Doug Henwood wrote:
> It matters because it's not that easy to specify how corporations are
> run - for whom, by whom, under what principles. We've been through 20
> years in which the stock market was the guiding star - linking pay to
> stock performance was supposed to align the interests of CEOs and
> shareholders, and free & easy M&A was supposed to impose good
> discipline. It's come into a crisis of phony accounting and generalized
> bubble thinking. If you want to socialize corporations, how do you do
> it? Who are the owners, and how are the things run?
As I've said before, I read Marx as thinking about these matters from within a very different box from that implicit in most conventional, including most Marxist, thinking.
I understand its essential elements to be the following.
The essence of the "human" individual - its "in-itself" - is potential for "freedom" understood as rationality. This potential includes a potential for a "will proper" and a "universal will." Its full realization involves full "subjective" and "objective" freedom.
The "universal will" is the fully objectively free will, i.e. the will whose content is "reasonable." This content, the content of rational desire, is, according to Marx and the tradition from which his ideas spring, "love" understood as "mutual recognition" (this is the ethical content) and "beauty" (the aesthetic content - again as elaborated in the same tradition, most importantly in the aesthetics of Kant and Hegel).
Full subjective freedom (which is necessary to full objective freedom) is the capacity to reach this content through the operation of one's own reason. When realized it is also expressed as a fully realized "will proper."
On account of the very different ontological assumptions underpinning it, this conception of "human nature," of the human "essence," is very different from what is conventionally meant by both the advocates and critics of "essentialism." The latter identity the human "essence" with some naturally given set of predispositions e.g. altruism, greed etc. By definition, a "will proper" has no such predispositions; it is open to full self-determination. Moreover, the idea of the "universal will" presupposes the existence of knowable objective ethical and aesthetic values whose existence allows the content of the will to be rationally determined. Finally, Marx's conception of the human essence is relational i.e. the existence of such an in-itself and the degree to which this in-itself has become for-itself are both treated as the outcome of the relations of the individual to everything else (this is what is meant by describing such relations as "internal").
I argue that it is this set of ideas that underpins Marx's treatment of economic relations as "basic" and, in particular, his treatment of "class."
The mere existence of a human being (let alone the full realization of the human in-itself) is dependent on economic relations (which mediate access to the means of any kind of life including an ideal life - the realm of necessity is, for this reason, inescapable). This is the most obvious way in which such relations are basic.
They are also basic in relation to the becoming for-itself of the human in-itself. This too is an aspect Marx has taken from the tradition in thought to which his own ideas belong, e.g. Marx (Capital [Penguin ed.], vol. 1, pp. 531-2) embraces Aristotle's idea that the development of forces of production is a prerequisite for this becoming because it allows time devoted to producing the means of a good life (i.e. time spent in the realm of necessity) to be minimized ( putting it more positively, it creates the free time required for full self-development).
The understanding of and the importance given to "class" derives from this same tradition, specifically from Hegel's treatment in the Phenomenology of the relation of class to the development of rationality and hence of "freedom" in the sense specified above. According to Hegel, the master/slave relation is positively developmental for the slave; it is a relation which facilitates some development of rational self-consciousness. One expression of this is the development of tools, of "forces of production," which constitute another way of defining the human "essence" ("what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax").
It follows from all this, by the way, that no "rational" person would be a capitalist in Marx's sense. The content of the will that defines such a person (M-C-M') is radically inconsistent with rational content ("love" and "beauty"). Moreover, the rationality of the will's ends is necessarily bound up with the rationality of its means i.e. irrationality in the ends will necessarily be associated with some degree of irrationality in the means, including irrationality in the thinking these means embody. As is true of both the master and the slave in Hegel, both the capitalist and the wage worker embody the same in-itself. What distinguishes them is the extent to which positive self-development is possible from within the particular form of human self-estrangement each represents.
If this interpretation is correct, Marx's ideas are inconsistent with the treatment of capitalist ends and means as fully rational. This does not mean these ends and means are completely irrational (mistaken either/or thinking of this kind is, in fact, characteristic of the kind of irrationality dominant in capitalism); irrationality is mixed up with rationality (irrationality, according to Marx, being, for instance, greater in the subjectivity dominant in early mercantile than in that dominant in mature industrial capitalism). This means that in evaluating capitalist ideas about how best to organize the labour process, how to treat state regulation, etc. some allowance must be made for irrationality as well as rationality (in contrast to the usual approach of treating capital as fully instrumentally rational).
Rentiers, early mercantile capitalists, late industrial capitalists, wage workers, feudal lords, peasants etc. represent different kinds of subjectivity, the kinds expressing the particular internal social relations within which each kind develops and lives. This, if true, if analytically very significant. You can't, for example, understand the transition from feudalism to capitalism without understanding the different kinds of subjectivity involved and the dynamic (constituted by the particular internal relations) through which dominance by one kind of subjectivity was undermined and replaced by another. Nor is it possible to understand how some more reasonable social form might develop out of contemporary social relations without understanding the particular forms of subjectivity constituted by such relations and their differing degrees of consistency with positive individual development.
There is a contemporary psychology - psychoanalysis - particular versions of which are consistent in fundamental ways with the ideas I'm attributing to Marx. Here, for instance, is Bion on the irrationality of a particular kind of "greed" and the origin of the dominance of such "greed" in adult personality in relations in infancy. Bion associates this with a failure in cognitive development, i.e. he treats emotional and cognitive development as internally related so that a person who feels "wrongly" will to some degree think "wrongly" as well.
"Fear, hate and envy are so feared that steps are taken to destroy awareness of all feelings, although that is indistinguishable from taking life itself. If a sense of reality, too great to be swamped by emotions, forces the infant to resume feeding, intolerance of envy and hate in a situation which stimulates love and gratitude leads to a splitting that differs from the splitting carried out to prevent depression. It differs from splitting impelled by sadistic impulses in that its object and effect is to enable the infant to obtain what later in life would be called material comforts without acknowledging the existence of a live object on which these benefits depend. Envy aroused by a breast that provides love, understanding, experience and wisdom, poses a problem that is solved by destruction of alpha-function. This makes breast and infant appear inanimate with consequent guiltiness, fear of suicide and fear of murder, past, present and impending. The need for love, understanding and mental development is now deflected, since it cannot be satisfied, into the search for material comforts. Since the desires for material comforts are reinforced the craving for love remains unsatisfied and turns into overweening and misdirected greed.
"This split, enforced by starvation and fear of death through starvation on the one hand, and by love and the fear of associated murderous envy and hate on the other, produces a mental state in which the patient greedily pursues every form of material comfort; he is at once insatiable and implacable in his pursuit of satiation. Since this state originates in a need to be rid of the emotional complications of awareness of life, and a relationship with live objects, the patient appears to be incapable of gratitude or concern for himself or others. This state involves destruction of his concern for truth. Since these mechanisms fail to rid the patient of his pains, which he feels to be due to lack of something, his pursuit of a cure takes the form of a search for a lost object and ends in increased dependence on material comfort; quantity must be the governing consideration, not quality." (Bion, Learning from Experience, in Seven Servants, pp. 10-11)
Bion finds a parallel between the mentality of such patients and modern science. Among other things, this will explain the irrationality in the "machine dreams" that dominate thinking in contemporary economics.
"The scientist whose investigations include the stuff of life itself finds himself in a situation that has a parallel in that of the patients I am describing. The breakdown in the patient's equipment for thinking leads to dominance by a mental life in which his universe is populated by inanimate objects. The inability of even the most advanced human beings to make use of their thoughts, because the capacity to think is rudimentary in all of us, means that the field for investigation, all investigation being ultimately scientific, is limited, by human inadequacy, to those phenomena that have the characteristics of the inanimate. We assume that the psychotic limitation is due to an illness: but that that of the scientist is not. Investigation of the assumption illuminates disease on the one hand and scientific method on the other. It appears that our rudimentary equipment for 'thinking' thoughts is adequate when the problems are associated with the inanimate, but not when the object for investigation is the phenomenon of life itself. Confronted with the complexities of the human mind the analyst must be circumspect in following even accepted scientific method; its weakness may be closer to the weakness of psychotic thinking than superficial scrutiny would admit." (Bion, p. 14)
Ted