Yesterday an old friend from my misspent Trotskyist youth sent me an excerpt from Harry Harootunian’s “Marx After Marx” that he described as “a further contribution to the transition debates and a polemic against Western Marxism, stagist theories, and by implication some aspects of Political Marxism (but no index entries for Brenner or Wood).” He warned me, however, that before tackling it I review Marx’s discussion of formal vs. real subsumption at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm#469. I did know that Marx wrote about subsumption in the Grundrisse, a “classic” that I confess never having read. I suppose if you are going to be a professional Marxist qualified to speak at HM plenaries, you need to have read the Grundrisse and earned a PhD from York University or some other top-drawer institute. Poor me to have no such qualifications.
Charles Post was someone who obviously had read his Grundrisse on the evidence of having uttered the sacred words “real subsumption” in his speech at the Ellen Meiksins Wood Symposium where he took on the “critics of Political Marxism” who harped on “the persistence of legally coerced labor under capitalism.” He referred them to Mike Zmolek’s recently published book on the history of capitalism in England from a Brennerite perspective, where the “the state plays a crucial role” in primitive accumulation by using “legal-juridical forces was necessary to ensure the sale of labor-power.” Once the state has finished playing this role by kicking the workers in the teeth, the markets can kick in after “capital has achieved real subsumption of labor.” Now, anybody who has not read Marx might scratch his or her head about this “real subsumption” business? What was it while the state was still a player? Unreal subsumption? No, Marx called it formal subsumption. Don’t ask me why. I have trouble enough with Hegel. full: http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/21/anglocentrism-and-the-real-subsumption-of-labor/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
