Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 15:16:33 +0100 From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> Subject: Re: M-TH: Some Bordieu and a pinch of RegSchool >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. and Dave answers (as clearly as anyone could wish): >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. Any agreement between Dave and Justin can *never* be substantial, unless Justin wakes up or Dave gets lobotomized. Justin holds to a fetishized view of all human society as some version of bourgeois society, Dave holds to an historical-materialist Marxist view of societies as grounded in modes of production, that arise, develop and are superseded historically, and are qualitatively different from each other, and that goes for the superstructure too, as the laws and culture and politics grow out of the economic reality. It's typical that the abstract Ricardian concept of surplus, skewered so nicely by Dave here, is eagerly seized on as indicating substantial agreement with a Marxist position. Once again, it shows how important it is to read Marx himself and see his polemics with the economists and politicians of his day as having current relevance for us. The historical stage of capitalism he worked in -- one of capitalism blocking the development of human resources rather than developing them and ripe for the transition to socialism -- is the same in many fundamentals as our own imperialist epoch, even though in our day the contradictions are so much more out in the open. The petty-bourgeois liberals (believers in legality and technocratic egalitarianism like Proudhon), the utopians (in our own day greens and anarchists and anti-party libertarians), the pure-in-heart philanthropists, sectarians like Lassalle and his "iron law of wages" -- all of these fake lefts had views of society and its economic motive forces that Marx was able to characterize scientifically and crush polemically -- before the middle of the nineteenth century (reread the litany of fake leftisms at the end of the Communist Manifesto)!! But since these tendencies express material relations with the means and forces of production, the weapon of criticism is not enough, as the constant return of the same old nostrums teaches us. It's time for the criticism of weapons -- literally when it comes to getting rid of the source of these fetishized notions, the capitalist mode of production itself, and organizationally when it comes to defeating such illusions in the working class -- the weapon of a revolutionary party built on the gains of Marxism and schooling revolutionary workers to see through all these debilitating distortions being pumped into their class by the traitors currently in positions of leadership in the working class. Cheers, Hugh --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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