File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-11-23.164, message 16


Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 21:47:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: marxian, marxist, and the LTV



JL says that Marx didn't present his work as a social theory but as a
piece of political economy. I think this is wrong on both counts. When he
gave a name to his theory he called it "the materialist conception of
history," which siounds like social theory to me. Although he wrote a lot
about PE, he didn't see himself as doung PE but as presenting a "critique"
of PE, the term is present in the title of both hid major works on the
subject. The critique was largely that the PE of Ricardo, Smith,
etc.ignored history. That's why Capital is so full of historical analysis
and material.

Now, as to the claim that Marx didn't presenta  theory of the subject.
Well, if that means he didn't think through the nature of consciousness
the way Hegel did, I agree. But there's a clear sense inw hich he thought
that Hegel had got a lot of that stuff right and, in M's famous phrase,
just needed to be set on his feet. So he develops a lot of analysis trying
to explain how the different phases of consciousness taht Hegel talks
about can be explained in their "material" context. The meaning of
"material" is key and debated, but it certainly does not mean, at least in
the broadest sense that M uses it, "narrowly economic." 

Thus while you find in Marx famous epgrams like, "The handmill gives you
the society with the feudal lord, th steam, taht with the industerial
capitalist," when he gets concrete in analysing any political moment, for
example, the class struggles in France, you do not find any simple
reductionist tendency to exaplin the poluitical developments in terms of
technology or indeed of class interests narrowly conceived. What
technology and class structure do for Marx is provide an explanatory
stryucture taht connects political, ideological, religious, etc. events
with their causes, which on Marx's own practuce _need not_ be economic.
Rather, they exert often subtle selection pressures on which ideas are
taken up by political groups for their own political, ideological, or
religious purposes, ruling out certain options (like the efficiacy of any
appeal to the Divine Right of Kings in capitalism) and promoting the
development of others.

If by the claim that Marx is economistic you mean the he thinks the
economy is the basic explkanatory framework, yoiu're right, but that's not
what most people mean. They mean by economistic the proposition that all
events have economic causes or or serve economic functions that explain
them. This is something you will not find supportted in Marx.

--Justin

On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, j laari wrote:

> Justin,
> 
> Gillian Rose was quite convincing in her "Hegel contra sociology".
> (I've mentioned that book couple of times earlier.) There she goes
> through dimensions of 'subjectivity' in Hegel's thinking, and shows
> that Marx doesn't offer anything like Hegel. Though I'd add that
> what's compressed into his concept of practice/praxis (whether a loan
> from Feuerbach or not) is certainly a novelty in philosophy when
> compared to earlier phil. So I'd stick to my belief that there's no
> proper theory of subject in Marx.
> 
> In a same way there's a lack of theories concerning culture, ideology
> and such. My point wasn't that Marx didn't allowed them autonomy.
> Surely he did. Everyone does so on a general level when asked. For me
> the main point is that Marx's Capital (and related manuscripts) isn't
> social theoretical in a modern sense, or to put it differently; when
> read social theoretically it's economistic. It's meaningless, of
> course, to blame Marx for that. He was doing political economy. But
> after long and harsh critical fights (with 'vulgar materialists',
> marxist-leninists) from late sixties (?) through seventies to eighties
> it's reasonable to accept today that by our contemporary standards
> Marx was rather 'one-sided'. (But he surely had several great
> insights...) But then again, I can't remember that he ever called his
> project as social theory or theory of society.
> 
> Jukka
> 
> > But I think thius is wrong as a sociuological reading of Marx. Marx
> > never,except in a few overwuoted epgrams, tries to explain poliutical,
> > ideological, etc. phenomena solely in economic terms. In his detailed
> > explanations he always grants these phenonema a lot of autonomy, treating
> > the economy as a limiting constraint on their variation, not as the sole
> > explanation.
> 
> 
> 
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