andie wrote:
> Maybe you missed the discussion on my defense of a
> Marxian theory of retribution. (I have a draft of a
> paper which I will send you on request) All the namby
> pambies here thought I was being barbaric. But did
> Chairman Mao say a revolution is not a dinner party?
> (If Doug can quote Stalin, I can quote Mao!) However,
> I I don't believe that retribution is based on
> resentment and envy.
The passage James Daly quoted doesn't confirm the theory of retribution you attributed to Marx in that discussion.
That theory allowed for retribution as an aspect of "justice" in Marx's conception of an ideal community. Such a community would be composed, however, of universally developed individuals capable of fully rational self-determination. This conception has no logical space for retribution.
Marx himself pointed this out in his criticism of Hegel's attermpt (in, for instance, the section - § 140 - in the Philosophy of Right from which Chuck Grimes recently quoted passages <http://mailman.lbo- talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070618/011770.html>) to justify punishment in general and capital punishment in particular on the basis of the same conception of human "dignity," i.e. by trying to demonstrate the consistency of fully rational self=determination with criminal willing and acting.
The passage Daly quotes, however, makes hatred and a desire for vengeance a feature not of universally developed individuality but of the less tthan fully developed individuality that would stiil charactize individuals in the immediate aftermath of the revolution (a revolution that must lead ultimately to the elimanation of all barriers to full human development). Like the "envy" and the "bourgois" idea of distributive justice that Marx claims would also characterize this inidivuality, they constitute a "defect," a "bourgeois limitation" that "constantly stigmatizes" the understanding of "right" in that context.
When conditions fully consistent with full human development - the development of "true individuality" - have been created, however, "crime must not be punished in the individual."
"There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ ch06_3_d.htm>
Kaufman interprets Nietzsche as belonging to the same tradition in ethics as Marx and, hence, as endorsing something similar to Marx's idea of the "universally developed individual."
"While Nietzsche's repudiation of hedonism is emphatic, he himself may be called a proponent of the Good Life. His earlier philosophy had put him into the inconsistent position of exhorting man that he 'ought' to live such a life. His conception of the will to power enables him now to say that the man who lives such a life is the powerful man, while the man who does not is weak - and if only he had the strength, he would live the Good Life, for it is what he, too, desires ultimately. In his frustration, however, the weak man either settles, faux de mieus, for some more or less petty form of power, such as that power over others which is found in positions of comman, in bullying, or in crime - or he resigns himself to failure and dreaams of greater power in another world. Such dreams may be highly spiritualized,m but in many cases they include the hope that one will behold the downfall, or even the eternal tortures, of one's enemies.
"Worldly power may thus cloak the most abysmal weakness, value cannot be measured in terms of 'success,' and it is precisely the dictator who is apt to be the slave of his passions. Nietzsche, of course, knew well the classical picture of the tyrant as the most slavish of men, in the eighth and ninth book of Plato's Republic. The ascetic, though lacking scepter and crown, seemed on the most powerful of men to Nietzsche - but still more powerful is the man who need not resort to so radical a cure. As one should 'measure the health of a society and of individuals according to how many parasites they can stand' (M 202), one must consider the man who is strong enough to maintain his masstery in the face of vehement passions as being more powerful than the ascetic who suppresses or extirpates his impluses. At the top of the power scale are those who are able to sublimate their impulses, to 'organize the chaos,' and to give 'style' to their character.
"The Good Life is the powerful life, the life of those who are in full control of their impulses and need not weaken them, and the good man is for Nietzsche the passionate man who is the master of his passions. The insistence that the good man is the passionate man distinguishes Nietzsche from the Stoic and - so he himself thought - from the Christian view. His insistence, on the other hand, that the good man masters his passions has been overlooked by the vast majority of Nietzsche's critics as wll as by those who have, from time to time, cited him in defense of their own license.
"In his early philosophy, Nietzsche had envisaged the artist, saint, and philosopher s the supreme type of humanity. Now he would still agree that these are the three types that have tried to rise above the mass of men, but he would evaluate them differently. The saint is now pictured as the man who has extirpated his passions and thus destroyed his chances of ever living the Good Life, while artist and philosopher employ their passions in spiritual pursuits and are the most nearly perfect of men; for the powerful life is the creative life.
"Among philosophers it was, above all others, Socrates who was the perfect master of his possions - and Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates will be considered in detail later - while among artists Nietzsche found one closer to his own time. Near the end of the last work he himself published, he gave us a picture of the powerful man who leads the Good Life, and, as so often, Nietzsche chose a historical person to be his symbol:
"'Goethe - ..." [ Kaufman, Nietzsche, pp. 278-81)
Kaufman also has Nietzsche, like Marx, appropriating "love" elaborated as "friendship" (philia) by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as the basis for a true ethics (see, for example, pp. 363-7).
On this reading, Nietzsche's claim (e.g. in sections 6 and 7 of the second essay in Genealogy of Morals <http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/ Nietzsche/genealogy2.htm>) that many ideas of "justice" - e.g. the idea of retribution as just - are masks for instinctive sadism is mistinterpreted if treatied as an argument for a return to the direct acting out of this sadism Rather, such ideas express "weakness" in the sense of an inability to fully master this instinct.
Whether or not this is true, Nietzsche's analysis does provide psychological insight supportive of Marx's claim re Hegel's attempt to justify "punishment."
"This theory, considering punishment as the result of the criminal's own will, is only a metaphysical expression for the old jus talionis: eye against eye, tooth against tooth, blood against blood. Plainly speaking, and dispensing with all paraphrases, punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims through the "leading journal of the world" its own brutality as eternal law?" <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-September/020184.html>
The answer to the last question is that it's a "state of society" that must be transcended. This judgment applies to the "state of society" Marx claims would exist in the immediate aftermath of revolution.
Ted