Date: Tue, 27 Dec 1994 09:03:58 -0500 (EST) From: Richard Wolff <rwolff-AT-minerva.cis.yale.edu> Subject: Re: Re: autonomist marxism In reply to boddhisatva, your message refers to an argument about separating domination and oppression, but that was not the separation which engaged our discussion...that was rather the separation of EXPLOITATION from domination/oppression. And the point was to return the left to a focus on the specificity of that particular social process in which some human beings perform surplus labor while others oppropriate and distribute as they see fit the fruits of that surplus labor. Now the point in referring to such a return to a focus on exploitation is NOT to reopen the absurd debates over what is the most fundamental, important, basic, etc. problem or contradiction of society. Instead of ultimately fruitless debates over what the "essence" of social structure and social change might be (oppression OR exploitation OR meritocratic ideology, etc.), the alternative I find persuasive is an anti-essentialism in principle - or what Althusser coined as "overdetermination" and others have developed further in various ways - in which exploitation becomes one of the objects of the left's critical attention which aims to grasp (and overturn) the interdependence (formulated systematically in terms of overdetermination) of exploitation and those oppressions that likewise find a place on the left's agenda of social change. I find much to agree with you in your critique of meritocracy, an issue much too little emphasized, but that is a different point from the set of issues hanging on the question of returning exploitation to its place within the left's political and theoretical agendas. Rick Wolff ------------------
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