Historical Specificity

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Tue Apr 25 06:27:05 PDT 2000


Jim heartfield:
> >> ...
> >> Engels wrote (in the notebooks published as Dialectic of Nature) that
> >> slavery was itself once a progressive advance over the alternative -
> >> ...

<gcf at panix.com> writes
> >Progress to what?
> >
> >I have the same problem with this admiration for classical
> >slavery and its fans Plato and Aristotle, and for the Founding
> >Fathers, and so on, as I had with Hayek's efficiency. There
> >is this tremendous _thing_ in the background which is the
> >_unsaid_ -- the thing that gives all these people and the
> >crimes they committed value which transcends the poor flesh
> >they ride on and crush. One used to call it God, perhaps.
> >What is it?
> >
> >Nietzsche, at least, was direct about it: "Man is a bridge
> >over which something travels; he knows not what, but the
> >bridge trembles." Good old Nietzsche.

Jim heartfield:
> Moral choices are relative to the conditions that they are made in. The
> level of productivity of primitive societies did not allow slave labour,
> so they did not take captives, just killed them. That is the context in
> which Engels says that ancient slavery is an advance.
>
> You protest that people in the past don't share your opinions. You
> should count yourself lucky that Washington, Jefferson and the rest
> fought a war to protect your right to hold opinions. Otherwise my
> disagreement with you would be easily resolved - I could just send in
> the British militia to silence you.
>
> Without US independence, Britain would have kept America to a slave-
> owning policy - indeed, it is more than likely that abolition in Britain
> would have failed. Those men from the past do not conform to your ideal,
> but they made it possible for your ideals to develop.

On the other hand, the people who made _them_ possible, the religious anarchists of the 17th-century, talked a lot like I do.

But I wasn't judging the morals of characters I mentioned; I was judging their politics. Their morals mostly died with them, but their politics did not. In point of fact, at least according to what I have read, pre-civil societies most customarily adopted prisoners of war and refugees. The invention of militarism and slavery was something else: an aggressive system of creating war and refugees, so that humans could be farmed like plants and domestic animals. It is still alive today, although changing conditions, its own rapidly-expanding powers of production and transformation, and the unremitting resistance of some of its victims have caused it to mitigate itself, most lately into liberal capitalism and humanitarian imperialism.

So Engels, in a way, tells us at the beginning how the great project will end: in more of the same. With one of their prophets pointing the way, the ruling class of the Soviet Union, increasingly fascinated with production and power (and certainly encouraged thereto by their competitors) could only wind up as one of the junior partners of Capital.

That is because he, and they, worshiped this _Thing_ toward which progress of a sort is made, grinding over the bones of the dead and the bodies of the living. But what is it? To _what_ did Engels think slavery progressed, if not more and better slavery?



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