File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-07-31.000, message 149


Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 16:59:14 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray-AT-alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Some theses on Marx


Oh, well, it appears that irony, not truth, is the first casualty...

I apologize to those who only read the first of my theses, and who thus 
got upset.  Personally, I think that I contradicted that thesis by the 
end as I tried to recuperate (through the ideas of structural lag and 
real subsumption) a fairly orthodox Marxist position.  For what it's 
worth, that is... I view this list as a discussion of marxism, not 
necessarily as discussion by marxists.

Because the problem seems to be an important one... and addressed most 
cogently by a number of feminist traditions.  Although in the 70s many 
socialist or marxist feminists tried to understand the inter-relations 
between "patriarchy" (personally I prefer the term gender oppression) and 
Marxist economics (cf. Annette Kuhn, _Feminism and Materialism_ for a 
snapshot of the debate), in the end, it seems, they more or less gave 
up.  Especially nowadays (and with awareness of issues of race and 
sexuality) "race, class, and gender... and sexuality..." has become a 
mantra in which (without examining the issue too closely) most (though 
perhaps I am speaking only for cultural studies here?) would accept more 
or less the terms of a (more or less) marxist economics, but would not be 
able to accept the priority given to such economics within a larger 
marxist cultural, ideological, or political field of vision.

That seems a serious challenge to marxism, and (as discussed earlier) is 
surely an impulse for Laclau and Mouffe, themselves influenced heavily by 
the Birmingham school, who borrowed and elaborated "hegemony theory" from 
Gramsci, in which all these categories (and more besides, to taste) of 
oppression are "articulated" loosely, and somewhat nebulously, together.

In this context my first "thesis"... but maybe it's just my sense of 
humour to use such a short-hand (what I thought) wrily provocative mode 
of communication.

Personally, however, I don't hold with hegemony theory, and am looking 
for different ways to deal with the same problem and (conversely, in 
terms of political action or agency) formulate ideas towards some kind of 
"coalition politics" (fuzzy and liberal as that sounds) that recognizes 
that perhaps the proletariat (as traditionally defined, at least) is not 
necessarily the motor of history.

Anyhow...

On Tue, 26 Jul 1994, Thomas Schumacher wrote:

> 1.   How is the superstructure "lagging" or "stuck" behind the base?  We can
> see, following Althusser, that there is uneven development here --
> overdetermined by the base, he says -- but this unevenness doesn't necessarily
> mean a "leading" base, does it?  What did you mean here?

I'll look for the Bourdieu reference on this one.  And I hadn't 
consciously realized the similarities to Althusser (but of course...).  
One of my pet theories at the moment is that Bourdieu is "merely" a 
vastly more sophisticated Althusser (who seems either to erase or to take 
for granted the "base").  Plus, I guess, I'm throwing in a bit of 
Williams (dominant, residual, emergent) to suggest (rather than the 
complex totality of Althusser, which is a synchronic anti-Hegelianism) 
that the issue might be temporal, that the whole superstructure might 
best be understood as residual (which fits to a certain extent, too, with 
Nairn and Anderson's analysis of the British state...).
 
> 2.   The comments on subjectivity are less clear.  How do we get subjectivity
> from fetishization?  I'm not sure I disagree here, but the waters are a bit
> muddled.

Not from fetishization (as far as I understand it, at least): 
fetishization is a relation to the commodity, while I was trying to talk 
about an immanent relation to capital during the labour process (a bit of 
D&G here... maybe it won't work).

> 3.   Sut Jhally has noted...

Can you give me references to Jhally and Harvey (is the Harvey that green 
book--the postmodernity one?); this sounds very interesting to me.

Briefly, I think I understand formal vs. real subsumption of labour 
fairly simply (and much as Donna Jones suggests that Banaji sees it, 
too): formal subsumption occurs when the specific technology of a 
productive industry remains as it once was, but it merely comes under the 
command of the capitalist mode of production.  Hence, here the chief 
means to produce surplus value is the extension of the working day.  On 
the other hand, under real subsumption, there is a transformation in the 
technology which thus increases productivity and surplus value through a 
reduction in the price of the commodity.

In this sense, then surely the "culture industry" is for the most part 
still in the condition of formal subsumption... this clearly includes 
academics, while we're at it.  Thus postmodernism may indeed be a 
transformation in the nature of cultural (at least) production, and so 
the arrival of the phase of real subsumption.

My problem (as far as I see it) is that I am collapsing gender, race etc. 
oppression with (Bourdieu's, essentially) analysis of taste, and 
culture... and while postmodernity does seem to be revolutionizing the 
latter, there seems no sign of the withering away of the former.

I should add that Hans Erhrbar's critique of my economics was helpful to 
me, and I am not going into such detail with regard to his post merely 
out of respect for those who cannot afford or who have not the time for 
supremely long posts.  I would merely ask, however, if he regards his 
final comments as a re-formulation of the distinction between a class in 
and for itself?

> Tom S. 

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Department of English and Comp. Lit.
U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
jbmurray-AT-alpha1.csd.uwm.edu


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