[lbo-talk] Debt

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed May 2 13:04:05 PDT 2012


"I've acquired the audio version of graeber's book, and have listened to most of the Preface. Even there, Graeber's historicism is glaring, even disabling,"

What does "historicism" mean here?

On Lou's blog, the historical criticism of Graeber's method is quite nicely given by Michael Yeats and someone who signs himself "Todd." Graeber digs himself in deeper in his reply to those criticisms.

But it is wonderful to have a polemic against debt, whatever its methodological weaknesses.

Carrol

Joanna

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Explaining a condition by its origins. The classic statement of historicism is to be found in the opening lines of PL. This is why it is important to see that Marx is _not_ writing history in the opening chapters of Capital. He _starts_ with an ideal capitalism. And what Angelus called my favorite quotation from Marx: "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." It is what Ollman calls "doing history backward," the opposite of historicism. Bourgeois ideology explains things by their origins; Historical method, which is what Marx & Engels usually called their method (only using "historical materialism" occasionally) _starts_ with the present. Sweezy's phrase, "Present as history," indicates the necessity of _looking back" as it were on the present to discover its meaning.

Carrol



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