Re: Re: Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, never mind, Yoshie, this is hopeless. Instead of a reasonable argument
that class doesn't account for as much of the variation as historical
materialists say (though it really depends on the HM--Marx put a lot of
emphasis on military factors in the rose of feudalism), we have the classic
straw man that it doesn't account of all of it all the time, which no
Marxist has ever maintained. And we have the objection phrased not in
explanatory, social-scientific term,  but in metaphysical terms, as
"essentialism," which is meaningless jargon. What we have here is not a
scientific but an ideological debate,a t least on the other side. I'm out of
it.

--jks


> > You said it Justin:
> > >  Primarily the social relations of production, i.e., the class
> > >  relations whose structure ****primarily explains the nature and
> > >  development of the mode of production, the state, and, less directly,
> > >  ideology.**** This is elementary. Surely you knew this is the
> > > historical
> > >  materialist view? L&M attack it (wrongly) as monocausal, narrowminded
> > >  class reductionsim and bad essentialism. --jks
> >
> > It is essentialist. Relations of production DO NOT, in all case, in all
> > historical epochs, explain the nature of the state. War has been in
> > many instances far more important.
>
> What explains the cause of war, though?  War itself?  Human nature?
> Something else?
>
> Yoshie

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