> But _not_ a future empirically described or predicted. For good
> reasons
> or bad, she did fall into prediction in her reference to capitalist
> collapse, but _not_ in her core statement. There she correctly
> rejecting
> the goal of "socialist society," vaguely conceived or otherwise, in
> that
> being true to Marx's own avoideance of writing recipes for the
> cookshops
> of the future. Nor does she ground her argument in any explicit
> assurance of success in the struggle, but in fact, in a paragraph
> remarkable for what it leaves out, she implicitly allows for failure:
As I just pointed out, these claims misinterpret the text, the Sept. 1843 letter to Ruge, on which they're based, as well as numerous other texts from the early and mature Marx.
What Marx objected to about "utopian socialism" isn't at all the objection interpretations such as the above attribute to him.
His objection wasn't to its attempt to specify the content of the ideal community implied by the idea of the "true human being".
In fact, he criticized the content elaborated by utopian socialists such as Fourier on the ground that significant aspects of it were based on a mistaken ideas of the "true human being" and "the true reality", mistaken ideas he took to be a consequence of their being "an expression ['of the humanistic principle'] which is still infected by its antithesis - the private system."
Rather, what he objected to was the idea that the content simply had to be pointed out to individuals in a didactic way in order for them to accept and actualize it. Thus by "recipes for the cookshops of the future" he meant recipes for the "roast pigeons" pointed to in the following.
"Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>
What was required instead (as "scientific socialism") was to show, by means of "remorseless criticism" of "existing reality" (including, as part of this, utopian ideas such as Fourier's) how "reason" in Hegel's sense was the "rose in the cross of the present".
By this means, it would, he claimed, be possible to demonstrate both the content of "the true reality" which was the "final goal" of history and how this goal was a "necessity" immanent in "the forms [including the forms of "theoretical and practical consciousness"] peculiar to existing reality".
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal."
These claims are embodied from the "historical materialist" conception of history as a process of "education", a process of "bildung", a set of "different stages in the development of the human mind" to "reason" in the above sense.
So "existing reality" had to shown to be "educative" in this sense, i.e. "educative" of the degree of "integral development of every individual producer" - of "enlightenment" - necessary to enable them initiate and successfully accomplish the "revolutionary praxis" creative of the social form penultimate to the final realization of "the true human being" and "the true reality".
This isn't just a matter of correct interpretation of Marx.
The misinterpretation leads to the absurd conclusion that, since there's no objective basis for claims about "the true human being" and "the true reality", whatever the "masses" decide to create through "revolution" will be "good" (a conclusion that, among other things, is self-contradictory since there is no rational basis for such a judgement, i.e. the fact that it's the shared view of the "masses" isn't such a basis - this self-contradiction being characteristic, as well, of the absurd idea of "standpoint epistemology" that, since there's no truth, whatever some like-minded group of individuals happen to believe is "true" "for them", each of them being able, apparently, to determine, in spite of their being no truth, the truth about what others, the like-minded, believe).
It also leads to relative indifference to or denial of what Marx claimed was the opposite of "the true human being" and "the true reality", namely, despotism, e.g. the despotism of Stalinism and Maoism.
Indeed, in some cases it's associated with the idea that "being" and "human being" are such that human relations are inescapably and more or less obviously despotic relations.
“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination." <http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm
>
The antithesis of "the true human being" and "the true reality" was the "superstitious" and "prejudiced" human being lacking a developed capacity for "enlightenment", for "thinking for oneself".
This, according to Marx in the letter to Ruge about German despotism, in the Brumaire explanation of the despotism of the Bonaparte dynasty and in the explanation of "Oriental despotism", etc., was the "cause" of "despotism".
You, in contrast, make an inability to think for oneself "a rational response under most circumstances", recently citing a footnote in Capital as evidence of Marx's agreement with the idea.
"See that footnote in C1 that I and SA located for James. There hasn't been much variation, except under extreme and rare conditons, over time in this matter of 'identifying with one's leaders.' In fact, it's probably a rational response under most circumstances." <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090309/004009.html
>
The footnote remark by Marx is:
"Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm>
But what this actually points to is the relation of "despotism", including "monarchy", to "dehumanised man", i.e to the antithesis of "the true human being".
"The monarchical principle in general is the despised, the despicable, the dehumanised man; and Montesquieu was quite wrong to allege that it is honour [Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois]. He gets out of the difficulty by distinguishing between monarchy, despotism and tyranny. But those are names for one and the same concept, and at most they denote differences in customs though the principle remains the same. Where the monarchical principle has a majority behind it, human beings constitute the minority; where the monarchical principle arouses no doubts, there human beings do not exist at all."
"the philistine is the material of the monarchy, and the monarch always remains only the king of the philistines; he cannot turn either himself or his subjects into free, real human beings while both sides remain what they are." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_05.htm>
Marx, in fact, pointed to this relation in his mistaken 1881 surmises about the Russian peasant commune:
"There is one characteristic of the 'agricultural commune' in Russia which afflicts it with weakness, hostile in every sense. That is its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this type but which, wherever it is found, has caused a more or less centralised despotism to arise on top of the communes. The federation of Russian republics of the North proves that this isolation, which seems to have been originally imposed by the vast expanse of the territory, was largely consolidated by the political destinies which Russia had to suffer after the Mongol invasion. Today it is an obstacle which could easily be eliminated. It would simply be necessary to replace the volost, the government body, with an assembly of peasants elected by the communes themselves, serving as the economic and administrative organ for their interests." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm>
So your approach not only endorses whatever the revolutionary "masses" decide to create as the content of "socialism"; it has no basis for criticism of "despotism" masked as "socialism" or for perceiving the potential for "despotism" in social contexts where the dominant "individuality" is significantly "unenlightened", i.e. "superstitious" and "prejudiced".
Ted