The Difficult Theory of a Mad World

/difficult-theory-mad-world

  • The Difficult Theory of a Mad World
    http://www.metamute.org/editorial/reviews/difficult-theory-mad-world

    The work simultaneously critiques Postone’s notion of class and class struggle as a traditional, sociological conception. Admittedly, Postone seems so fixated on the critique of traditional Marxism that, despite his own recognition that class is a relation in the sense Bonefeld uses, he implicitly adopts the sociological conception of class. Bonefeld provides a way out of this contradiction later, but in this section Bonefeld’s critique is marred by his own shuffling back and forth between capital as an abstract form of domination and as domination by a constituted capitalist class. Capital is an abstract form of domination because it is not a direct relation or dependent on personal domination. It is enacted through the necessity of selling one’s labour power in exchange for money, the only medium through which the labourer may procure the use-values necessary for his or her own reproduction. The seller of labour is not under the compulsion of any particular capital, capitalist, or institution and is free to take their labour wherever it may be sold. If class is a relation and capital is an abstract form of domination, then capital does not need to be embodied in individuals. The asymmetry between labour and capital in the class relation, the necessity of the one to be embodied, the other not, is lost. This is why you can have capitalist social forms in the absence of any capitalist class whatsoever (the so-called communist countries) or even the replacement of individual capitalists by corporations as persons before the law.

    #philosophie #open_marxism #théorie_critique