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John Holloway <104164.2012@compuserve.com> said, on 03/27/00 at 06:38 PM:
>2)...If I read you [Paul Z.] correctly, you do not want to understand
>'capital' as class struggle, you do not want to understand 'state' as
>class struggle, you do not want to understand 'crisis' as class struggle.
>If you did, then fetishisation, the 'thing-ification' of antagonistic
>relations, would of central importance to you. If I am correct and you do
>not, are you not limiting (i.e. defining) the scope of class struggle?
John has the lead article, "State as Class Practice", in Vol. 3 (1980) of
the RESEARCH. The page facing his own title page is page x of my
"Foreword". My third-to-last sentence reads: "the purpose of developing
theory is to aid the struggles of popular classes against their oppression
and for revolutionary change". I have never departed from that
understanding.
>4) Nicky in 2599 says:
>"John doesn't seem to believe that class is definable, so any struggle in
>this direction is a waste of everyone's efforts, anyway."
>I never said that at all. Capital defines class all the time. I said that
>our struggle is against definition. One of the disturbing features of
>'Marxist economics' is that it tends to assume a continuity between
>bourgeois theory and Marxist theory rather than a radical rupture.
Capital, however, did not and does not define production relations,
productive forces, mode of production, labor power, constant capital,
variable capital, production of absolute surplus value, production of
relative surplus value. Marx did. Why didn't Marx "struggle against
definition", but rather FOR definition within the context of his struggle
for knowledge? I suppose it is possible to argue FOR such definitions and
against a definition of "class", but I haven't heard such an argument. (I
have repeatedly asked John to relate, one way or another, to these
attempts FOR definition undertaken by Marx.)
>8) Paul Z. says in 2606:
>"FETISH*:
>I did a search of *Capital*, Vol. 1. "Fetish" and "fetishism" ONLY
>appears in that ONE 12-page section of Chapter 1 (other than in Chapter
>3, "the hoarder, therefore, makes a sacrifice of the lusts of the flesh
>to his gold fetish"). How can one make "fetish" THE category of Marx's
>work, in the face of this evidence?!
>The point is not to count words, but to try to understand.
I answered this point two days before this posting by John, when I replied
to Andrew (OPE-L 2604).
Thanks, Paul
***********************************************************************
Paul Zarembka, supporting RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
********************http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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