Re: The materialist road...

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

>From David whose posts have been a pleasure to read:


 > Unlike the
>hegelian marxists and Feuerbach, who looked everywhere for a Subject (Man,
>the proletariat) of History, Hegel and the Slovenian clique see the process
>itself as the Subject.  They retain the notion of a Goal, but this is
>internal to the process itself.

I am wondering whether this understanding is similar to the argument that
in demonstrating how Capital took on the properties of Hegel's Absolute
Subject, Marx was able to demonstrate the historical specificity of
Hegelian philosophy.

For example, Patrick Murray has argued:

"The idea's story of externalization parallels the dialectic by which money
is transformed into capital: Money externalizes itself in commodities
(means of production and labor power) and returns to itself (with a
surplus) in the valorization process.  The logical idea externalizes itself
in nature and (human) spirt only as a representation of itself....When
money is transformed into capital, it is externalized into natural ojbects,
labor power, and products of human labors on natural objects.  In so doing,
capital posits the earth and labor power (nature and human spirit) as
values.  At the end of the valorization process, capital returns to the
fixated abstraction of its turning point--money.  TO THE EYES OF CAPITAL
(my emphasis), the earth and human labor are valueless in themselves, just
as in absolute idealism's scheme of things, "*Nature as nature...is
senseless" (Marx).  By forgetting their sources, both the idea's course of
externalization, which treads the logical path of the negation of the
negation on a grand scale, and capital's cycle of negations (buying,
selling, producing) in the process of valorization condemn themselves to a
hellish running in spirals." (43)

To this self-positing nature of capital, Tony Smith has argued that Marx is
insisting that individuality and particularity must be developed as
equiprimordial to universality. As Smith interprets it,  Marx is using this
Hegelian triad to fight for the principles of subjectivity, individuality
and personality which tend to be blotted out by capital as a
self-reproducing totality, which Smith parenthically argues capital cannot
attain in the long run. (31) From the  passage above, one also wonders
whether nature could be conceptualized differently than a moment in the
externalization of Capital.  I am not sure what the nature of nature would
be if the principles of particularity and individuality were applied to it,
but that is an interesting question to think about.

Chris Arthur picks up on Smith's parenthetical concern to remind us that
"Unfortunately for capital, it cannot actualize itself and conquer all its
presuppositions of its existence as easily as Hegel's Idea is supposed to.
The true reality is material. As a pure form, capital spins in a void. The
logic of capital accumulation would run into the buffers pretty quickly
were it not for the material fact that workers produce more than they
themselves consume. Moreover, the laborers are liable to resist their
incorporation as internal moments of capital's ideality, that its, the Idea
of capital made real." (86)

All quotes from the edited volume, Marx's Method in Capital: A
Re-examination. Ed. Fred Moseley. NJ: Humanities Press, 1993.

rakesh





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