Social and sexual revolution : essays on Marx and Reich by Ollman Bertell

Author:Ollman, Bertell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883, Reich, Wilhelm, 1897-1957, Marx, Karl, 1818-1883, Reich, Wilhelm, 1897-1957, Social classes, Socialism, Classes sociales, Socialisme, Seksualiteit, Klassenbewustzijn, Marxism
Publisher: Boston : South End Press
Published: 1979-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Marx's Method 111 IV

After ontology and epistemology, the next stage in Marx's method is that of inquiry. What Marx is looking for and how he understands what he finds exercise a decisive influence over his inquiry. And what he is looking for is essentially the internal structure and coherence of the capitalist system, its existence as a historically specific totality. No matter what Marx's immediate subject, his greater subject is capitalist society, and, whenever and however he proceeds in his research, this society is always kept in mind.

Marx's method as inquiry is his attempt to trace out relations between units themselves conceived of as social relations in order to uncover the broad contours of their interdependence. Given their logical character as internal relations, these ties may be sought in each social relation in turn or between them, conceived now as separate wholes within some larger unit. In practice, this means that Marx frequently changes both the perspective from which he sets out and the breadth of the units (together with the meaning of their covering concepts) that come into his analysis. Thus, for example, capital (generally the core notion of "capital") serves as one vantage point from which to investigate the intricacies of capitalism; labor serves as another, value as another, and so on. In each case, while the interaction studied is the same, the angle and approach to it (and with it the emphasis in definitions) differ.

More directly of concern to political scientists, and wholly in keeping with Marx's example, Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks investigates the intersecting social relations, class, civil society, political party, bureaucracy and state to uncover as many onesided versions of the totality of his time. The chief advantage of Marx's approach is that it enables him (and Gramsci) to discover major influences without losing sight of interaction and change throughout the complex as tends to happen when looking for relations between narrowly defined static factors. Likewise, the transformation of one social form into another (indicated by a change in the operative concept) is best captured when tracing development within each social relation. Note Gramsci's sensitivity to how social classes and bureaucracies become political parties and how political parties can become a state.^

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