http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/54/39/
Marxism for the 21st Century - a revolutionary tool or more scholasticism? Monday, 13 August 2007 Michael A. Lebowitz 'Save me from these so-called Marxists who think they have the key to history in their back pocket! Save me from disciples like those who followed Hegel and Ricardo!' Few people understood better than Marx how a theory disintegrates when the point of departure for theoretical work is 'no longer reality, but the new theoretical form in which the master had sublimated it.' Happily for him, Marx was spared the spectacle of disciples scandalized by the 'often paradoxical relationship of this theory to reality' and accordingly driven to demonstrate that his theory is still correct by 'crass empiricism', 'phrases in a scholastic way', and 'cunning argument'. Lucky Marx who (if Engels is to be believed) was before all else a revolutionary whose 'real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society' - he missed the affirmation by 20th Century scholastics that what the working class really needs for its emancipation is proof that he was right all along about the transformation of values into prices and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall! How can we today follow Marx's mission and contribute to the overthrow of capitalism? How can we help the working class become 'conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation'? In a talk several years ago, subsequently published in Monthly Review (June 2004) with the title, 'What Keeps Capitalism Going?', I stressed two main points. Firstly, if we understand anything from Capital, it should be that capital tends to produce the working class it needs - workers who look upon its requirements 'as self-evident natural laws'. Why? The point is really simple: (a) the wage necessarily appears as a payment for a quantity of labour, thereby extinguishing every trace of exploitation; (b) all notions of justice and fairness are based upon this appearance of an exchange of labour for money; (c) capital, the product of workers, necessarily appears as the independent contribution of capitalists and thereby deserving of a separate return; and (d) workers, as individuals within capitalist relations, really are dependent upon capital in order to meet their own needs and, indeed, are dependent upon particular capitals. (clip)
