Re: [Marxism] theocracy? (Haines Brown)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Friedman wrote:
> 
> Interesting. By bringing in the notion of social being we can also do away
> with the need for (and, indeed the cause of the notion of) transcendance
> via an afterlife, etc., as Nestor once pointed out...

This is always difficult to get across, the notion of the atomic
individual (isolated, existing prior to and autonomously of social
relations) is so deeply entrenched in capitalist culture. One way I have
found of expressing it in conversation which sometimes catches peoples
attention is, "I do not HAVE a history, I _am_ a history, and I have no
existence in abstraction from that history." Notice that this makes the
notion of immortality incoherent. Also, just as Marx speaks of the
"human essence" as being the ensemble of the social relations, one can
speak of the individual history in this way: Wherever and whenever we
find ourselves we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social
relations in abstraction from which we simply have no being.

Carrol


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