[lbo-talk] Debt

[c b]

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

^^^^^^^
CB:  Marx's famous criticism of bourgeois thinking about capitalism is
that it is ahistorical; that it equates capitalist relations of
production as human natural , when it is historically derived. So,
bourgeois ideology does not explain capitalism by its historical
origins. it pretends that things have always been this way; that there
is no history.

Some of what Marx writes in _Capital_ is history; and its purpose is
to understand the present.

Historicism is idealist error as with Hegel, explaining history as an
unfolding of the Idea rather than the product of class struggles and
development of the means of production. ( See _Manifesto of the
Communist Party_).

Also, discovering the "meaning" of capitalism is not a historical
materialist project.

Using the anatomy of man as the key to the anatomy of the ape would be
analogous to using the "anatomy" of capitalism as the key to the
"anatomy" of the slave mode or feudalism.  That's not a Marxist
project either.  Discovering the key to the anatomy of feudalism is
pretty useless to practical critical activity in today's class
struggles since there isn't feudalism anymore.