From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@msn.com)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 08:45:46 EST
Re Michael E's [8046]: I'll pass over your reference to "sociation" and _Value-Form and the State_ now but would like to return at a later date to the controversial issue of whether sociation (and hence dissociation and association) should form the starting point for a systematic dialectical reconstruction of capitalism in thought (as Mike and Geert contend in _VFS_) or whether the starting point should remain the commodity (as in Marx). I will note only that within _VFS_ the sociation/dissociation/association dialectic is crucial for the later comprehension of the state-form. Instead, I want to further discuss -- and connect -- the following sections of your post. > It is still taken for granted today, in 2002, in the mainstream > social sciences that if it ain't measurable, it don't exist. > With respect to a theory of capitalist society, thinking aims at saying > what capitalist society _is_. This is the form of question posed by > philosophy since its beginnings, the famous Socratic question _ti > estin...;_ "what is...?". What something is is the question as to its > essence. Marx starts with an analysis of commodity exchange in > order to gain a first, preliminary, but all-decisive answer to this > question. He starts with a familiar phenomenon of sociation, > namely, the exchange of goods between people. The practice of > exchange sociates > (or, to use a more familiar word, associates) > humans with one another. So the question is: What is going on when > people sociate through the exchange of commodity goods? Yet, this constituted part of Marx's *critique* of the philosophers: "The philosophers have only *interpreted* the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to *change* it" (of course, the celebrated and oft-quoted 11th Thesis from the "Theses on Feuerbach.") So, clearly Marx identified his task as something more than just understanding 'what is'. One could even argue, though, that a *consistent* application of the 11th Thesis -- wherein one interrogates its meaning rather than taking it as a 'given' -- would lead to a rejection of Descartes' Rule 14.4. How so? Let me explain: While it is the case that capital attempts to subordinate all aspects of social life to its imperative and thereby attempts to commodidify all social relations and hence express those relations quantitatively as magnitude, this can never be entirely successful or complete. Indeed, it only expresses one side of a dynamic: namely, how capital attempts to re-mold all aspects of human relations in its own image. That side of the dynamic is not only expressed everyday in the marketplace (e.g. with the attempted commodification of love) but in mainstream (bourgeois) thought as well (e.g. "Human capital", a la Gary Becker, theory). Yet, the perspective that beings can only be comprehended in terms of magnitude is one-sided and hence false. There are many *essential* aspects of social relations that *can not* be expressed as magnitude. In fact, I would assert that a systematic comprehension of *CLASSES* and *THE STATE* can not be developed merely through an examination of magnitude. Indeed, *ONE CAN NOT CHANGE THE WORLD IF ONE ONLY COMPREHENDS THE WORLD IN TERMS OF MAGNITUDE*. Hence, a rejection of Descartes Rule 14.4 is a REVOLUTIONARY IMPERATIVE. Before you arrived (in the Spring, 2002) we had a discussion on-list that was stimulated by the publication of John Holloway's book _Change the World_. While the three of us (John H, yourself and I) have a number of theoretical and political disagreements (which, no doubt, will unfold in due course) I think we all agree that we can not understand _or_ change the world if we conceive of social relations only as quantitative relations which can be expressed as magnitude. E.g. in that discussion, John highlighted the connection between LOVE AND STRUGGLE. How can we, for instance, conceive of class subjectivity, consciousness, sisterhood, and comradeship only as magnitude? Of course, it can't be done -- indeed, it is absurd. Moreover, the working class and the revolutionary movement can not be conceived adequately in terms of magnitude. It is thus part of the process of the unfolding of an emancipation movement that revolutionaries come to conceive of themselves as more than just numbers. I look forward to further discussion. In solidarity, Jerry
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