When you speak of the absence of a grappling with or acknowledgment of *agency*, I see that as the most important part of your piece. And it is not solely the agency of those in power, or the dominant ruling class.
*It is the agency of those people who continuously have challenged those people in power*, whether through slave rebellions (repressed by force of the state), industrial strikes (busted by (state-employed) police and private detective agencies), farmer rebellions (busted by state militias), the imprisonment of nonviolent challengers to oppression (Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Leonard Peltier, Dr. MLK and ad infinitum) and the assassination of violence-based or persistent rebels from Tecumseh to Kent State—or of self-defenders like Osceola, Malcolm X……. ALL of these individuals and the movements that they represented and were part of *have been a representation of agency for the way things could be should be would be or might be*, if they were successful.
Same as true today. Unions giving up paychecks in order to fight for a better future is a reflection of the agency of the oppressed,
*who actively and intentionally resist the organization of the state in the way that it is currently manufactured by the ruling class*.
Well said, Angel! Yes, all these forms of history-defining action are erased in a history book that ignores actual human agency. And it’s not only the agency of political action but also the agency of common peoples’ ever day activities—building society, producing its wealth, creating its technologies, language and art, making discoveries, etc.
The "mind virus" is a terrible analogy for what is essentially a liberal framework. Hayek et al constructed "historicism" as a straw man for Marx (amongst others!), and proposed that our society is the result of competition in the "marketplace of ideas". Therefore, not historically determined by the material conditions of the past and present.
That's why capital loves liberalism - society becomes the best idea, and not the outcome of their exploitation. {That is also why the left must reject liberalism forthwith!}
The other side of agency would be to understand history as a social artifact.
History in other words is like an archeology of our frozen social relations. That was Marx's essential insight, that we manufacture history.
Where Marx went wrong was he had a "necessitarian" view of history, he thought that there were a limited list of social types and that these types unfold according to historical laws of development and under the relentless drive of inner dynamics and contradictions. Marx was wrong about that.
There is no such thing as "capitalism" if we understand it as a predefined social type with laws, logic, etc. Capitalism is a broad social phenomena, not a predefined typological system.
But we can still salvage from Marx the key insight that society is a human artifact, we created it and we can transform it into something else within the range of social reality. That's the task of our agency, to realize our political ideas and ideals within the constraints of economic and social reality.
I appreciate your interest in drawing nuanced insights from Marx, and I agree with your concluding sentiment about the task of our agency.
I find Marx, however—especially his latest, most advance work, Capital—to be far more rich, nuanced, and relevant than you indicate here.
Marx does think that capitalism is a stage or form of development of productive forces without which you could not get to socialism. However, I’m not sure exactly where in Marx you’re getting “predefined.”
In the opening Section of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx outlines laws of a market economy in general, what would apply to any form of market economy, and then he proceeds to show how those laws play out in a capitalist economy in particular. For Marx, societies are defined by social relations of production.
Simply put (for sake of brevity), capitalism is defined most basically and generally by relations of exchange between buyers of labor power (those who enter the market to buy means of production in order to extract more money though the production process) and those who can only afford to sell their labor power (those who enter the market with their own labor power to sell in order to buy commodities they need to survive).
This is a definition which stands across the various advancements of productive forces within the history of capitalism, over time and across regions—Marx described the development of a world market and an international division of labor—such that a barista or an office worker working in the 21st Century U.S. can be understood as performing the same relational (class) function as a factory worker of 19th Century England or a modern factory worker.
Here’s a few recent pieces of mine that point to some of that nuance and relevance. Cheers!
When you speak of the absence of a grappling with or acknowledgment of *agency*, I see that as the most important part of your piece. And it is not solely the agency of those in power, or the dominant ruling class.
*It is the agency of those people who continuously have challenged those people in power*, whether through slave rebellions (repressed by force of the state), industrial strikes (busted by (state-employed) police and private detective agencies), farmer rebellions (busted by state militias), the imprisonment of nonviolent challengers to oppression (Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Leonard Peltier, Dr. MLK and ad infinitum) and the assassination of violence-based or persistent rebels from Tecumseh to Kent State—or of self-defenders like Osceola, Malcolm X……. ALL of these individuals and the movements that they represented and were part of *have been a representation of agency for the way things could be should be would be or might be*, if they were successful.
Same as true today. Unions giving up paychecks in order to fight for a better future is a reflection of the agency of the oppressed,
*who actively and intentionally resist the organization of the state in the way that it is currently manufactured by the ruling class*.
Well said, Angel! Yes, all these forms of history-defining action are erased in a history book that ignores actual human agency. And it’s not only the agency of political action but also the agency of common peoples’ ever day activities—building society, producing its wealth, creating its technologies, language and art, making discoveries, etc.
The "mind virus" is a terrible analogy for what is essentially a liberal framework. Hayek et al constructed "historicism" as a straw man for Marx (amongst others!), and proposed that our society is the result of competition in the "marketplace of ideas". Therefore, not historically determined by the material conditions of the past and present.
That's why capital loves liberalism - society becomes the best idea, and not the outcome of their exploitation. {That is also why the left must reject liberalism forthwith!}
The Dawn of Everything makes Sapiens look like a Post-it Note scrawled on by a toddler.
The other side of agency would be to understand history as a social artifact.
History in other words is like an archeology of our frozen social relations. That was Marx's essential insight, that we manufacture history.
Where Marx went wrong was he had a "necessitarian" view of history, he thought that there were a limited list of social types and that these types unfold according to historical laws of development and under the relentless drive of inner dynamics and contradictions. Marx was wrong about that.
There is no such thing as "capitalism" if we understand it as a predefined social type with laws, logic, etc. Capitalism is a broad social phenomena, not a predefined typological system.
But we can still salvage from Marx the key insight that society is a human artifact, we created it and we can transform it into something else within the range of social reality. That's the task of our agency, to realize our political ideas and ideals within the constraints of economic and social reality.
I appreciate your interest in drawing nuanced insights from Marx, and I agree with your concluding sentiment about the task of our agency.
I find Marx, however—especially his latest, most advance work, Capital—to be far more rich, nuanced, and relevant than you indicate here.
Marx does think that capitalism is a stage or form of development of productive forces without which you could not get to socialism. However, I’m not sure exactly where in Marx you’re getting “predefined.”
In the opening Section of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx outlines laws of a market economy in general, what would apply to any form of market economy, and then he proceeds to show how those laws play out in a capitalist economy in particular. For Marx, societies are defined by social relations of production.
Simply put (for sake of brevity), capitalism is defined most basically and generally by relations of exchange between buyers of labor power (those who enter the market to buy means of production in order to extract more money though the production process) and those who can only afford to sell their labor power (those who enter the market with their own labor power to sell in order to buy commodities they need to survive).
This is a definition which stands across the various advancements of productive forces within the history of capitalism, over time and across regions—Marx described the development of a world market and an international division of labor—such that a barista or an office worker working in the 21st Century U.S. can be understood as performing the same relational (class) function as a factory worker of 19th Century England or a modern factory worker.
Here’s a few recent pieces of mine that point to some of that nuance and relevance. Cheers!
https://marxandfriends.substack.com/p/marxism-after-fordism
https://marxandfriends.substack.com/p/a-history-in-which-we-can-intervene
https://marxandfriends.substack.com/p/part-2-laying-down-the-law-with-marx