Marxism is a science

[Ted Winslow]

James Heartfield wrote:

> Marx wasn't interested in 'value' in the sense you use it here (as in
> 'value judgement') which is largely influenced by Weberian sociology.
> Marx was interested in the concept of value that he found in political
> economy, which has no bearing on value judgements, but is a concept that
> accounts for the proportions in which commodities exchange. Marx was
> interested in that, and shared the view of the earlier political
> economists - which he called 'classical' - that it was objective (but
> differed in thinking that it was not a natural law). He differed with
> the later economists - which he called vulgar - who thought that value
> was a wholly subjective expression of the wills of the trading parties.
> 
> I raised this discussion originally in this exchange to make it clear
> that Marx - however successfully or not - was interested in developing
> an objective science, a critique of political economy.

This seems to accept that "values" in the sense involved in the idea of
"value judgements" can't be part of "objective science."  I don't think this
is so and I don't think Marx thought it was so.

He's part of a tradition that treats values in this sense as objective and
knowable.  Political economy is for him a "moral science". Ultimately it's
about the provision to individuals of the material means of a "good" life.

One key aspect of a good life is ethical - good relations with others.
These are relations of "mutual recognition" - an idea that sublates, among
other things, Aristotle's treatment of "friendship" in Books VIII and IX of
the Nicomachean Ethics.

Another idea taken from Aristotle is that such a life requires of those who
are to live it the development of the capacity for it. Individuals have to
know both what is good and how to actualize it.  This is why true "wealth"
is the

"universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces
etc., created through universal exchange?  The full development of human
mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of
humanity's own nature?  The absolute working out of his creative
potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic
development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development
of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a
predetermined yardstick?  Where he does not reproduce himself in one
specificity, but produces his totality?  Strives not to remain something he
has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?  In bourgeois
economics - and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds - this
complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying
out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the
tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human
end-in-itself to an entirely external end. " (Grundrisse p. 488)

Individuals who are wealthy in this sense are characterized by a "will
proper" and a "universal will".

"The Will Proper, or the Higher Appetite, is (a) pure indeterminateness of
the Ego, which as such has no limitation or a content which is immediately
extant through nature but is indifferent towards any and every
determinateness. (b) The Ego can, at the same time, pass over to a
determinateness and make a choice of some one or other and then actualize
it." (Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 2)

The "Universal Will" is "the Will which is Lawful and Just or in accordance
with Reason."  (Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 1)

This is the will of a "universally developed individual":

"the rich individuality which is all-sided in its production as in its
consumption and whose labor therefore appears no longer as labor, but as the
full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its
direct form has disappeared, because historically created need has taken the
place of the natural one."  (Grundrisse p. 162)

Marx treats human history as a process of "bildung" through which this kind
of individuality develops.  It should eventually lead to society as "an
association in which the free development of each is the condition of the
free development of all".  In this society,

"the surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the
development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the
development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production
based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production
process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free
development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary
labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction
of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to
the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set
free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the
moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a
minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and
source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so
as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in
growing measure as a condition - question of life or death - for the
necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science
and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order
to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time
employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the
measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine
them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as
value. Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of
the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means,
and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact,
however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.
'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours.
Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather,
disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every
individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)"
(Grundrisse, pp. 705-6)

Hegel's philosophy of history had itself assigned a key role to "relations
of production" in this process of bildung.  In the Phenomenology he gives
such a role to the master/slave relation.  The relation is positively
developmental for the slave but not for the master.  The sign of this is
that it creates in the slave a self-consciousness that allows for the
development of "tools" - "forces of production" - which are "the power of
knowledge, objectified."

Marx understands "forces of production" in just this way; they are an index
of the development of mind.

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,
self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural
material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human
participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the
human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed
capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a
direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the
process of social life itself have come under the control of the general
intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the
powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of
knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life
process." (Grundrisse p. 706)

It is, however, a capacity for knowing - a "rational" self - and not merely
knowledge that develops.

The differential impact on development means that the master/slave relation
is "contradictory"; the identities of the related individuals alter through
the relation in a way that ultimately destroys its basis.  This
contradiction includes the contradiction between the master/slave relation
and the ideal relation of mutual recognition.  The latter relation is not
only ideal; it is the kind of relation instrumentally required for the full
development of rational self-consciousness.

This account of the relation and of the historical process of development of
which it is part, including in this the role assigned to objective values,
claims to be "scientific" in the sense that it claims to be an account of
the "objective" nature of the relation and of the process, an account that
can be rationally grounded in consciousness.

By the way, the interpretation of Marx's treatment of history as
"historicism", on which Popper's criticisms of it in The Poverty of
Historicism are based, misses all these aspects.

Popper could usefully have followed up the suggestion he claims (in The Self
and Its Brain p. 111) Jeremy Shearmur made to him. He says there that after
he had written the following:

"The newborn child has many inborn ways of acting and responding, and many
inborn tendencies to develop new responses and new activities.  Among these
tendencies is a tendency to develop into a person conscious of himself. But
in order to achieve this, much must happen.  A human child growing up in
social isolation will fail to attain a full consciousness of self."

Shearmur drew his attention

"to the fact that Adam Smith puts forward the idea that society is a
'mirror' which enables the individual to see and to 'think of his own
character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of
the beauty or deformity of his own mind', which suggests that if it were
'possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary
place, without any communication with his own species' then he would not
develop a self. (See Smith [1759] Part III, Section II; Part  III, Chapter I
in the sixth and later editions.)  Shearmur has also suggested that there
are certain similarities between my ideas here and the 'social theory of the
self' of Hegel, Marx and Engels, Bradley and the American pragmatist G.H.
Mead."

Ted Winslow