[Marxism] Time and Reality 2

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor and I apparently corresponded offlist on this topic. I have lost
his original post, but I quote part of it in the following post to him.

Carrol

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: An extension of Marxist history
Date: Sat, 08 May 1999 15:19:47 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <nestor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky wrote:

> Worse yet, under capitalism the Future is the Real and the
> dictatorship of the Past (embodied in objects that rule on
> humans) is the Actual. So, there is no Present but as a
> flow from sadness under the yoke of the Past towards
> anguish under the yoke of the Future. Would Proposition C
> have something to do with this?

I hadn't thought of a Proposition C, but your suggestion is excellent,
continuing the way in which (more generalized) capitalism simply steals
our life. An anarchist philosopher, Fredy Perlman, writing an
introduction to Rubin's *Marx's Theory of Value*, defines labor as
living human activity, then defines political economy (as opposed to
bourgeois economics) as the study of how, under given historical
conditions, human activity is allocated. That is our life which the
expropriation of surplus value both directly and indirectly steals from
us.

Technically, I believe this is what "commodity fetishism" means. But I
like to paraphrase that frightening expression in as many ways as
possible. That's human life rolling past us in the freight train -- in
fact the train itself is the human life of all those who made it, of
those who fed and clothed those who made it, of those who mined the iron
and smelted the steel and .....of those who fed and clothed the feeders
and clothers of those who mined the iron ....

It's been over 50 years since I read Goethe's *Faust* in a clumsy
translation, but if I remember accuratelly at all the one request that
Faust is forbidden to make is that this moment remain as it is.

Carrol


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