File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9711, message 44


Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 22:56:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Some Bordieu and a pinch of RegSchool



As I explained in a previous post, the "Ricardan" (so called) approach to
exploitation is a necessary additional level of abstraction in Marxist
political economy. Dave B isright that if we are to understand the sense
in which capitalist exploitation is _capitalist_ we need to characterize it
in a way that refers to the relations of production in virtue of which the
economic surplus is extracted. But if we are to understand the sense in
which capitalist exploittaion is _exploitation_ we also need a way of
charcterizing it that does not refer to those relations. The notion of an
economic surplus per se provides this and allows us to underline the sense
in which capitalist expoloitation is continuous with feudal and other
sorts of exploitation, viz. in involving the appropriation by any
illegitimate means by one class of whatever sort of a surplus however
characterized produced by another class of whatever sort. Our analysis
cannot end there. But like Marx's it must start there.

Where Bourdieu means anything of the sort I would presume to guess. I
doubt it. He's French, so probbaly incapable of being sensible.

--Justin 

On Sun, 16 Nov 1997, Dave Bedggood wrote:

> Justin writes:
> > 
> > For once Dave B and I are in substantial agreement. Although I don't
> > understand why the notion that all capital derives from an economic
> > suprolus appropriated by the ruling class is a "broad neo-Ricardan concept
> > of exploitation." Sounds like the orthodox Marxist one to me.
> 
> Why? because it is insufficient to talk about surplus appropriated by 
> a ruling class without specifying if the source is surplus-value 
> appropriated during production, or surplus appropriated during 
> exchange. The latter conception of appropriation is Ricardian and 
> eliminates the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value as 
> the dynamic of capitalism. Bourdieu in adopting a Ricardian 
> conception of exploitation, does echo the Frankfurters in 
> shifting the locus of class struggle from production to exchange and 
> hence to culture and politics. Hence class struggle over production 
> ceases to be the driving force for change, and is replaced by the 
> moral rebellion of the petty bourgeois socialist intellectual.
> Dave
> 
> Dave Bedggood
> 
> 
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