[lbo-talk] Keynes on Trotsky

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Thu Jun 3 08:18:46 PDT 2004


From: Ted Winslow


> And "internal relations" ? Like Ollman or no ?

Ollman captures some of what's involved. He has an appendix on Whitehead. The best exponent is Whitehead himself, as in the passages I've previously quoted e.g. the passage giving his definition of a "society," the passage on "law as immanent," etc. A short summary of all these ontological ideas - "internal relations," "self-determination" and "final causation" - is available in the two chapters (VII and VIII) in Modes of Thought I mentioned earlier.

^^^^

CB: Are you saying that Marx had as a fundamental concept of "internal relations" but called it "dialectics" or something else; and that his concept was identical to Whitehead's concept of "internal relations" ? And that Lenin and Trotsky didn't understand this conception of internal relations ? And that Whitehead independently discovered it, in the sense that he didn't get it directly from reading Marx ( maybe Haldane showed him _The Dialectics of Nature_) ?

^^^^^^^

Adventures of Ideas provides an account of historical development based, as I suggested, on essentially the same ontological ideas as the accounts found in Hegel and Marx. Whitehead had indirect access to Hegel's ideas via English Idealism, specifically via Bradley, McTaggert and Lord Haldane. In the preface to Process and Reality, having acknowledged the influence of Bradley on the cosmology elaborated there, he describes the cosmology as "a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute idealism onto a realistic basis." (Process and Reality, Corrected Ed. edited by Donald Sherburne and, yes, David Ray Griffin, p. xiii). This includes an appropriation of relativity and quantum theory (see also chaps. VII and VIII of Science and the Modern World).

I don't think he read any Marx, but his comment about "the economic interpretation of history" is very insightful. It perceives the ontological underpinnings of the interpretation. Most readers of Marx, including many Marxists, don't perceive these e.g. don't perceive that for Marx "forces of production" are the objectification of mind and, as objectified, part of production processes characterized ontologically as activities of "poesis" and "praxis" within internal relations i.e as "objective conditions" that "are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew." They tend to interpret Marx's "materialism" as "a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites".

^^^^^^^ CB: I would not count Lenin or Trotsky among these crude or vulgar materialists. Of course, this is a very well known issue, and a fundamental aspect of the step away from materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites is the whole emphasis on economic classes and class struggle in the vein of classical Marxist-Leninist literature , which is to say not a struggle directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites ( though to utterly ignore the role of coarse appetites is to be like the typical German criticized in _The German Ideology_)

Marxism-Leninism , say in its elementary text books, discusses human workers as the critical force of production. But even more, the wheel, the machine, the internal combustion engine, the computer chip do not invent or operate themselves. They are originated and used by humans. Development of the forces of production is a human activity in the Marxist-Leninist conception. So, the above would not touch Lenin and Trotsky. They know and teach that technology is a human product and activity. "Labor" is always "_social labor_" and "tools" are essentially social products. Any technological determinism is still a form of social determinism, with the technological sector of the human division of labor having a significant determining role.

Most objective conditions of importance to humans are human created. Thus, the significance of the observation that when an idea grips masses , it becomes a material force; and that Lenin and Trotsky were a couple of the all time greats at getting Marxist ideas to grip masses.


> "According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the
> juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting
> labour) and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive
> powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and
> knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief
> form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the
> accumulation - which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents
> it - of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated
> activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated
> and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.

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