[PEN-L:8765] Re: Socialism, Social Democracy, Democracy

["Ricardo Duchesne" <RDUCHESN@xxxxxxxx>]

> I think people should stop thinking of Marx as an economic determinist. As
> Lucio Colletti pointed out years ago (before he abandoned socialism),
> Marx's economic sphere isn't "economic" in the normal sense of the word,
> since involves social relations, class struggle, and consciousness.
> Seemingly without realizing it, Sam Bowles and an earlier incarnation of
> Herb Gintis generalized from this, distiguishing between "sites" and
> "practices": in Marx's economic "site" (fraction of society), not only
> economic, but political practices take place -- and in the state (the
> political "site"), not only political but economic practices occur.
> Actually, it's unclear to me if Marx actually split off an "economic" site
> from the rest of society.

It is a common assumption of Marxists that, if one conceives the
formation of classes in terms of their cultural, psychological,
political experiences (or you name it, that may very well be you
contribution to Marxist theory) one has transcended the
base-superstructure model: class relations can no longer be seen as
deterministic since they include simultaneously all sorts of
non-economic experiences. But Althusser's critique of Lukacs
expressive totality applies here, since each of these simultaneous
experiences are really an expression of the essential experience of
class, *distinctions within the unity of that one experience*.

Of course, as Hindess and Hirst were later to show (and as the
editors of Rethinking Marxism have yet to learn) Althusser's concept
of structural causality was ultimately "Hegelian", in that it, too,
conceives the structure mode of production as a "cause immanent in
its effects", which is akin to the "Hegelian" notion that there is an
inner principle which is present in the whole, the parts being an
expression of that inner essence.