Not sure where the Keynes posts are going; I don’t have much time to do anything more than basically summarise the chapter! So it’s self-clarification, but because I don’t have the time to be concise it’s a lot for people to get through… without much point since I am basically repeating the chapters!

Enjoy the conference; I was thinking of going to that one, some friends will be there, but I have a conference paper deadline and overseas vistors so I have to give it a miss.

I take Marx to operate, in part, by… reattaching a wide range of forms of thought that are often taken to be free-standing elements of intellectual history – often interpreted, in other words, in an “idealist” vein – to other sorts of collective practices. This kind of analysis both begins to establish targets for political practice, and also begins to cast light on obstacles to transformation – obstacles that might include certain kinds of “misrecognition”, but that go well beyond this (Marx makes a very explicit point in the first chapter of Capital – I’ll write on this in a bit – about how the political economists’ eventual recognition of the existence of value does nothing to abolish the coercion this category describes).

And yes, an important aspect of Marx’s argument involves the discussion of the ways in which, not just ideas, but collective practices that point beyond capitalism, are generated in the very heart of this social system. But even this isn’t a good way to pose the issue: it’s not that capitalism generates practices + ideas/ideals – it’s that Marx focusses relentlessly on the practical dimension of concepts of all sorts, so that he never talks about, say, ideals, without immediately tracing the ideal back to its practical enactment.

I do think, though, that there is an element to his argument of also suggesting that the particular way in which an ideal (or practice) originates or is presently implicated in the reproduction of capitalism, can potentially be severed from the uses to which that ideal/practice could potentially be put, with a transformation of the current context. This is how I view Marx’s constant attraction to metaphors of the undead, of reanimated dead labour, etc. – and how I tend to deploy the concept of alienation: capitalism can’t help but constitute and preserve – continually reanimate – particular kinds of potentials that simultaneously play a determinate role in its reproduction and sit in tension with that reproduction. Seizing these potentials involves taking command of what was alienated, redeeming rather than reanimating the unintentionally constituted potentials of history, etc. I hope to be writing a great deal more on these issues – and hopefully a bit more clearly and cautiously than I’m expressing it now.

But I agree with the impulse behind your comment :-)

I’ve been meaning, by the way, to contribute more to your posts on Keynes – this period is unfortunately a bit of a zoo, and I’ll be away in Sydney next week… With some luck, I might be able to catch up with you a bit on the trip, and perhaps lob something into the discussion, if it seems relevant, when I get back…

I would stress that it’s important to Marx that while value relations are mutable social relations, they are very real and not easy to change just by deciding to. Realising their contingency is not enough to remove their effects. They’re not imaginary in the sense that if we stopped believing in them, they would disappear (or become more changeable).

Unmasking their contingency is part of a political strategy, but only part, because even if everybody in a capitalist society understood the direct social relations commodity exchange mask, we would still have to continue enacting those relations unless collective practice was changed. The difficulties in changing these social relations are serious because it can’t be done by a group (or certainly not an individual) simply deciding to act in other ways. The obstacles to practical change thus tend to reinforce the ideology of commodity fetishism, as economic relations appear even more as immutable forces of nature. Thus ‘economics’ as intellectual discipline explaining the interrelation of everybody’s production reacts back upon politics to limit what seems politically possible.

That’s why what you might call immanent _practical_ critique is so important to Marx. He wanted to believe not only that capitalism could generate an intellectual critique of itself, but that it would generate social practices that would end up undermining it.

Someone else, apparently, was at least interested in Epicurus and Democritus:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/index.htm