrat in (say) Mycenae doubles the amount of barley he
> > seizes and sends off to the Palace. The local factory lays you off. No
> > mystery about the former; a good deal of mystery about the latter.
>
> Not mysterious to those workers who read the newspapers, follow what's
> happening in the economy, etc.
This is profoundly false! We are talking about concrete experience: what one can see / taste / hear / feel in the rush of the blood. No amount of newspaper reading (or no amount of reading _Capital_ for that matter) can in the least reduce the experiential mystery of the simple fact I mentioned. And besides, the newspaper explanation is false also, the more or less deliberate obfuscation of reality. The reality can be best labelled, commodity fetishism. And one of the most common misunderstandings of Marx is the belief that commodity fetishsism is a pscychological condition which can somehow be opposed. As Marx points out, the discovery of the laws of gravity had no effect on gravity. The understanding of the economic relations, whether in the superficial and semi-lying version in the newspaper or in the pages of the Grundrisse does not change in the least the myhsteriousness to experience of those laws.
The foundation of freedom is the existence of a direct relation of act and motive. This is precisely what capitalism destroyes.
Carrol