File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 154


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: M-I: On the Forging of Epitaphs
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 10:16:15 -0600 (CST)



<[SNIP] call to reassess the traditional parameters of Left and Right, to
[SNIP] refigur[e] the concept of "The Party", is from the perspective of
changed circumstances and the constantly evolving ambiguities of "fact"
that render much of what we have heretofore believed irrelevant.>

This paragraph is worth printing and pasting on one's bulletin board. It
epitomises the route away from the working class of every ex-marxist of
the last 100 years. The first step is always the same: When Marx wrote his
critique of capital he was correct. But capitalism has now changed and we
need a new theory. It nearly always begins with a purely empiricist
explanation of capitalism, and exhibits the inner disease of all
empiricism, the inability to see continuity within change. So the the
coming of monopoly capital is seen not as a transformation *within*
capitalism but as a whole new world. And the new capitalism, having
resolved the contradictions of the old capitalism, no longer contains the
seeds of its own destruction, and hence theory is no longer raising of
practice to the level of theory (the subordination of theory to practice)
but a set of moral absolutes, existing prior to and independently of
history. That is, since the "new" capitalism has resolved its internal
contradictions, neither the arm of criticism nor the criticism of arms can
any longer grasp its nature from the inside; only free spirits, grasping
their little eternal moralities, themselves somehow existing "outside" of
capitalism, can judge it. The routes to change are then either merely
voluntaristic violence of a small elite or moral suasion of the
capitalists themselves. (This is the route followed by so many of the
weather people of the 60s.)

Empiricism always tends to degenerate into a complete nominalism, which in
turn generates a desperate longing for order and intelligibility, for
which the obvious soothing balm is an equally desperate return to Plato
and a denial of reality to the chaotic world of appearances. For example:

<<In [SNIP] Rhode Island, the traditionl "working class", that is, those
engaged in manufacturing, construction and certain areas of
transportation, has declined by a third since 1986 [SNIP]>>

"The Working Class" is now not a historical set of relations, endlessly
dissolved and reformed in struggle, but a Platonic Form, knowable only to
the pure intellect. Actual workers can never fit such a Platonic Form, nor
can actual working class struggle be intelligible to the mind which dwells
only in a world of Platonic essences, and hence there is no longer a
working class (that is the Platonic moralist has separated herself from
that class, and what she/he cannot recognize does not exist).

Carrol



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