Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Sartesian writes:
>Now for Marx's writings.  ... Is there more to Marx than the class struggle?  Yes.  But there is nothing to
Marx without that class struggle.  All that is more is the expansion of the that core.<

agreed. 

>The competitition of capital's is a manifestation of the "flaw" in the private property
form that encapsulates social production, as capitals have to achieve a social
"verification" by throwing all privately appropriated values into circulation to obtain
any portion of the total value.  It is a manifestation of the conflict between use and
exchange, or.. private property and social production., or labor and the conditions
of labor.  It is in fact, derivative....<

right, but this "flaw" also has benefits for capitalism. It looks to many or even most people on the inside of capitalism (in the belly of the beast as it were) as if capitalism isn't a unified class system. If not for competition, people would see One Big Capital and see it as their enemy. Instead, many people say "hey, maybe if I'm loyal to my boss for while, the benefits will trickle down to me because of success against competitors" and the like. This of course, is part of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism or illusions created by competition.  

>Finally, I come to the remark about giving advice simply as "common sense."
Marx, like Hegel,  had a lot to say about  common sense.  None of it good. And
why?  Because common sense was an ideological concept, not a critical
analysis.<

There are two sides of "common sense." One is that it represents a fetishized vision. That should be rejected. However, there's another side, which is the every day experience of real people trying to survive in the real world. Though it's fetishized, it's a mistake to reject it root and branch. Someone trying to organize workers must pay attention to their common sense understanding. It's part of treating people as people (respecting them) rather than objectifying them. A lot of their "common sense" turns out to have a lot of validity. Like when (in the 1970s) a bunch of Trotskyists moved into jobs in a steel mill a friend was working in. At the time he said that they were a bunch of damned dilettantes (not his word) who wouldn't last. That turned out to be about 90% true. (Nobody involved knew that the factory would soon be shut down.)  

The Hegelian tradition (especially the followers) tend to overdo their emphasis on the "big picture," seeing the forest but not the trees. "Common sense," on the other hand, sees the trees but not the forest. If "the truth is the whole" (as Hegel said), then both the forest and the trees are relevant. We have to see not only the unified character of the system (e.g., that behind every market there's a death squad) but also the heterogeneity of real phenomena, e.g., that in some markets many consumers -- even working-class ones -- are pretty happy with the results.  

jd