Eubulides wrote: > > > Because everyone living 'under' contemporary capitalism are just too > ignorant to figure out what kinds of intellectual errors Marx made that > would be fatal to his analytical approach.....................
Actually, I'm not arguing the point so much as making a prediction. Any given individual is always wrong in many of his/her convictions and analyses. The trouble is, one never knows _which_ of one's ideas are wrong. If one did one can correct them. That's why we need endless debate. And it'ts not a matter of ignorance or knowledge: it's a matter of the limits to _any_ period's self-knowledge. Marx allows us to understand in some depth (and with room to argue about many of the implications under particular conditions) that (and why) capitalism must grow without limit.* He allows us to understand the grounds in capitalist social relations for the "dot-like existence of the isolated worker," and thus of the ideology of "rational choice individualism." He allows us to grasp many of the implications of the separation of act and motive under capitalism in contrast to (at least the appearance) of that relationship in modes of production grounded in production for use. He allows us to see the subordination in capitalism of market relations to productive relations. He allows us to understand the changes under capitalism of the distinction of private and public life (the sharp but also illusory walling off of the former from the latter). Probably some others, but that will do. Under varying conditions these various elements in Marx's work will be restated and exemplified in endlessly different ways. But understanding of those differences and changes has to be rooted in the raising of practice to the level of theory, not in the retheorization of the fundamental social relations of capital. And in seeing this within the general framework Marx has offered us we are in a better position to understand the current manifestation of that ever-changing relationship of theory and practice. Carrol *This puts on warning that much (perhaps most) change under capitalism does generates an illusion of Progress & that this constant change is, probably, the ultimate or root evil of capitalism, its threat to the very survival of humans as a species. Unfortunately :-< Marx does _not_ give us a lot of help in identifying which changes are indeed desirable and which are either destructive or the guise under which less visible destructive changes are occuring. Surely that is a sufficiently difficult and important question to keep intellectuals busy without the self-deceiving practice of endlessly recasting (or pretending to oneself that one is recasting) our fundamental understanding of capitalism.
