Marxism aims to abolish the state and liberalism does not
"Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re:
Do you believe it enough to act on it ?
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>The last question is the right one for a pragmatist. Yes, I do.
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>CB: Would seem to me that you pragmatist should give credit to Marx as
>having developed this before the pragmatist philosophers.
As you know I give full credit to Marx for this thought, and have developed the idea at length in print. See my The Paradox of Ideology, Canad, J. Phil. 1993.
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CB: Good. I forgot that. Lets dwell on this and spell it out more.
Yes, I have the copy you sent me. I'll have to pull out that file.
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Pragmatism and Marxism are twin children of Hegel. I'm planning a paper on this for a panel in honor of Sidney Hook's early pragmatic Marxsima t the Am Phil Assn meetings at Christmas.
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CB: Even before Hegel, there is a lot of pragmatism in the social thinking of the law. That would be a good paper for you :>)
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> In general , the liberal and skeptical attacks on Marxism as dogmatic
Not mine!
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CB: You have no dogmas ? You seem to subscribe to a lot of liberal dogma. What's your list ? Elections, civil liberties, etc. That's liberal dogma,no ? I thought you were comfortable with your liberalism. Surely, it is dogma. The notion of the permanence of the state, that we discuss below, is liberal dogma.
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>CB: On this you should acknowledge more often than you do that your
>liberal ideology contemplates the need for permanent repression and use of
>force and Marxism does not. Whereas , the general impression you give is
>that somehow your theory is less repressive than Marxism's theory.
I never attempted to give this impression. Perhaps you confuse my loathing and contempt for Stalinist totalitarianism with a view of Marxism as repressive. I think that Stalinism and its bastard scions, Khrushchevism and Brezhnevism are considerably further from Marx than liberalism is.
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CB: No , I was thinking specifically of your claim that I am a " fan of repression". I was expounding Marxism when you made that claim, so it seemed an effort on your part to distinguish your views as less repressive than Marxism.
Then there are your assertions from time to time in the vein that "rights" are alien to Marx, combined with your emphasis that you are very much for your list of liberal rights. This seems to be your effort to be a socialist but with a large dose of liberal "rights" thrown in to cover Marx's rights/repression deficiency.
And you must be kidding when you above try to make Marx out to be a liberal. "The dictatorship of the proletariat" is about as anti-liberal of a concept as can be formulated.
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I think that traditional Marxist ideas about doingw ith the state and law are a pipe dream.
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CB: Law and the state have not always existed.
Why is it a pipe dream ? Because criminality is in some people's genes, or is natural in some sense ? Why cannot the necessity for standing bodies of armed personnel, the state, be overcome by humans ? What is your anthropological theory and evidence on that ?
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I also think that the simplistic equation of thge state and law with force and repression is failing of the Bolshevik tradition, one that contributed to the rise of Stalinism. There is a good dael in Marxsim that is more nuanced, see here especially the thought of Gramsci.
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CB: It is not a simplistic , but complex relation articulated by Marx , Engels and Lenin. Yes there are nuances, but they point toward the state as analyzed by Lenin in _The State and Revolution_
The notion that the Leninist analysis of the state is anything but proven by the actions of the bourgeois states that were the main cause of the rise of Stalinist repression is just "simplistically" silly.
Gramsci's theory does not contradict the Engels theory on this issue. Gramsci just puts another layer between the repressive apparatus and the oppressed class. Gramsci's position is not that hegemony would work without the repressive apparatus as the ultimate bulwark against overthrow of the ruling class.
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In general much of the law--most of the law--has nothing to do with force or repression. A lot of it just enables people to do things, such as make contracts, get married, own property (personal as well as prodictive) and the like. Much of the rest of it involves ways iof resolving disputes so as to avoid force and repression.
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CB: Actually, Engels and Lenin don't talk about the law as identical with the state.
But modern anthropology draws the line of the origin of law after and out of custom as corresponding to the development of the state.
And really, implied in Marx's criticisms of equal right as illusory and the persistence of the stamp of the bourgeoisie society in the socialist one is the existence of the state in socialism. Ultimately, the state has to be there to enforce a contract when in dispute. All of the law involves disputes that, although, it usually doesn't come to the police, courts would soon have very little business if there wasn't the police backing it up. There is a reason that the sheriff deputy or marshalls are in court rooms in civil cases. Another example is that Sheriffs carryout evictions. Very few people would agree to the custody or property orders of a court in a divorce that went against what they wanted. The police are right there beneath the surface in almost all civil matters. They are obviously very much there in criminal matters.
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>Marxism is closer to left anarchism than liberalism.
Not a selling point, in my view.
<Marxism has more faith than liberalism in the ability of people to live
without a state repressive apparatus.
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>Marxism aims to abolish the state and Liberalism does not !
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Quite right, one more reason I am not a MArxist.
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CB: The problem is you want to also claim that even though you are not a Marxist , you have a more "nuanced" and "complex" i.e. accurate understanding of Marx than those who are Marxists. This is a recurrent sort of sophitry in these discussions on these issues.
If you understood the "nuances and complexities" of Marx as well as I do, you wouldn't be a liberal :>)
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Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 04:21:45 +0000 From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re: No rights under communism
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>CB: What do you mean by "law" ?
Following HLA Hart, I'd say that law is the rules for guiding social behavior authoritatively enacted by competent authority.
Do you recognize the existence of custom before law in human society, i.e. a system of dispute resolutions without a state apparatus backing up the decisions ?
Yes.
simplistic equation of thge state
Is it your position that law arises at the beginning of human society ?
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No.
Here you should bone up on your Hegel. Custom does OK in small homogeneous societies where no one much reflects on why we do things the way we do them around here. As soon as diverse interests and ideas and conflicting conceptions of the good arise, as they do in a complex free society, you need to go beyond custom to law.
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CB: Actually, Hegel was weak on the state, rights and law, as Marx critiqued. He is also weak in his anthropology, because in smaller societies there was a lot more reflection than was realized in Hegel's day. The key "diverse interests" that give rise to this change are those between exploiting and exploited classes, which can only be settled by a state, which is literally the force behind the law. The force of law is the state. That's the formulation.
Socialism has to have socio-economic order, but not law. The Marxist idea is that humans can voluntarily conduct their economic business in an orderly manner. Human nature is capable of that. Marxism has a higher opinion of human nature than liberalism in this regard. This economic orderliness is the discipline, the mastery of necessity, in the Hegel/Engels sense, that is the premise for freedom.