Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 00:51:22 +0100
Subject: Re: marx/


Cologne, 27 January 1999

Redlip-AT-aol.com schrieb:
> re; comments on Marx's popularized thoery was an historical disaster. Hows
> that? And what is the nature of this illusion in respect to philosophy and
> politics? Maybe not an immediate precipitation, but the connections are hardly
> illusory. And I'm not sure what Marx was trying to do is comparable here. ?
> Anyway, thanks  j.s.

In many, many ways Marx and Heidegger are incomparable, of course. I was only 
comparing the will on the part of both thinkers to 'implement' their thinking in 
some sense in an historical context. 

I'm thinking of the deeper dimensions of Marx's later thinking, i.e. the 
_Grundrisse_, _Kritik der politischen Oekonomie_, the first and second editions 
of _Das Kapital_, Vol. 1 with the dialectical sections in the first chapter on 
the value-form, commodities and money. These texts were always regarded as 
difficult; cf. e.g. Marx's advice to Dr. Kugelmann's wife to skip the first 
chapters of Capital and start with the chapters on the "Working Day", 
"Co-operation, Division of Labour and Machinery." (30 Nov. 1867) If one reads 
the correspondence between Marx and Engels during the fifties and sixties one 
finds as a recurring theme the difficulty of the analysis of commodities and 
money. Marx says at one point "Even clever heads have not been able to 
understand it, so there must be something wrong with the presentation." In 
short, this part of the analysis of capitalism has always been beyond the 
understanding of most readers. So what's the point of it?

On the other hand, the analysis of commodities and money is (one of?) the most 
subtle and profound analysis of the essence of capitalism existing. The question 
arises as to what relation these profounder insights into the nature of capital 
have with the political struggle against capitalism and for a socialist society. 
The more subtle thinkers in the new-born Soviet Union, such as Rubin, were 
ultimately done away with by Stalin. His brilliant essays on Marx's theory of 
value were first published, not in Russian, but in English translation by Quebec 
anarchists in 1973! What does it mean to overcome the fetishism of commodities 
historically? What does commodity fetishism say about human being, the way we 
_are_? With such questions one can easily be howled down in Marxist circles. 

The real-historical realizations of socialism we have seen in this century, with 
their overbearing, totalizing states, I would suggest, cannot be regarded as 
having anything to do with an overcoming or twisting free from essential 
capitalist relations. What would it mean to twist free of commodity fetishism? 
Can a political movement be a vehicle for such a change? Aren't the socialist 
experiments we have seen based on positing a total social subject (to wit, a 
kind of state)? Can reified social relations, as Marx thought them through, be 
loosened up historically within a thinking which is still fundamentally rooted 
in the metaphysics of subjectivity? 

I regard these questions as challenges to Marxist thinking (in the broadest 
sense) today. If Marx is still worth reading today, it is only because the depth 
of his thinking has not been exhausted by the historical realizations of Marxist 
theory which have occurred to date. And how thinking becomes an historical 
reality in a way of living together in a form of society may well be much more 
than a question of politics.

Michael
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