On Monday, December 8, 2003, at 05:34 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
> In other words, I think
> you have to take the quote regarding man (sic) making his own history
> not as
> he pleases as applying to all past epochs. The Communist-Marxist
> revolution
> is a revolution in revolutions in that it is based on fuller
> consciousness.
> It is the beginning of the new epoch in which people do make their
> history
> as they please. You can relate this to a planned economy. In other
> words,
> the idea of historical materialism is overthrown by the communist
> revolution, because society is no longer the unconscious slave of
> economic
> forces, class conflict. The struggle is with natural forces, not social
> forces. To put it in other famous terms, by mastering economic
> necessity
> (abolishing the unfulfilled needs of class society), we become free to
> make
> "history" as we please.
I don't think that his point about people having to make history in circumstances not of their choosing can be divorced from the revolution that overthrows capitalism. It may be that humanity would enter the realm of freedom from historical necessity *after* the revolution, but in the process leading up to it we would surely still be within the capitalist system, and therefore still subject to economic forces. That means, as I see it, that people would not be free to choose to make a capitalism-overthrowing revolution (below, "COR") just because they wanted one; the conditions needed for such a revolution would have to be present, and then they would choose whether to respond to those conditions by making the revolution or not.
> So, a key "mistake" from past revolutions ( but really societies in
> ongoing
> history) that Marx and Engels generalize the correction of is failure
> to
> cognize that revolutions have to end class exploitation,not replace one
> ruling class with a new one.
I think it could be argued that past revolutionaries have almost always wanted to "go all the way" -- end all oppression and distress and bring about a perfect world, though they conceptualized the process in different terms from Marx's, of course: consider the slogan of the English Revolution, "the world turned upside down," for example. But a Marxist would say that the conditions for such a completely successful revolution never existed before capitalism. I think, of course, that it is an open question whether a COR would completely eliminate social evil, either, because the system replacing capitalism might generate its own kinds of oppression, too. But I think the Marxist view at least would be that previous revolutions didn't make the "mistake" of not realizing that they had to end class exploitation -- they were just carried out under conditions that did not make that possible.
> CB: Well, yea , it couldn't actually be completely proved, unless we
> have a
> world communist system and then there were no exploiting classes in it
> as a
> test of the theory. Practice is the test of theory in Marxism. The
> reasoning is that since the working class is the overwhelming majority
> of
> the population, if that class became the ruling class, it couldn't
> exploit a
> minority as the basis for its existence.
I know that that is one of the classical arguments, but it has an obvious flaw: even assuming there are no problems with the Marxist definition of the working class as the overwhelming majority of the population (and I think there are), there is no reason to suppose that, once they took over, they wouldn't split up along some other sort of lines (race, nationality, etc.) and continue exploitation. In other words, I don't think Marxists have ever completed their proof of the proposition that all social ills are caused only by owner/working class division.
> By the way, one of the things learned from the Russian Revolution and
> the
> socialist revolutions following it is that the socialist revolution
> must be
> worldwide. Also, a sort of confirmation of a famous Marx-Engels idea
> is that
> there has to be an initial rev in advanced capitalist countries.
Well, M-E sometimes argued that and sometimes (especially when they were conversing with their Russian comrades) they didn't.
> This seems
> to be confirmed by the common sense reasoning that, as with the Soviet
> Union, when socialism in a poor country has to compete with wealthy
> capitalist countries, the latter can cause the socialist revolution to
> fail
> through use of superior force of arms. I wouldn't call the Russian
> Revolution a mistake in this regard ( in the sense that "they should
> have
> let Germany have a rev first"), but this is something confirmed by the
> first
> historical experience with socialist revolution.
The Whites and their foreign allies *lost* the civil war after 1917, so you can't say that they "caused the socialist revolution to fail through superior force of arms." Whatever might have gone wrong with the socialist revolution in the USSR, you can't blame it on that.
> CB: The first little fear gets into the whole ongoing thread on "human
> nature", selfishnes ,etc. It really is true that Marxism has a very
> high
> regard and optimism for human nature and human potential. It says, "We
> can
> do it. "
That's where Marxism turns essentially into a kind of religious faith, IMHO. (Whenever they hear this, the old-line Marxists go wild, I know. But some newer-line Marxists are willing to accept that it is a kind of religion, although a sort of "scientific" one.)
Essentially, I think that the bulk of what Marx said about the basic structure and play of forces in capitalist societies was probably correct, or at least contained a great deal of insight. But when he took the next step and tried to predict the future -- the dynamics of capitalism would inevitably lead to worse and worse crises, and at the same time get the workers more and more organized, so that *kommt der Tag* -- when the Great Day came -- they would make the final revolution and cure all social evils once and for all -- when he sailed off into this apocalyptic thing, he turned out to be as bad a prognosticator as everyone else who has tried to prove that the future *must* go such and such a way and no other.
(In fact, one of the best things about his theory of capitalism is that he points to a "dialectical" (if you will) combination of opposing tendencies at work in it -- basically, the system trying to pump out more and more relative surplus value from the workers' labor power, as opposed to their efforts to prevent that. But a system in which there are opposing tendencies at work is precisely one for which one cannot predict which tendencies will eventually win out, and therefore one cannot predict just what is going to happen to it. On top of that, I think that history contains a considerable amount of "chaos," also -- the butterfly in Brazil causing a tornado in Kansas sort of thing. And that, of course, science in Marx's day wasn't ready to deal with yet.)
But of course that kind of vision of the future is exactly what the Marxist movement needed to keep its hopes alive and persist through all the trials and tribulations it had to go through -- right up to the 1950s or so, when the Hungarian revolt, the Khrushchev disclosures, etc., finally disillusioned most of the true believers (though not all -- there are still a few left). Every movement needs some sort of inspiring vision like that, but none of them, IMHO, could be called "scientific," because there just isn't any scientific way of knowing how the human future is going to develop. Not yet, anyway; perhaps the human sciences will become that complete some day. (But the chaotic element of history will probably still prevent a perfect predictive method; even the solar system has some chaos in it, though not enough to prevent pretty precise predictions and "retrodictions.")
> Now this is backed up by science in the sense that a lot of
> anthropology indicates that for most of human history we have lived in
> non-exploitative societies.
Really? Those so-called "primitive communist societies" were all peaches and cream? Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with modern anthropology.
> It definitely will take conscious work to construct. That's one of the
> main
> points I am making here. The socialist revolution is uniquely
> consciously
> constructed.
I must just say at this point that I am not impressed by any of the "constructions" that socialist theoreticians have come up with yet. If you know any good ones, I'd appreciate being pointed toward them. That's just what I would like to see.
> You know its like the bee and the spider and the human in the
> famous Marx quote. The bee and spider have splendid constructions, but
> the
> difference between those and humans' constructions is that the latter
> "imagines" or plans the construction in advance. Up until the communist
> revolution, people have acted like bees and spiders, and not "imagined"
> ahead of time how they made history; they made it, but not just as they
> pleased. Marxism says, _now_ lets start making history that pleases us
> all.
As I said, I don't think that, if there is a COR, it will be made "just as they please." It will have to be done under the existing conditions, just as all past revolutions have been.
> But also, they are being
> democratic, in the sense that the masses of people themselves will
> work out
> the details, not follow a dogma of two people. Marx and Engels expect
> if
> basic socialist consciousness can grip the masses, and labor is
> substantially emancipated, people will learn and know what to do in
> carrying
> out the details in the long run.
Again, that's pure religious faith, in my view. Maybe that might happen, maybe not. I'm very skeptical.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt