MARX AND THE MARXISTS: THE APORiAS IN MARXIST THINKING

While Marx, in his work, was trying to retain the utopian socialist and egalitartan impulses of thinkers like Saint Simon, Hegel or Saint Max, bringing both the idealistic and materialistic aspects of thought under the purview of his enquiries, later Marxists, especially Althusser  creates a distinction between the young Hegelian Marx and the Marx of the Capital, bringing forth a Stalinist notion of scientificity  which displaces egalitarianism with an absolutism that privileged authority and dismissed thought as a discursive event, and a heterotopic possibility. This was much in the line of Kant’s assertion of immanence that rationalized and specialized disciplinarily distinguishing between Philosophy and theology as aspects of enquiry, thereby moving away from the grand discursive movement of thought and succumbing to the binary notion of idealism/ materialism which created impossibilities for further experimentation, dismissing several important aspects of thought.

'Money ' as Emmanuel Levinas was to point out, is an abstraction, of value, which unlike the system in barter provides a different rationale for the exchange of objects or services. Unlike what Althusser would assert in his turn towards economism and crass materialism, 'capital' is also primarily a conceptual category, and as such could in no way displace discourse from its evaluation. Marx's rejection of all philosophy as ideology, though premised on changing the world as primary, resulted in the subordination of thought and later to the dominance of economo-centric formulations that denied thought and led to an activist metaphysics that was self congratulatory and derisive of contributions from 'other' formations distinct from class. While the Jewish identity, and the derision of the 'wandering' Jewish trader as ruthless Shylocks which may have pained him could probably have prompted him to think deeply and critically about the political economy, and in trying to circumvent capital, one should also remember that till then the Jews had not established their regimes anywhere simply through the use of trickery or force as in colonialism.The insistence on the economy though not totally pointless, reduced the economic transactions in a given society to inert binaries whereas, in actual fact the economy had several fluid and strategic ways to make a movement of capital , commodities and labour, and in many societies the economy was changing into agrarian capitalism, which was in many ways distinct from industrialised societies.