this is related to stupid uses of class in feminist bloglandia but i can’t be arsed to connect the dots
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 8th, 2009 • Category: Class, Critical Social Theory, Marxist Theory, Theory, Time Labor and Social Dominationseriously. this really is related. as i mentioned in previous post, i couldn’t be arsed to travel my lazy ass up the stairs to go get another book, so i trundled postone’s book to the porch with me and my cuppajoe. i flip open the book to where i’d last been, which was toward the end of his chapter on criticial social theory, as in the frankfurt school of critical social theory: adorno, horkheimer, marcuse, habermas. i did my undergraduate work on those dudes, having written a senior thesis that criticized the way critical theory became “entrapped in the present” — unable to imagine a way “out of this place.”
Carrol Cox had urged me to read postone, and I’m, more and more, seeing why — in spite of Chuckie’s protestations! :) The first thing I noticed was that I suspected Carrol was thinking of my critique of a certain version of identity politics. And this is becoming clearer as I read the book - though I’m reading mostly for immersion right now, unable to find the time and space to sit back and think terribly hard about what I’m reading or make significant connections between what postone is saying and contemporary political issues.
But here’s a passage I’ve come across and, I think, it’s quite thought-provoking:
The epistemological dilemma entailed in the pessimistic turn retrospectively highlights a weakness in Horkheimer’s earlier epistemology, which had seemed consistent. In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” the possibility of an all-encompassing social critique, as well as of the overcoming of the capitalist contradiction was interpreted as one between social “labor” and those relations that fragment its totalistic realization and inhibit its full development. In such inhibiting social relations and are ultimately extrinsic to the concept of “labor” itself. This indicates, however, that, within such an interpretations, the categories of commodity and capital do not really grasp the social totality while expressing its contradictory character. Instead, they specify only one dimension of capitalist society, the relations of distribution, which eventually comes to oppose its other dimension, social “labor”. In other words, when the Marxian categories are understood only in terms of the market and private property, they are essentially one-dimensional from the outset: they do not grasp the contradiction but only one of its terms. This implies that even in Horkheimer’s earlier essay the critique is external to, rather than grounded in, the categories. It is a critique from the standpoint of “labor” of the social forms expressed by the categories.
And this is the problem with discussions of class and class privilege in feminist bloglandia, too. They conceive of the problem in terms of the politics of distribution.
But anyway, I’m going to have another cuppajoe and take this up at another time. For now, I just wanted to record this quote for later reflection and discussion
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Postone’s book is pretty much a book about books, isn’t it? If ‘traditional Marxism’ was about movements and parties, it might make some sense.
As if anyone had the time, the history of the Knights of Labor would be a good topic for putting a discussion of identity on a more solid, historical foundation.
Just look at the name, the ‘Knights.’ Image, self-image, movement image, organization image. Utterly unconnected to any ‘marxism.’ Indicative of the ’spontaneous’ development to class-conscious, but not socialist or revolutionary, that ‘marxism’ interacted with.
Another take, the problem doesn’t seem to me so much a ‘problem’ of Hegel reception as giving Hegel that much attention at all. ‘Capital’ for instance, is not subtitled a ‘critique of Hegelian philosphy’, it’s a ‘critique of political economy.’ The Hegelian slant thinks form can exist aside from content, when materialism might axiomatically assume that content determines form in theory.
Or again, lots written, for example, about Rosa Luxemburg. Not very much about Friedrich Ebert. Now Ebert wasn’t a Marxist, but a whole lot more important than Luxemburg as a leader of the Social Democracy. And a lot more attached to the class consciousness of ‘real workers,’ which attachment is I would hope what Postone is actually trying to write about instead of Hegel reception.