From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 07:11:13 EDT
Paul C wrote on Thursday, May 08: > It is a general property of the epistemological break founding a > science that it installs a mode of explanation that sees things > in terms of processes without a subject. The sciences in general > deal with material systems evolving through time under a set of > dynamical laws. These systems require no subject for their > conceptualisation, leaving aside your pun on the word subject > to mean subject matter. We have to distinguish among the sciences. Consider the science of geology. Putting aside the presence of the observer (the geologists), that science seeks to explain an objective process without a subject. This is fundamentally different from any science, including political economy, that purports to explain *human* behavior. Unlike the object of study in geology, human beings are not rocks! We have the capacity, through the development of understanding and consciousness, to _change_ our reality. Rocks (despite Erich Weinert's wonderful poem "Song of the paving stones") can not collectively organize for their mutual benefit in order to change the world of rocks. Thus, subjects are _necessarily embedded_ in the study of the 'dynamical laws' of capitalism. > It depends on your level of conceptualisation. Social systems > are configurations of matter operating under their own specific > dynamical laws, Marx was attempting to uncover these 'laws of motion' > for the capitalist system. Those "laws of motion" often make assumptions about the behavior of classes as subjects. For example, what assumptions about the state of class struggle did Marx make in explaining the law of the tendency for the general rate of profit to decline and its counteracting tendencies? As we examine such processes at a more concrete level of investigation, we must explore the means through which social subjects affect the "laws." > As a side effect of their operation, the reproduction of capitalism > generates juridical subjects - not philosophical subjects. I am not referring here to juridical subjects but to the real social subjects which exist in the material world and who are able through their actions to change aspects of social life and, to some extent, their material well-being. They are not merely philosophical subjects but _real_ subjects under capitalism. > The point is that subjects are an interior effect of the laws of > commodity production, explicable in terms of these laws and not > constitutive atoms of reality. I would say, on the contrary, that social subjects (such as classes) are indeed "constitutive atoms of reality" since they shape their own circumstances (within limits) and are shaped by circumstances and other subjects (such as the actions of 'alien' classes). Moreover -- from a historical standpoint -- capitalism revolutions) could not have arisen as the dominant mode of production without subjects. Weren't bourgeois revolutions necessary for that transformation? Those revolutions would be unthinkable without subjects. To take the subjects out of the study of capitalism transforms capitalism into a ahistorical, mechanical process. > I dont see that talking about subjects helps us with materialist > concpetion of social class. Classes are not juridical subjects nor > psychological agents. Do classes and class segments have *consciousness*? Isn't that a significant reality for the comprehension of the state of class struggle? In solidarity, Jerry
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