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Monthly Review

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 1-9

  Meiksins Wood, Ellen ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 0345876277     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-049-02-1997-06_1     Document Type: Review

References (2)

1. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 467.
2. For those few readers who may be interested in this point, let me just give a very sketchy idea of what I have in mind. I think, for example, that the Frankfurt School was in a sense more preoccupied with bourgeois society than with capitalism (which to me are not the same thing, as I suggested, for instance, in "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?," Monthly Review 48 no. 3, July-August 1996). So the famous shift from political economy to culture and philosophy may have had to do not just with an intellectual shift of focus from the material to the ideological, but with a focus on a different material reality. It had at least a little to do with a view of society in which the main axis of division was not capital vs labour but non-capitalist bourgeoisie (especially, in the German model, a bourgeois of intellectuals and bureaucrats) vs the "masses." And the problem is further complicated by the fact that these critics of bourgeois society and culture themselves belonged to that very particular kind of bourgeoisie, were steeped in its culture, and (dare I say it?) sometimes shared its contempt for the masses. But leaving that complication aside, the point is that this form of theory may not only be seeing capitalism from a different angle but may have one eye fixed on a different, pre-capitalist social world.