The Yankees look terrible. If this is May in New York, I don't want to be here in November. What else is there besides Marx? I mean other than looking at and listening to Beyonce, and Shakira?
So OK, here goes. First some quotes from Ted, quoting Smith, Hegel, Marx: 1."It is thus that through the greater part of Europe the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country" (Smith). 2."I shall, therefore, use the term 'passion;' understanding thereby the particular bent of character, as far as the peculiarities of volition are not limited to private interest, but supply the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."(Hegel). 3. "Marx's sublation of this idea of the "passions" makes it part of a philosophy of history that constitutes history as a set of internally related "stages" in a process of "education," i.e. as "stages in the development of the human mind." Like differences in religion, the differences in "passions" express different stages in this process. This is very different from Smith's conception of "stages." It sublates Hegel (who also sublated Smith). The role assigned to class relations embodies this philosophy of history. The class relation is conceived as an internal developmental relation, i.e. as an internal relation developmental of the human mind." (Ted). ___________________ Well, where to begin? How about with the "4th Volume of Capital," Marx's Theories of Surplus Value? It is in part 1 of TSV, in the analysis of the physiocrats and Adam Smith that Marx shows, demonstrates, implicitly his real sublation, overcoming, turning over-- like a turning over of the soil-- and regrounding of the real content of Hegel's inquiries, and does it with "passion." That real content is quite simply human history, for what Hegel presents as passions, as spirit, as interconnected, and interpenetration stages in the development of the human mind is a history, but presented as,--and determined, informed by the material conditions of its production, in its own "underdevelopment," -- an alienated history. With Marx, history is the product of human activity in the material world; history is social, is the product of the organization of labor; and the interpenetrations, the interconnections of stages, the transformation of a things into opposites, are social relations of production-- the accrual of labor, the appropriation, expropriation, aggrandizement of labor as property, the relations between classes. Marx does not exactly "stand Hegel on his head" or even exactly turn Hegel right side up.. He extracts the conditions of production, the alienation of human activity that is given its most perfect expression, and the prospect for its immanent inversion in Hegel. In TSV part 1, Marx performs begins his "extraction," his sublation through overthrow of political economy, with the Physiocrats-- opening his remarks with the statement: "The analysis of capital, within the bourgeois horizon is essentially the work of the Physiocrats. It is this service that makes them the true fathers of the modern political economy.....It is not a reproach to the Physiocrats that, like all their succesors, they thought of these material forms of existence--such as tools, raw materials, etc.--as capital, in isolation from the social conditions in which they appear in capitalist production; in a word, in the form in which they are elements of the labour process in general, independently of its social form-- and thereby made of the capitalist form of production an eternal, natural form of production. For them the bourgeois forms of production necessarily appeared as natural forms. It was their great merit that they conceived these forms as physiological forms of society: as forms arising from the natural necessity of production itself, forms that are independent of anyone's will or of politics etc. They are material laws, the error is only that the material law of a definite historical social stage is conceived as an abstract law governing equally all forms of society." Quite an opening paragraph, isn't it? Stands, in my estimation, right alongside the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the opening chapter of Capital, as containing every bit of Marx, the person, Marxism, the analysis-- everything that will be developed throughout his works. I like to think that if you study the first chapters of Capital, if you get the distinction and interpenetrating identities of use value and exchange value, if you get the commodity, you can build all of Marx's system, analyses, yourself. If you don't get that, you get nothing. But returning to this paragraph-- Marx is (almost IMO) implicitly comparing the Physiocrats not with Hegel, but with Feuerbach, "thanking" or recognizing that they have grounded political economy in the material conditions of production-- actually comparing them favorably in that the Physiocrats move the material conditions from nature to society, although never recognizing the limits, the historical specificity of those conditions. Marx's opening with the Physiocrats is evidence of the historical grounding of his extraction from Hegel. And as he continues, he is able to make the most profound observations in a manner so logically, and so concisely (and almost so casually) that the observations easily escape notice by those reading the notes. A page or two after the introduction Marx writes: "The difference between the value of labour-power and the value created by it--that is, the surplus-value which the purchase of labour-power secures for the user of labour-power--appears most palpably, most incontrovertibly, of all branches of production, in agriculture, the primary branch of production." Then right before concluding the introductory section, he writes, identifying the material bases for the standpoint of the Physiocrats: "The possibility of surplus-labour and of surplus-value therefore arises from a given productivity of labour, a productivity which enables labour-power to create more than its own value, to produce more than the needs dictated by its life process. And indeed this productivity, this level of productivity which is presupposed as the starting-point, must first--as we saw in the second point above--make its appearance in agricultural labour. It appears therefore as a gift of nature, a productive power of nature.....A definite stage in the development of agriculture, whether in the country concerned or in other countries, forms the basis for the development of capital..." So I think in answer to quote 1 from Smith-- and by extension to the argument about the impact of colonies, gold, sugar, slavery, trade, commerce, passions of merchants,-- the improvement and country requires the existence of the social relations of production, the social necessity, the existence of class, classes that, embody and are organized around that need for "improvement." Commerce and manufacture are of themselves no value, no use, in improving cultivation unless the economic necessity exists for such improvement, and that necessity subsumes, dissolves, and only makes accessible, that use in exchange. And that is Brenner's pivot for his analyses. Somewhere, and I think it might be the Grundrisse, Marx says "All economy is the economy of time." And somewhere else (probably don't have this one exactly right) he says something like "All history is the history of relations between town and country." He wasn't kidding. And in these things, Marx really was a Marxist.
