From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Mar 29 2007 - 01:39:17 EDT
My sincere apologies Rakesh. I don't know what happened there, one bit from one mail seems to have slipped into another, it wasn't meant for you. I have been ill and haven't got around to scanning the harddrive again to figure out the problems I am having. However the first bit WAS meant for you. Namely, in his depiction of long waves of capitalist development, Mandel suggests that "class struggles" are an EXOGENOUS factor, in contrast to the ENDOGENOUS forces (laws of motion) which cause a boom to turn into its dialectical opposite. Point 1: Mandel mixes up the concept of "class conflict" with "class struggle". A class conflict can exist more or less permanently as a field of tension between social classes, but it does not automatically mean a class struggle. Point 2: I think that class conflicts and class struggles are ENDOGENOUS to capitalist development, they help shape it, and I think Marx thought so too. Workers' resistance to oppressive conditions and terms of work, or protests with regard to laws and politics, whatever form they take, are simply part and parcel of everyday life in capitalism, the only thing that changes, is their scale and intensity. Sometimes they assert themselves in a fairly mute and oblique way, at other times with furious intensity and on a massified scale. Now this is important, because if you don't really understand what you are talking about regarding class conflicts and class struggles, then you cannot solve the problem of what Mandel liked to call "the subjective factor" either. What I am suggesting is that, by seeking to be super-objective in these things, he is in fact severing the relationship between object and subject. Once that happens, no amount of talk about "dialectics" of objective and subjective factors can solve the problem of understanding subjectivities. So essentially I think Mandel reifies the idea of class struggle in his theory. Behind the "economic categories" I think are human relations, and if we fetishize economic relations we lose touch with what that specifically means for human beings. Marx isn't talking about the rate and mass of surplus value simply as a satire on political economy, he is talking about numbers which directly impact on the lives of working people, make no mistake about that. At the risk of caricature, Mandel has a picture of the "economic engine" motoring along according to its laws of motion and then breaking down at some point, and then you get growing tensions between social classes and explosions of class struggle. But there is no "economic engine" and those tensions exist all the time. Mandel was a gifted writer and he wrote an awful lot, getting better at it over time. But that doesn't mean he's necessarily correct. I think on many crucial topics he got it wrong. He could for instance perfectly well explain the Leninist theory of party-building in fine detail, but he couldn't build a mass party. And that is because his concepts and methods were wrong, all the rest is apologia. Jurriaan
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