Re: recession?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:
>
> Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
> stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Brecht puts his finger on the reason that facts by themselves tell us
very little.

I think that is probably the trap Stan Goff has fallen into. For him, it
seems that marxism was an empirical description of the world. When that
empirical description (as he understood it) clashed with his perceptions
of current actuality, he rejected it. For example, he apparently assumes
that "working class" is an empirical category. But if class is an
empirical category, then it obviously is no more useful than any other
empirical category in describing the contemporary world. In particular,
it is far less useful than the empirical categories "women," "men,"
"sexists," "racists," etc. So it follows that it is mechanical and
dogmatic -- pure metaphysics -- to speak of class as a primary
contradiction, since to the empiricist gaze there are no real
contradictions, there are only a numerous collection of clashes in the
world empirically  inspected, of which he's probably right the most
important in the u.s are and always have been race and gender.

But this tells us absolutely nothing about the truth or falsity,
usefulness or uselessness of marxian theory.

Carrol