Apologies. Accidentally sent before completion. ----- J.D.
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Original Message ----- From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3 at panix.com>
To: <marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 2:12 AM
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Religion, the proletariat, Marxism, and revolution
from Hal Jamison.
In the Communist Manifesto, for example, M/E posited a working class endowed with the strength, courage, and immunity to ideology to enable it to overthrow the ruling class representing capitalism and establish a new social/political order based on real justice, i. e., to each what he/she needs, from each according to his/her capabilities. Thus the working class was idealized into the heavens for sure, its realities as so accurately depicted by Engels in Condition of The Working Class in England completely ignored.
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J. D's reply. (edited): -- To my mind this is the crux of Marxism. I think the Promethean motif is the antireligious, militantly secular side of Marx and Engels -- hatred of the unjust Zeus. Rejection of Calvinist (and Augustinian) predestination is one source of modern Prometheanism. So is rejection of the specifically modern religious dogma of the evilness of nature and the individualist and otherworldly "end of times" eschatology, not shared either by Judaism or Catholicism.
The religious motif on the other hand is significant (however ironic) in the early Marx, for instance in the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction" which is published in the early writings, but is referred to without reservation in the usually unquoted part of the classic "late" document, the 1859 preface. In the CHPRI he speaks of the proletariat as the redemption of humanity, and in the EPM he speaks of communism as the resurrection of nature.
Reference to God (Mind, Spirit, the Absolute) is common in philosophy influenced by Hegel, where it has its source in neoplatonic philosophies and Spinoza. An unfortunately brief and selective introduction to Marx from that point of view is found in the opening pages of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, and in the guiding thread of his account of Marxism, which ends on his last page with the judgement that Marxism has ended up in absurdity like every previous attempt at human self-deification.
But [NB!] in The Holy Family Marx rejects the Young Hegelian accusation that he has [NB!] *deified* the proletariat, saying that he only pointed out what the proletariat is and what, *under pain of extinction*, it must do.
Taken with his saying that advanced societies hold up the mirror of the future to backward societies (England to Germany), this led to a rigidifigation of "historical materialism" as a mechanistic prediction of communism as the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of working-class interests in a utilitarian sense.
But in the CHPR:Intro and in the Communist Manifesto he envisioned the proletariat as the *universal* class, and proletarian revolution as liberating all humanity, precisely because it would end the tyrannical mechanistic pressure of the capitalist system which depended on everyone pursuing their individual "economic" interests.
In Wages Price and Profit he condemned the confining of labour's demands to the economic, which could only perpetuate the Hobbesian possessive individualist system -- and he pointed out that revolutionary change could only come from the demand for the abolition of the wages system. This demand totally -- infinitely -- transcends bourgeoisified sectional interests, which are similar to the destructive militancy of the "crude communists' " envious "limited [ not *universal* ] need" (EPM) on the one hand, and on the other the conformist and reformist individualist Benthamite utilitarianism (despised by Marx) of the Lassallean trade unionists. Only revolutionary overcoming of such muck of ages would "fit the proletariat to found society anew".
I cannot trace an excellent article written about 10 years ago (by Arrighi? In New Left Review?) which takes up a similar theme, about an alleged dichotomy in Marx's thought between the proletariat as the wild-eyed revolutionary victim of total immiseration (Third World...?), and the proletariat as the trade union bureaucrat, the disciplined gravedigger (First world...?).
The mechanistic interpretation of historical materialism's "the inexorability of a law of nature" is very relevant. I think, following Roy Bhaskar and agreeing with Haines, that a law of nature for Marx [as for Aristotle and Hegel] means the working out of the *nature* of something. It does not mean the Popperian covering law explanation of one phenomenon by the mechanistic causality of another. Marx's philosophical formation had nothing to do with the empiricist mechanism of the next generation, which he and Engels attacked in the person of Duehring.
James Daly