Essence and appearance - still a problem for marxian theory today?

now thats what i call a critical fragment

one of your links is doing is selling insurance:

http://www.metamute.com/

(i always look at a sites links to get an idea of it, like seeing who its mates are)

Tacks:

http://www.metamute.org/

Word. PD are on the right track, I just think that their affinity with Wertkritik shouldn't seduce them into adopting willy nilly the rather crude Zusammenbruchstheorie promoted by Kurz et al.

Value-form analysis, but without "final crisis" bullshit should be the order of the day.

lol PD are fucking clowns, still battling a ghost of 'ortho marxism' and one dimensional strawmen class anyalsis's. Arthouse poseurs still fucking the corpse of the Frankfurt school.

wtf are you on about they're as intelligble as that situ shite you pose with, they however aren't very good, they are total cockpuppets.

That may be what they meant to link to but in fact they linked to the .com

no weeler you just bust out something situesque shit.

you do know it's the situ's fault there are so many ballbags like PD going around spouting shit about spectacles and misunderstanding commodity fetishism.

The Working Class: Farewell to Andre Gorz.

Scarecrow bothering ballbag.

Postone and Krisis/Exit aren't Frankfurt School, you ass-hat.

Fucking PD are though, spouting their castrated situationist shit and their poorly understood notion of commodity fetishism.

Postone is fucking full of shit, oh this autonomous movement of value of which classes and concrete categories are but shadow puppets, idealist wank.

Admins - move to theory?

Essence and appearance was never a problem.

Interesting you think something is "quite good" even though it's unintelligible.

"To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them." - Karl Marx, Capital, Preface to the First German Edition

Eh yes, there is a tension within marx's work between subject and object, objectivist shit either in the outdated second international forces of production form or a hipper Value form get up is hardly anything groundbreaking. This quote however is hardly problematic though, since he is talking on a level of individuals who personify class relations and class interests not an abstract overarching Value form, he hasn't reduced social classes and relations to puppets in Value's Punch and Judy show.

yeah and some of the things Social WorkersParty write make sense, they're still full of shit.

and their magazine is a lot more intelligible than alot of the situationist shit you roll with.

situationist shit don't roll, it wanders yo

Ok, then try this (and sorry to post it in German, but the Aveling translation available online doesn't convey the meaning of this passage adequately, since it does not translate the key term, "automatic subject"):

Die selbständigen Formen, die Geldformen, welche der Wert der Waren in der einfachen Zirkulation annimmt, vermitteln nur den Warenaustausch und verschwinden im Endresultat der Bewegung. In der Zirkulation G - W - G funktionieren dagegen beide, Ware und Geld, nur als verschiedne Existenzweisen des Werts selbst, das Geld seine allgemeine, die Ware seine besondre, sozusagen nur verkleidete Existenzweise. Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren, und verwandelt sich so in ein automatisches Subjekt. Fixiert man die besondren Erscheinungsformen, welche der sich verwertenden Wert im Kreislauf seines Lebens abwechselnd annimmt, so erhält man die Erklärungen: Kapital ist Geld, Kapital ist Ware. In der Tat aber wird der Wert hier das Subjekt eines Prozesses, worin er unter dem beständigen Wechsel der Formen von Geld und Ware seine Größe selbst verändert, sich als Mehrwert von sich selbst als ursprünglichem Wert abstößt, sich selbst verwertet. Denn die Bewegung, worin er Mehrwert zusetzt, ist seine eigne Bewegung, seine Verwertung also Selbstverwertung. Er hat die okkulte Qualität erhalten, Wert zu setzen, weil er Wert ist. Er wirft lebendige Junge oder legt wenigstens goldne Eier.

BTW, you might want to try actually reading Postone's book, rather than just Aufheben's *cough* "critique". It might shock you that Postone does not spend the entire 424 pages dumping on your beloved working-class. Indeed, the majority of the book is concerned with a reconstruction of Marx's value theory.

that's what you like? fucking in graves?

well what the fuck have you been doing? you're missing out... i know my website sucks and all my songs are shit and everything, but at least i'm fuckin trying. there's a lot of people out there that this is all they do is type shit and do fuck all in real life... i'm out there in the street every day meeting people and finding myself in weird situations. what's the proper way for "doing it", o fearless leader?

damn dude your site sure is free of ads and fail. bling bling.

Don't be a ballbag I don't speak german, if you could be as kind to translate it yourself with a qualification of the 'automatic subject' i'd not look so much like you didn't have a point. I'm also not sure how a reconstruction of Marx's value theory necessarily means he still holds a place for a revolutionary proletariat, indeed an overstatement of the laws of value can quite easily lead to the tail wagging the dog with social classes becoming a simple reflection of it rather than value ultimately being an expression of class struggle.

Thanks for posting that, Sean! Is that how it appears in the Fowkes translation? The official MECW translation really leaves a lot to be desired.

And thank you for the link to the Tamas article, I had not encountered it before. The Postone-haters on this board are really knocking down a straw-man. In fact, in one footnote in TLaSD, Postone even formulates things in terms of self-abolition of the working class. Why that should be deemed incompatible with any perspective on this board is beyond me.

The point is not that there are no classes. Clearly there are, but classes exist in *everywhere* historical society with a developed division of labor. The question is rather, what form these relationships take. In Marx's account, classes are derivative categories. Presumably it's been a while since revol68 took a look at _Capital_, otherwise he'd notice that the book starts with the commodity, whereas the fragment on social classes appears at the end of Volume III.

The irony of all this is that there are indeed things that Postone can be criticized for. I share Michael Heinrich's view that Postone insufficiently addresses the centrality of money and finance for Marx's theory. But the prolier-than-thou types on this board don't even scratch the surface of things like that.

Really the working class is shrinking? What a ridiculous assertion that could possiby only appear true of parts of the west by defining the working class in a crude caricatured manner but becomes a surreal claim even in such terms if one was to even glance at China and India. One can only assume the gobshites at PD have as stagnant concept of the working class as any ortho marxist stalinist.

Marx did hold the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, a class in society but not of society, a class in radical chains etc etc. Appalling you fail to take into account that the proletariat are quite a fundamental part of capital and as such to say capital is a barrier to itself is not to assert the proletariat is not the revolutionary subject but rather the tension between capital and labour is fundamental to capital itself, capital by necessity contains it's own barriers, y'know that wee line about capital producing it's own gravediggers?

The comment about value is just poor pseudo poetic babble, being generous i'd say you are simply stating that no one is outside value, that there is no alternative independent circuit in say the working class or anyother section of society, hardly a profound insight.

Regarding overcoming commodity production, well one must wonder how exactly you see the end of commodity production if not the replacement of production for the valorisation of capital ie exchange value for production based on use value with some sort of organs for the co ordinatining of this production based on need and use.

The point about post modernism is barely a point as far as I can see it, in as much as i can decipher (guess at one) it would appear that Postone is saying that post modernism contains utopian moments that point beyond itself and that's realisation remain retarded under capitalism, not exactly a groundbreaking point though one i agree with but which to have any real value would require moving beyond vague generalisations. I don't however see how such a point leads to your conclusion that the proletariat must be dropped as the revolutionary subject.

I do wonder if you are the guy i spoke to at the PD stall at the bookfair who asked me 'where are the proletariat' and seemed shocked when I asked you to try walking down the road to the high street, perhaps that guy though the proletariat only comes in boiler suits and hard hats.

What Angelus Novus is proposing is pure idealism. To say that social classes are "derivative categories" implies that the existence of classes is derived from categories. Is that what you're trying to say? Or are you just trying to say that it makes sense to analyze social classes after analyzing value? (Like the category of class is "derived" from the category of value.) If it's the latter, then that doesn't say anything about classes themselves -- unless you think that how we analyze classes acts as a cause in relation to classes themselves. (Again, idealism.)

The whole attempt to philosophize Capital is a bad joke. Luckily it'll never get any significant following beyond grad students, although even grad students don't seem to like it very much.

I don't see how it's philosophising Capital, as far as I can see it stands in the tradition of jettisoning Marx's earlier (anti)philosophical writings on the subject object dialect in favour of resolving this inherent/necessary tension in the form of a one dimensional determinism whereby the real relations of men become little more than a side effect of Value's self realisation . I suppouse it is a philosophical reading in so much as it rejects Marx's early philosophical writings and in doing so finds itself back in the realm of idealist philosophy that Marx had rejected.

Are you at al capable of making something approaching a point instead of cutting and pasting quotes and adding your own non sequitur conclusions?

The whole point of Marx's concept of the proletariat was that it's position constituted a new universal, again I'd wish you'd read his early works were he posits the proletariat as the universal class in opposition to Hegel's state bureacrats. Marx held exactly that the proletariat was the universal class in that its demands could not be met without the abolition of all classes.

The point about class being increasingly dead in cultural and political terms is also true in that parochial concepts of class eg flat caps, industrial male worker and this is to be entirely welcomed. Likewise the old politics of labour, of social democracy, where the working class were 'represented' as a special interest group in society is dying on it's arse, again something to be welcomed. Of course this isn't because the proletariat is shrinking, it is because the proletarian condition has been more and more universalised.

It would seem that you arthouse ballbags at Principia Dialectica need to go back to basics instead of idiotically spouting off about stuff that is well above your station.