File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-12-31.000, message 82


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


     ------------------

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005