Re: recession?

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

The above is exactly correct.

I don't know what Marxists Stan Goff is dealing with,
but it certainly isn't people like E.P. Thompson,
Ellen Meiksins Wood, John Holloway, or Daniel Bensaid.

As Bensaid never tires of reminding us, it is not
coincidence that the chapter on social classes comes
_at the end_ of Volume 3 and then breaks off.

Marx states very clearly at the beginning of his
depiction that classes as they appear in Capital are
character masks, not empirically existing social
classes.

Classes for Marx are derivative categories of abstract
labour, not a "primary" anything.

In empirically existing social reality, we have wage
labourers who also own stock in their respective
firms.  On an empirical level, they embody both the
wage-labour and capital abstract categories.

As long as the Marxian critique is not understood in
this way, the Stan Goffs of the world will find little
of use in Marx, and will reject him for good reason.









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