USE VALUE VERSUS PRAXIS

On Bolívar Echeverría, Karl Marx, Aristoteles and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez

Abstract

Bolívar Echeverría’s interest in the cultural aspects of ‘capitalist modernities’ should not be understood as an idealist dilution of the Marxian analysis of society, but rather as an effort to develop a radical critique of the powerful idealist and ethnocentric residues and naïve faith in progress that exist among various currents of contemporary Marxist and materialist thought. Echeverría attempts to save Marx from such interpretations. This attempt at a materialist concretion of the concept of use value production, determined in each case according to cultural differences, and the concomitant critique of the pseudo-universalist concept of the subject – which is, de facto, ethnocentric – cannot but entail consequences for the concept of praxis. Human praxis, too, must be understood in each case within its historical, cultural, and geographical context; it cannot really be understood within the framework of a form of thinking which apparently remains universal.