From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2007 - 14:56:34 EST
Ajit, I can follow your jocular, sarcastic poesis quite well (I read Castoriadis also), but thought I would try for a serious answer to your unserious quip. I don't subscribe to historical materialism, which is a doctrine, I favour the materialist conception (Auffassung) of history as a guide to research, like Marx & Engels. That means I don't believe in creationism or the idealist interpretation of history, and that I think social consciousness and the selfawareness that people have, ought to be explained in terms of the practical relations they have in society, the way they practically produce and reproduce the conditions of their existence, which obviously involves both objective and subjective conditions. Marx & Engels never claimed the "universal truth" of historical materialism, or any non-tautological universal truths for that matter. Scientific statements are always fallible statements for which we can specify the limits of their application. Universal statements are usually metaphysical statements, not amenable to experimental proof, precisely because they are universal. All scientists operate with some metaphysical beliefs, as Stefan Amsterdamski noted, but if they are scientists, they acknowledge that their metaphysical beliefs are metaphysical, and not scientific. Marx & Engels thought that the materialist interpretation of history, as a guide or orientation, would probably be modified in future by the scientific research it inspired (a similar point is made by Makoto Itoh in "The Political Economy of Socialism"), and they strongly criticised the "world schematism" of philosophers who invented "systems" from behind their writing desks, without doing any serious scientific research into the historical facts of experience, as well as university drop-outs who sought to occupy a leading position in the socialist movement. Marx indeed writes in the preface to Das Kapital, "every scientific criticism is welcome", though vulgar prejudice is not. He wasn't afraid of criticism, to the contrary, criticism led to the growth of knowledge. Marx & Engels never laid claim to a privileged epistemic position, you are confusing them with Louis Althusser and Stalin, who claimed the scientific authority of Marxism (as interpreted by the Central Committee) prior to any science really occurring, a bureaucratic fallacy. Goran Therborn among others has emphasized the need to apply the tools of historical materialism to the evolution of the doctrine itself (see his book "Science, Class & Society", which was still influenced by Althusser to some extent). I myself translated a book about the history of Marxist interpretations of the USSR. For Marx & Engels, a privileged epistemic position was something to be conquered through doing real research, not something granted by divine or official ordination. In this sense, Marx wrote specifically that "there is no royal road to science" and if you want to ascend to its luminous summits, then you have to do the work to get there, i.e. if you want to get to the top of the mountain you have to climb up the mountain. This was in the days before there were the helicopters which Leonardo da Vinci imagined and instant wisdoms through Googling the Internet. You ask "How could Marx penetrate through the so-called "commodity fetishism" where other political economists could not? Obviously they had some limitation that Marx does not have." I think this is partly true and partly false. It is true insofar as from a certain vantage point, it is possible to understand the causes of the reifying effects of commodification. But it is also false, since the insight into the reifying effects of commodification was never limited to Marx at all. Numerous 19th century political economists as well as early socialists and anarchists concerned with "the social question" commented on aspects of it. Marx was quite aware that alienation is never absolute, because alienation also gives rise to the revolt against alienation, and reification gives rise to the protest against reification. Insofar as commerce dehumanises human relations, it also gives rise to the attempt to re-humanise them. Insofar as postmodernism has a progressive content, it is precisely to be found in this area. Many leftists of the 1960s painted a picture of monumental, monolithic domination of totally alienated people, but this is a fallacy, because it ignores the way ordinary people subvert that domination, more or less playfully, or more or less seriously, with their own meanings. Alienation is rarely absolute, and precisely for that reason, people can acquire insight of and understanding of their alienated condition. It is just that they cannot abolish their alienation totally as individuals, however much they try, since they are still trapped in the society which generates it. All they can do, short of enacting a social revolution collectively, is to generate new, authentic social relations and forms of consciousness which partially overcome that alienation, and make life more liveable. The human species as a distinct species is maybe 4 million years old, while bourgeois civilisation is only a few hundred years old, and therefore many aspects of humanity live on, even if they are denied by commerce and the cash nexus, which reject the value of anything unless it can be traded, and postulate liberal democracy as the "end of history" in a neo-Hegelian way. My interest in Lawrence Krader is not a tactic for evading important logical implications of Marx's theory. I am interested in Krader because he stayed curious, and tried to understand the limits of economic definitions through historical and anthropological research, and in that way enriched the meaning and understanding of those definitions. After all, Marx's theory of value is not intended simply to apply to capitalism, but to the whole history of trade, even if "value-form" theorists deny Marx's statement that "many thinkers tried for more than two thousand years to understand the value form". Marx wrote:"Der Austausch oder Verkauf der Ware zu ihrem Wert ist das Rationelle, das natürliche Gesetz ihres Gleichgewichts; von ihm ausgehend, sind die Abweichungen zu erklären..." meaning "the exchange or sale of commodities at their value is the rational, natural law of their equilibrium; taking them as point of departure, the deviations can be explained" (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Band III, in: Marx/Engels, Werke, Band 25, Berlin 1964, p. 197). He explains, however, that in capitalist society mostly commodities are not traded exactly at their value, which has important implications for the quest of realising the maximum surplus value from the products of human labour. You may of course disagree with Marx's procedure, and adopt another procedure, but you cannot seriously argue that Marx subscribed to an equilibrium theory, under conditions where commodities in reality do not trade at their value. You can only do so by regarding price-value deviations as irrelevant. Well, few modern investment specialists would follow you in this - they make their money especially from price-value deviations. Jurriaan What'll I tell him When he comes to me for absolution Wouldn't you know it Hope I don't make a bad decision 'Cos I'd like to believe That there is a god Why sinful angels Suffer for love I'd like to believe In the terrible truth In the beautiful lie Like to know you But in this town I can't get arrested If you know me Why don't you tell me what I'm thinking Hey don't look now But there goes God In his sexy pants And his sausage dog And he can't stand Beelzebub 'Cos he looks so good in black, in black - "There goes God", Crowded House
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