James Heartfield wrote:
> CB: Don't have much data by which we can exclude the European
> imperialists, colonialists and slavers as the main cause of the
> cruelty, an lack of reward. The "stupidity" part is racist.
>
> Which I think is a bit of a weird response. Did I say that those who
> lived in those societies were to blame? No. The conditions of there
> existence did not let them rise further. And Charles is right that
> if you are talking about societies that were made primitive in the
> modern era, then yes indeed, those who held them back, like
> colonists, imperialists and slavers were responsible. The fact
> remains that their lives were cruel and unrewarding. What should we
> do? Pretend that their lives are rewarding, because we might offend
> their feeling? No. If you cannot recognise the need for change, you
> will not make it.
>
> Charles goes on to say it is racist to say that life in primitive
> societies is stupid. But that is not to say that those who live in
> such societies are innately stupid. Only that limiting conditions
> limit intellectual development, too. Should we tell people that
> illiteracy is OK? No. that is why education always played such a
> major part in anti-imperialist struggles. The opponents of
> oppression always understood that subjugation was degrading and
> stupifying.
On Marx's ontological and anthropological assumptions, "rationality" expresses the degree of development of "free individuality". Such development is the product of "education" in a sense that, for example, makes wage-labour a "steeling school".
Such an education substitutes rational self-determination for instinctive determination (it's this that allows for the appropriation of insights from psychoanalysis with its "structural" conception of mind). It produces a "state of character" with the fully developed "virtues" required for the fully "rational" activities that would constitute life in an ideal community.
The conditions of human life from the beginning of human history to it's "end" in the fully "free individuality" of the ideal community are, in varying degree, inconsistent with those required for full development. They therefore involve less than fully "rational" forms of "individuality", i.e. varying degrees and kinds of "stupidity".
Though Marx claims that all "peasant" conditions are ultimately incompatible with the full development of "free individuality", he claims some are less so than others.
He claims, for instance, that the 19th century conditions of many Indian and French peasants were less compatible with development than those of "peasant agriculture on a small scale" in "classical communities at their best" and in Shakespeare's England, i.e in the latter case, the conditions productive of "the proud yeomanry of England, of whom Shakespeare speaks".
The condition picked out for emphasis is the role played by "the private property of the laborer in his means of production".
"The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the laborer is the private owner of his own means of labor set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm>
"Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the carrying on of independent handicrafts, which together form the basis of the feudal mode of production, and after the dissolution of that system, continue side by side with the capitalist mode, also form the economic foundation of the classical communities at their best, after the primitive form of ownership of land in common had disappeared, and before slavery had seized on production in earnest." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm>
Though they facilitate a significant degree of positive development, of "education", the conditions of "petty industry" are inconsistent with those required for full development. In the English case, Marx has "progress" beyond them brought about by "primitive accumulation".
He has this motivated by "passions" in Hegel's sense, the "passions" constitutive of human history as "the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised".
In the case of the "passions" that motivated "primitive accumulation" in England, Marx describes them as "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." The unintended progressive consequences that define them as "passions" in Hegel's sense were "the rose in the cross of" that "present".
"This mode of production ['petty industry'] pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labor, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring- individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor."
As I've pointed out before, Engels, who explicitly endorses Hegel's idea of the role of the "passions" in human history, treats the "annihilation" of the "primitive tribal community" in the same way, quoting Marx on its incompatibility with the full development of "individuality," i.e. of "rationality."
"It is by the vilest means -- theft, violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before." <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012643.html
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Ted