>>> Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au> 02/23/00 12:38AM >>>
Geez, Chas - this is three posts in a row where we agree!
I reckon historical humanity necessarily has a (relatively) timeless bunch of stuff in it. Gotta have. Our drive to be free is as much there in Hittite rebellions against Thutmoses as it is in the Lesbos strike as it is in the Judean revolt against the Romans, the Gnostic dissentors, the serf's revolt of 1525 etc etc. What we want freedom from, what we want to be free to do, and what unfreedoms we make for ourselves in these pursuits are, natch, historical, as James's post best highlights.
If Foucault's allowed to posit Nietzche's will to power within a purportedly anti-humanist post-structuralist context, we may surely reserve the right to posit a will to freedom? Our claim seems much less contradicted by the materialist conception of history than does Foucault's by his particular theoretical universe.
Indeed I'm not sure there's much Marx left if we don't allow ourselves that call.
That said, I'm trying not to give the impression I disagree categorically with Yoshie, James and Ken H. I don't. I just reckon there's a lot of the Rift Valley still in us, albeit ever in play with the historical moment.
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CB: Maybe Marx is wrong, but if we are trying to discern what Marx's and Engels' ideas were on the existence or non-existence of human nature "of any interest" , or the degree of their historicism, what about the category "production" , and as I say "labor" ? Production is universal among humans for them. And labor is the form of production that distinguishes humans from other species. How can labor not be human nature FOR MARX , even if we admit that he is a dialectician so that this nature is in unity and struggle with a historical shaping ? Such a conception is not absolute historicism. Is to labor , to produce with imagination, an idea passed on from generation to generation ?
In other words, absolute historicism sees Marx's correct critique that BOURGEOIS economists' conception of economic/rational, individual man is not universal human nature, and generalizes it to the idea that for Marx there is no human nature, no human essence, no authentic anthropology. The second step , the generalization, does not have foundation in Marx's writing. For Marx the human essence is contradictory, and thus changing, but for dialecticians, that it true of everything. There is no nature period that is not like that , changing based on internal contradictions. Chimp nature, dinosaur nature, all species natures are changing and contradictory. Humans do have a unique contradiction.
Also, Engels, in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ , is referring to those three as transhistorical categories.
Engels and Marx are not absolute or radical historical particularists. With respect to capitalism they say not only is bourgeois "nature" not human nature, but proletarian struggle IS human nature, given a bourgeois or other private property regime. The Revolution is natural.
Maybe ?
CB