Jerry Monaco:
Your forbearance. This is much too long. If you wish to skip my ruminations, on Marx and science, and common Thucydides you can go to the last four paragraphs:
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Jerry, do you think that Marx might have had the same viewpoint as Engels below, on the difference between Darwin's science of natural history and Marx's science of human history ? Maybe one can find similar notions thrashed out between Socrates and Thrasymachus. I don't know. Did S and T discuss class struggle ?
Do Alfred Chandler-Charles Tilley-Lewis Mumford's ideas and a conception of the major Corporations as state entities, or separate "legal sovereignties" suggest a direction of transformation to some kind of socialism ? Do they have any class analysis ?
Also, I'd be interested to see a brief statement of your argument that Thucydides' theory explains socalled capitalism. Maybe that's not what you mean.
Charles
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Excerpt from Frederick Engels' _Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy_;Part 4: Marx
In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature. In nature - in so far as we ignore man's reaction upon nature - there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation. Nothing of all that happens - whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable upon the surface, or in the ultimate results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents - happens as a consciously desired aim. In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For here, also, on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws, and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.
Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history. Thus it is also a question of what the many individuals desire. The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, "enthusiasm for truth and justice", personal hatred, or even purely individual whims of all kinds. But, on the one hand, we have seen that the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended - often quite the opposite; that their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical forces which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm