----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:46 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] "Theory's Empire," an anti-"Theory" anthology
Ted's exegesis reveals the ("sublated") Hegelian in Marx (in terms of reason, freedom). In an earlier post Ted refers to universality in terms of "the individuality required for the activities that constitute the content of relations of mutual recognition, e.g. creating ("composing") and appropriating "the most beautiful music" and "the finest plays." "
But Marx's thinking is equally and profoundly Feuerbachian in his concern for the universalising of the I-thou relation, of love, of mutual caring.
The difference between these two is the difference between the bourgeois and the proletarian. The bourgeois version stems from what Marx called the Germanic Christian antagonism between nature and spirit, e.g. the Hobbesian state of nature which Hegel accepted, found also in Sartre's "Hell is other people". Human relations are naturally possessive individualist competition etc. For Marx on the contrary human relations are naturally loving, not warring -- in the Aristotelian sense of naturally, i.e. ideally. Marx castigates the Hobbesian sense of nature, whereas in the introduction to the Grundrisse he agrees with Aristotle that man is by nature a zoon politicon, a political animal. Human relations are those of the good Samaritan, not those of the Athenians towards the Melians, proletarian not bourgeois, communal not possessive individualist.
Hegel's famous dialectic (which Marx never used) of the (aristocratic) Lord and the (proto-bourgeois) servant -- the source of Hegel's abstract war of all against all, culminating in mutual recognition or respect -- derived from his reading of Diderot's *Rameau's Nephew*, the complaint of a servant whose skills and mastery of the real are appropriated by the incompetent feudal master, but whose enterprise outwits him. It is the theme of Beaumarchais's and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, J. M. Barrie's *The Admirable Crichton*, and PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.