<snip>
[On a stylistic problem I am not sure whether the wrap-around difficulties are occurring my end or Jim's. I am typing this with Word Wrap on in my Eudora software.]
JF:
>Marx in his "On the Jewish Question" presented one of his earliest
>critiques of liberalism. His analysis obviously owes much and builds
>upon Hegel's analysis of civil society. Marx among other things
>exposes the inadequacies of rights talk, and of what Isaiah Berlin
>would have called "negative liberty" - that is liberty as the absence
>of coercion. As Chris points out Marx always retained the essentials
>of this analysis and it is echoed in his _Critique of the Gotha
>Program_.
I am encouraged by Jim's detailed discussion which in general terms I find supportive of my approach. This is the first time in my 4 years experience of marxism-space that I have had an informed analytical exchange on this challenging text. I am further encouraged in that I regard Jim as handling data with a high degree of accuracy certainly as far as I can see, but also being willing to make his differences with my own views clear when necessary.
>
>Chris seems to be echoing some of the themes that Andy Austin
>has been pursuing in regards to globalization. Andy sees globalization
>as a confirmation of predictions that Marx had made concerning the
>longterm evolution of capitalism a 150 years ago in The Communist
>Manifesto.
I note these points, which are quite possible, although I have not read Andy Austin's posts on theme. Certainly as stated here, I agree with the points. The Communist Manifesto has a strange freshness and relevance still after 150 years and I assume it is because many of the fundamental revolutionary features of the capitalist mode of production continue to eat into the fabric of hitherto existing social life. All that is sacred is profaned etc.
Since there is no point in trying to oblige JF or AA to "believe in" "dialectics of nature" in the non-human world, my reservation about what Jim states here, is whether Andy Austin would accept as perhaps JF does, the deeply contradictory nature of civil society. I would need to read more about the sense in which each would see a dialectical approach as relevant in *this sphere*.
I suggest it is politically most important that large numbers of would be marxists grasp that civil society is a contradiction.
>I would suggest that in "On the Jewish Question" the passages that
>seem to be anti-Semitic examplify Marx's dialectical irony.
Is one form of this perhaps the contradiction that often occurs between superficial appearance and inner essence?
> Marx plays
>upon the popular identification of the Jews with commerce and the
>commercial spirit and he shows that commercialism is an increasingly
>dominant feature of modern society. Christians are by no means immune
>to commercialism. On the contrary those anti-Semites who were most
>strongly opposed to Jewish emancipation (on the grounds that Jews
>were "money grubbers" and "economic parasites") were themselves
>most infected with the commercial spirit. Marx can be seen as exposing
>the role of projection (to use a Freudian term) that underlied much of
>the anti-Semitism of the day. What Christians most hated in themselves,
>such as greed they projected onto the Jews. As I read him Marx turns
>the anti-Semitic prejudices of his day on their head by showing that
>gentiles possess all the negative qualities that they attribute to the
>Jews.
>For Marx all this was the consequence not of the qualities of individual
>persons or groups of persons but of the social relations of production.
I particularly welcome JF's identification of a psychological phenomenon like projection at the macro-sociological level. We need a richer understanding of the relationship between the base and the superstructure in serious marxist analysis. I believe Marx wrote with a psychological theory of semi-consciousness, by which I mean that human beings can be only partly conscious of all the phenomena around them, and may often go on superficial appearances. In a complex theory of the superstructure there must be allowance for mass psychology, as well as the limited consciousness of each participant in the market trying to trade one use value for another and thereby creating a collective phenomenon of (exchange)value, of whose dynamics they have only partial consciousness.
Marx's writings I suggest clearly assume how individuals can symbolise whole classes or strata in political and economic conflict.
Concerning psychological processes Marx comes close to describing what followers of Freud would call projection. Consider these two passages from Volume 1 of Capital, which I posted recently on marxism-psych:
>Peter only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man,
>Paul, in whom he recognizes his likeness.
>An individual, A, for instance cannot be 'your majesty' to another
>individual, B, unless majesty in B's eyes assumes the physical shape of A,
>and, moreover, changes facial features, hair and many other things, with
>every new 'father of his people'.
There is a parallel psychological concept to that of projection, called introjection. This I suggest is even closer to marxist theories of knowledge being reflections of external reality. Read this way, the passages above suggest by analogy that individuals may carry within them not only an internal representation of majesty, but an internal representation of other less admirable qualities, like greed, avarice, or lack of collective spirit.
Greg Nowell's further thoughts under this thread title about how the christian church might also have been a source of stored wealth during times of need, can be integrated into a historical analysis so long as we can give due weight to the effects of partial consciousness. The internal representations of greed and avarice might be attributed to Jews, while the internal representations of nurturing and succour, reinforced by images of the Madonna, might appear "naturally" to be better associated with the the Church itself.
In incorporating these psychological ideas on a social and historical level, it has recently been suggested to me by a thoughtful non-marxist, that the concept of introjection tends to privilege (rightly) a social analysis, in which the dynamics of the wider society already exist, and get reflected with partial accuracy within each individual, whereas the concept of projection tends to privilege an individualist analysis, in which the starting assumptions are the abstract structures of the individual which then get projected onto the society, which in this model, is not necessarily much more than an aggregate of turbulent individuals.
>Marx's language is hardly P.C. by contemporary standards.
PC is of course itself a historical conditioned form of consciousness, of late capitalist commodity exchange society. Which does not mean that I think we should speak disrespecfully of different individuals or groups by reference to their external attributes.
>Leon held that historically the Jews were a a kind of nation-class which
>in pre-capitalist societies occupied roles in commodity exhange that
>were parasitic on the existing mode of production.
That is obviously debatable, but I would suggest, and I do not know that there is a particular marxist parentage for this idea, that the history of jewish people in christian culture is one of the creativity of a group on the margins of the main dynamics of the society. In the language of dynamical systems theory, this is hyped as being "on the creative edge of chaos". Perhaps the marxist way to put this is that as individuals or as a group jewish people often found themselves straddling the different poles of a contradiction and thereby highlighting it more vividly than appeared in the more stable areas of christian society. Of course to some extent, this is true of all groups hovering on the edge of assimilation. But the jewish culture has been especially successful at resisting total assimilation, except in China and Africa (evidence more circumstantial for the latter).
>Marx's polemic was in large degree directed against his friend
>Bruno Bauer who had argued against Jewish emancipation on the
>grounds that it was a diversion from the real struggle for human
>emancipatation. Marx held on the contrary that the struggle for
>political emancipation including the struggle for Jewish emancipation
>was a necessary precondition for human emancipation.
Good. That was my broad understanding.
>An even more interesting comparison might be with the philosopher,
>Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was the son of a Jewish industrialist
>who had converted to Catholicism (just as Marx was the son of a Jewish
>lawyer who had converted to Lutheranism). Wittgenstein was like Marx
>similarly conflicted over his Jewish heritage. As a schoolboy he read
>the book _Sex and Character_ by the young Austrian Jew, Otto
>Weininger who had killed himself in accordance with the arguments
>laid out in his book. Weininger, among other things condemned what
>he saw as the cultural decadence of his times which he associated
>with Jewishness. Wittgenstein was profoundly influenced by
>Weininger's book, and he remained a lifelong admirer of him. He
>too shared with Weininger a conflicted view of his own Jewishness.
>In other words Marx's conflictedness over his Jewishness was hardly
>unique to himself but seems to have been characteristic of a broad
>stratum of emancipated Jewish intellectuals in central Europe
>of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sources for this
>must be sought out by analyzing the contradictory nature of their
>position in society.
Yes, that does sound like another very interesting example, alongside Marx and Einstein. Here we see the importance of understanding how certain individuals *introject* in a particularly concentrated, painful, or creative form, much wider social, political, and economic contradictions. This simply cannot be described effectively by an individualist analytical approach of projection which gets stuck at limited observations about Wittgenstein's inability to achieve full Freudian genital maturity, or somewhat titillating biographies of Einstein that describe certain rather unremarkable difficulties in his relationships and the existence of his lost daughter.
These sort of titillating biographical footnotes to the lives of great thinkers reflect a trivial dichotomy between the brain and material life, between the individual and the complex economic, cultural, and political dynamic of the society in which that individual was an inseparable component, and whose contradictions he or she in many ways merely expressed in a particular form.
Chris Burford
London