> Ted says his point is that both ideas represent
> communism marked by the old bourgeois society and the
> transition. Of course, but so? I guess Ted means that
> insofar they are so marked, Marx thinks that they are
> Bad.
>
> That's one-sided, Ted -- like Hegel, Marx thinks that
> every phase of social development has its truth that
> is preserved at the higher level. And what's more, is
> right for its time. So he doesn't think that
> capitalism is Bad -- in fact it's progress. It's just
> that it generates evils that make it unstable. (We
> wish.)
Is this an example of the careful reading you demand from others? What I actually said was:
> That point was that the principle manifests the economic, moral and
> intellectual backwardness that continues to characterize communism in
> its "first form" when it is "still stamped with the birthmarks of the
> old society from whose womb it emerges." Though it's an "advance" on
> the distributive principle operative in capitalism it retains a
> "crude" and "brutish" aspect.
>
> Thus the EPM passage connects the principle it claims will
> characterize the "first form" - "equality of wages" - to "greed"
> masquerading as "general envy."
As I pointed out, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx explicitly ties the remaining "defects" in the first form's distributive principle to its level of "cultural development."
> In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly
> stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is
> proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the
> fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
> But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist
> society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs
> from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic
> structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
> What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has
> developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it
> emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect,
> economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the
> birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly,
> the individual producer receives back from society -- after the
> deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has
> given to it is his individual quantum of labor.
These defects are to a significant degree expressions of a less than fully free "will" i.e. a less than fully rational will. It's this that constitutes the essential point of continuity with the EPM passage. Both are treating human history as a dialectical process of development of rational self-consciousness. Fully rational willing is the willing of the "universally developed individual." Individuals in the first form of communism aren't yet "universally developed." It's only when this is achieved "with the all-around development of the individual" that "willing" and with it the willed distributive principle become fully rational.
That the principle anticipated in the Critique's account of the first form isn't fully rational is demonstrated by, among other things, the fact that it isn't fully consistent with the requirements for "all-around development of the individual." These requirements are incorporated in the concept of "needs" in the fully rational principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" "Needs" include what is needed for universal development. Fully rational individuals would, according to Marx, desire lives creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. They would therefore want the "needs" of everyone in this sense to be met.
The particular principle in the Critique can, like the principle in the EPM, be explained in terms of greed, in this case undisguised.
Insatiable greed is another feature of clinical narcissism. Greedy narcissists would not conceive the "good" in the above way. They would think of it as "goods" in the vulgar materialist sense of house room, clothes, etc. and would greedily desire as much of them for themselves as they could get their hands on. What Marx has them objecting to is anyone obtaining such "goods" without working for them. Given their greed and their linked grandiosity, however, they would have no difficulty with the idea that that the gifted in work should receive more than others since they each think it obvious that this (the recognition of a "natural privilege") will be to their benefit. To them, therefore, the principle would appear rational.
> even worse, Ted, despite his qualification of the idea
> that according to Marx a "correct" principle is one
> appropriate to the pahse of social development, really
> treats "correct" as "correct" tout court. But Marx
> does not think that principles are correct regardless
> of the phase of social development, but are
> appropriate to them or not.
This is another misrepresentation. As I've said many times and just repeated, I interpret Marx as treating history as a developmental process through which reason is realized. The principles governing social arrangements during this process are, therefore, not "correct" if you mean by this an expression of the fully rational willing of individuals within those arrangements. Thus, for instance, "fetishism." The arrangements only become fully rational when those creating them have developed fully rational self-consciousness.
> Ted refers to the translation where Marx says that
> Hegel's retributive theory has a specious (meaning
> false) appeal, but that is a mistranslation of
> Bestechendes, as I explained. That term means
> attrcative, seductive, or appealing. I double-checked
> this with a native German-speaker, who agrees with me.
I agree that the sentence "there is no doubt something specious in this formula, inasmuch as Hegel, instead of looking upon the criminal as the mere object, the slave of justice, elevates him to a position of a free and self-determined being" is better translated by replacing "specious" with "attractive." The "something attractive" is, as I said, the formula's recognition of "human dignity in the abstract" in contrast to treating "the criminal as the mere object, the slave of justice."
What I disagree with is the claim that this means Marx accepts the theory as rationally applicable in some context. What follows the sentence demonstrates that he doesn't. This is what I meant by saying that "specious" accurately represents Marx's judgment of the theory as a whole as opposed to his judgment of the aspect that constitutes "something attractive." The claim that "MArx says this theory is the only thing that even counts a theory of punishment because it respects human dignity and doesn't treat people as objects" isn't an accurate rendering of "there is only one theory of punishment which recognizes human dignity in the abstract."
> Ted's view that punishment
> doesn't promote human development
>
> (he says: Retributively
>> inflicting suffering isn't positively developmental
>> for either children
>> or adults)
>
>
> and therefore cannot be Marx's view presupposes a
> particular controversial view of Marx -- that the
> promotion of human development is Marx's supreme
> value, that he's some sort of (to use the technical
> philosophical jargon) eudiamonistic consequentialist
> (how's that for a mouthful!). That is not a silly view
> and it has been plausibly defended, for example, by
> Richard Miller.
>
> But it is not my view. I think that Marx's supreme
> value, like Hegel's is freedom, and this is consistent
> with, and may require, retributivism as a theory of
> punishment. I won't argue for this here and don't want
> to get into that discussion now.
What I've actually claimed is that, for Marx, the "supreme value" is creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition (as in the account of how we would produce if we produced as "human beings"). This is Marx's sublation of Hegel's view that the essence of "human being" is "freedom." The difference is that Marx treats the "good" as wholly positive and conceives its realization as a community in which everyone is able to live a "good" life in this positive sense. Like Hegel, he takes a developmental view of "human being" understood in this way; the "good" - "freedom" - requires for its realization a long, difficult process of human development, of "bildung."
"That man is free by Nature is quite correct in one sense; viz., that he is so according to the Idea of Humanity; but we imply thereby that he is such only in virtue of his destiny - that he has an undeveloped power to become such; for the "Nature" of an object is exactly synonymous with its "Idea". ... Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. ... To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite; and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination." (Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 40-1)
Marx's view of this process is inconsistent with "retributivism as a theory of punishment."
Ted