> From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
Date: 2007/06/12 Tue AM 02:34:32 GMT To: lbo-talk lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Nietzche: Left or Right? (Bush and Foucault)
[ earlier] CB; What about the profound and sensitive theory of Marxist psychology Ted Winslow has been explaining to us for years ? What about the theory of alienation in the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" ?
Andie: I can't read Ted.
J. D. Could you please explain what that means?
Andie : The 1844 MS is good stuff, but it was unpublished MS,
J. D. But the marvellous Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right was not only published -- he referred the reader to it in the "late" 1859 preface, for an account of his relation to Hegel.
Andie: also pretty standard and somewhat limited German Romanticism -- you can get pretty much the same story from Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man --,
J. D. how about the theory of the proletariat as the redemption of history? the abolition and the fulfilment of philosophy? The struggle over wages making the capitalist richer and the worker poorer, the critique of Hegel, the critical notes on James Mill in which he said "suppose we had produced in a human manner... I would have been recognized in your thought and in your love".
Andie:... and while Marx never really retracted it, still apart from his work in ideologiekritik, he never advanced beyond it.
J. D....to where?
Andie : There is nothing in Marx that is like N's subtle linking of social class to individual psychology and physiology. Marx is more on the level of saying things (true but limited) that, capitalism makes for stupid work that cripples people's minds and bodies. He almost never tries to explain how this sort of thing produces values that themselves have psychological, physiological, and sociological effects that have their own dynamic. Don't mistake me, I like Marx's psychology. there just isn't very much of it.
J. D. What about the moral critique -- of envy in crude communism, of Benthamism in the critique of the Gotha programme, of hucksterism in the first thesis on Feuerbach, of the separation of economics from "Cousin Morality". Of the nobility of man shining forth from the toil worn bodies of the French communist workers? What about the vision in the third thesis on Feuerbach of revolutionary practice as making the proletariat get rid of the muck of ages and prepare itself to found society anew? The critique of individualism ("the bourgeois inflates himself into an atom") and the naming of communism as humanism and naturalism. And much, much more...
James Daly
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