Re: 'critical theory' ?

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

>[snip] I have enjoyed my readings in critical theory, but this is the
>time to make available all of Grossmann's and Mattick's writings.
>[snip]
>rakesh
>Any chance you could give me a nutshell on what is 'critical theory'?
> I've heard the phrase, but I don't know what it means.
>Thanks,
>Lisa


Well, as I looked for and found that nutshell (provided by Werner Bonefeld
in his discussion of Max Horkheimer's seminal essay on traditional and
critical theory), I also came to the conclusion that I was  wrong to
devalue the importance of critical theory.

When I have some more time, I will reproduce the paragraphs from pp.
184-185 of Werner Bonefeld's "'Capital as Subject and the Existence of
Labour" in Emancipating Marx: Open Marxism, vol 3. London: Pluto, 1994.

 Bonefeld begins: "Horkheimer's remark that 'human being produce, through
their own labour, a reality which increasingly enslaves them', is of key
importance....On first sight, the sentence provides a paradox. On the one
hand, human beings are the subject of the sentence.  They are active and
creative.  They produce their own reality.  They are the essence of the
sentence.  On the other hand, they are merely the object of reality, an
enslaving reality.  Human beings are reduced to a faceless 'them', to an
appendix of reality which stands above them, and which merely develops
through human action.  How do we understand human activity: subject and, as
such, essence of reality; or merely object of reality...."

There is an extremeley important place where Marx criticizes left
Ricardianism for its inability to grasp this contradiction--see pp. 258 of
TSV III (Moscow, Progress).

Here  Marx argues that left Ricardianism embraced labor as active and
creative, the *sole* source of exchange value and the active source of use
value without probing why the product of that same  labor is also
self-generated structural domination (producing a reality that enslaves
them).

 Describing how and why there was a one-sided left appropriation of
Ricardo, Marx then summarizes and points to the limits of this--let's
say--traditional critique:  "Labor is the sole source of exchange value and
the only active creator of use-value.  This is what you say.  On the other
hand, you say that *capital* is everything, and the worker is nothing or a
mere production cost of capital.  You have refuted yourselves.  Capital is
*nothing* but defrauding of the worker.  *Labour* is *everything*.  This,
in fact is the ultimate meaning of all the writings which defend the
interests of the proletariat from the Ricardian standpoint basing
themselves on his assumptions. Just as little as he [Ricardo] understands
the identity of *capital* and *labor* in his own system do they
*understand* the contradiction they describe.  That is why the most
important among them--Hodgskin, for example--accept all the economic
preconditions of capitalist production as eternal forms and only desire to
eliminate capital, which is both the basis and necessary consequence [of
these preconditions]."

For Marx then the task was not only to prove that despite fetishistic
appearances, profit, rent and interest are but forms of the surplus value
produced by labor and labor alone; Marx was also interested in why this
same all-powerful labor produced a dynamic system which escaped its control
and turned itself (labor) into nothing more than a production cost to be
minimized.

To understand this labor could not be defended on Ricardian grounds.  For
Marx, critical theory required a critique and of labor in the historically
specific functions it had assumed under capitalism.  I think it is safe to
say that the only modern theorist who has grasped that this was the burden
Marx put on critical theory (a critique of left Ricardianism) is Moishe
Postone (along with the people he cites, Backhaus)

rakesh






     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------