Date: Tue, 26 Jul 1994 14:24:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray-AT-alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Some theses on Marx 


These were written late last night, provoked by a reading of the 
_Resultate_, and meant to be mildly controversial.

I.	Marx was right about economics but (probably) wrong about 
everything else.

II.	Marx was right about the Labour Theory of Value--in as much as 
that means that value is determined by congealed labour, that production 
is thus the only source of value, and that this entails exploitation 
through labour-time "surplus" to necessary labour time.

III.	But this in itself is a mere banality in that

IIIa.	as it expresses a transhistorical proposition (valid from slavery 
to the present day), this knowledge cannot situate us or enable us to 
understand society in any detail.

IIIb.	this knowledge carries no political valence--and if anything is 
of more practical use to the bourgeois political observer (a 
Machiavellian Adam Smith) than to one wishing to change this state of 
affairs.

IV.	The specific analysis fo capitalism, however, is of interest 
because 

IVa.	it states that the form of exploitation of "free labour" entails 
a necessary mystification of thetrue relations of production.  This 
implies the kernel of a theory of subjectivity.

IVb.	it suggests that the worker is reified while things (capital) 
become personified.  This is the basis of the ethical (the only possible) 
critique of capitalism and the further development of a theory of 
immanent, machinic, subjectivity.

V.	But whereas Marx suggests that this mystified free worker is the 
hallmark of capitalist society, while political and other non-immanent 
forces of compulsion and organization were the hallmarks of feudal etc. 
exploitation, this is clearly not the case.  In the cultural and social 
spheres (Gramscian civil society) racism, sexism and homophobia (for 
example) are clearly still overwhelmingly powerful forces, more so than 
the ideologies of liberalism which would correspond to the free labour of 
the economic base.

VI.	To such ideological bigotries can be added the artificially 
restricted categories fo taste and symbolic power describe by Bourdieu, 
and which lead him to compare (in _The Logic of Practice_) the economies 
of art and culture with that of pre/non-industrial society.

VII.	Thus it is most useful to conceive of the base/superstructure 
model not in terms of reflection or causality (which have been the 
downfall of the model) but in terms of a specific temporal lag; though 
the economic base of Western societies is capitalist (and produces 
varieties of subjectivication and de-subjectification appropriately), 
everyday life and discourse remain stuck at a previous stage.

VIII.	This, however, is beginning to change--albeit slowly.  
Postmodernity is the final irruption of capitalism into the cultural 
sphere--it produces a cultural decoding of flows analagous to that 
performed at the base.  Alternatively, and following Toni Negri, we can 
say that we are only now beginning to see the real subsumption of society 
under capital.


Jon

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