File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9711, message 47


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production, that arise, develop and are superseded historically, and are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








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