I should first say, I'm no philosopher. I've read Marx, Feuerbach, Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein. Mostly Marx, then Hegel... Hegel brought me to tears, and not tears of joy.
OK I'm no philosopher. Neither was Marx, although unlike Marx, I never studied the subject formally. My take on Rosa's debate is a little unusual, if not for others , certainly for me, being a partisan of dialectics-- at least I think I am-- or I think I am, therefore I am, or I might be. Anyway... First-- I am more than sympathetic of Rosa's argument that Marx did not create a dialectical materialism, I am in complete agreement. IMO, those who think there is a "dialectical materialism" to Marx's work are taking a giant step backward. Marx is not creating a new philosophy, a philsophy of the universe, a philosophy of science or nature or anything else. He is, in the beginning grappling with...he is grappling with what he and Engels call the "rational kernel" that he extracted from Hegel. And that core is the real content of human history. What Marx finds in Hegel, in the Hegel's presentation of "spirit," "consciousness" making itself manifest in the world is an alienated expression for the real content of history. And what is the unalienated expression, what is that real content? For Marx, it is the social organization of labor. The materialism is history. The materialism is social. But my take is, as I said, unusual, in that I think Marx clearly takes over words, methods, "tactics," from Hegel in his analyses of contradiction, necessity, immanence in capital's existence. What is the "dialectical contradiction" Marx explores? Philosophy has proven itself incapable of answering that, and we must, to be consistent with Marx find the answer in history, in the social organization of labor. That contradiction is the relation of capital and wage-labor. Each exists only in the organization of the other. Capital, to be capital, must organize labor in a specific form in order to access, appropriate surplus value. To do this, the means of production must be monopolized by the class of [emerging] capitalists-- but they are monopolized in a manner that makes them essentially useless when not yielding exchange-value and profit. For that to occur, labor itself must be organized as useless, as offering no mechanism for the laborer to subsist, save in the exchange of the ability to labor in return for the means of subsistence [or the medium for their purchase]. So while capital belongs to the capitalist as private property, the private property can only exist with a specific social organization of labor. Capital can go nowhere without dragging this, wage-labor, its complementary opposite with it. Now for capital to aggrandize greater portions of the source of the surplus value, it must not only organize, aggrandize labor as wage-labor, it must simultaneously aggrandize and expel such labor from the production process. The more capital accumulates, the more it exchanges itself with wage-labor, the less, relatively, of itself it exchanges with wage-labor. And it is this contradiction, dialectical contradiction, that leads to the overproduction of capital and the decline in the rate of profit. The more capitalist property expands, the less that property is capable of providing the return that is necessarily the end, and the beginning, the realization and the extinction of capital's circuits. Now these processes of capital are historical, material, social processes. Marx wasn't making philosophical inquiries, no more than he weas making a "new" political economy. Capital is no work of political economy. It is the history of capitalism's internal metabolism, almost like a teasing-apart of the strands of DNA to find the patterns of replication. Economics is nothing but concentrated history. History is the social organization of labor. Marx really is, or supposed to be, the end of philosophy and political economy. I think Marx makes this breakthrough most evident not so much in the Theses on Feuerbach, but in two later works, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, and, IMO, the 2nd greatest work of historical materialism ever produced, The 18th Brumaire... (Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution being number 1). And of course, there is Marx's preface to the 2nd edition of Vol 1, when he explicitly declares himself a dialectician.... ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
