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INTRODUCTION
- State University of New York Press
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INTRODUCTION T his is an attempt to read Marx through a very specific lens—that of process thought. In some ways, this book would serve as an excellent introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism although, to be quite honest, it should serve as more of a reintroduction. I intend to return to what I consider to be the basics of Marx’s position and to enhance the understanding of those basics through a novel approach. While much of the ground covered will be familiar to Marxists, the added language of process is meant to provoke reconsideration and development. A space is opened up by this approach which will suggest that the perennial debates in Marxism may require thorough reconsideration. Many of those debates are simply undercut by this analysis and “melt into air.” Likewise, for those familiar with Whiteheadian process philosophy, this project is meant to imply a radical politics emerging from taking that philosophy seriously. We must start here. If we do not get the basics right, then the foundation of our understanding will be faulty and this would be the greatest misfortune because nothing is more essential at present than an adequate understanding of the basics of the critique of capitalism. Such understanding, I argue, constitutes class consciousness and class consciousness is the basis of our future. In service of presenting this foundation clearly and systematically, I have often had to curtail my own articulation of the results of the approach for specific problems, but the implications should be obvious to the astute reader. I do not believe that I am breaking any radically new ground herein. Many theorists have read Marx in the way I have but what is new is that I have sought to give that reading a solid philosophical foundation and thus to repudiate the positions of those who take Marx to be a mere materialist or historical determinist, of those who would engage in critiques of Marx’s economics based on a-temporal models, of those who believe that new historical manifestations of the presence and operation of capitalism in any way change the fundamental correctness of Marx’s critique, and, finally, of those who neglect to see in the practice of capitalism anything other than the grossest violation of the human essence. Our current form of social relations is not triumph but tragedy, except as it may present the conditions for what will lie beyond it. May this work aid in coaxing our understanding of those conditions—the understanding of ourselves and of our potential. xi ...