[lbo-talk] Rousseau v. Marx

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Jun 19 18:19:26 PDT 2009


Put antoher way, ravi follows Rousseau rather than Marx - as the Hungarian philosopher, Gspar Miklos Tamas, argues in "Telling the truth about class":

``The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does not want to 'replace' society by annihilating 'rule' and the ruling class as such, but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself.'' [quoted, Carrol Cox]

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This is a pretty good post. I am not sure what it was doing under its former thread, so I changed the subject line. Here is the link for the whole essay for those who didn't follow it from the other thread:

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm

I am working my way through it. It encompasses a broad sweep, an historical summary of socialism and communism through out the modern era.

Getting back to the minor opening points. I never thought about contrasting Marx and Rousseau. I mean it makes sense. Another way to look at this opposition is that Rousseau was a romantic and Marx was a disillusioned romantic. I vacillate between these two poles or sensibilities depending on mood, news, and number of Martinis.

There is another thing to consider which is historical time and the fact that Rousseau lived before the French Revolution and the industrialization age of Europe. Marx lived a century later when those historical developments and their consequences where taking shape into a recognizably modern society. It's quite possible that The People and their potential fate had changed from something like one vision into another.

In Rousseau's time it was possible to believe that Enlightenment principles of education alone could work some kind of magical transformation of the people onto their true path toward a natural fruition. I am pretty sure Marx's experience in the lower depths of Berlin, Paris and London, probably resembled some thing more like Dickens, Hugo, Baudalaire and Zola.

This captures a similar point:

``It [capitalism] liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient regime as 'natural') to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand - in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or 'inner worth'. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything..''

I don't see as much opposition as Carrol wants to see. I am thinking about what's now a traditional American story, where family members arrive from the old country many from rural decline and live in big American industrial cities with their ethnic ghettos and are transformed from one world into another, from one kind of people into another. These stories are still going on of course where Mexico and China have replaced say Ireland and Italy of the another century. Or seen from within the US, blacks and whites from the decling South follow the roads and rails to New York, Chicago or LA or here in various waves. My own family was composed of five parents all came from rural small towns in Oklahoma, Utah, Illinois, Tennessee, and Maryland. They were divided between relatively poor and relatively well off. My visits to the relatives were stunning memories of differences between the discrete places of small town America and vast urban sprawl of the LA basin---not exactly a place you can call home or even roots. Later, I figured out you can ot actually from Los Angeles.

I think of these elements of Rousseau and Marx not as oppositions, but as a dynamic spectrum of history. I went back to the link looking for what suggested the opposition between Roussaeu and Marx. Here is the explanation:

``All versions of socialist endeavor can and should be classified into two principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two have opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these visions have determined everything from rare epistemological positions concerning language and consciousness to social and political attitudes concerning wealth, culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be said at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.''

Again, I don't see the opposition. I started off with moral indignation and worked my way (mostly through experience) to a much more hard core and systematic view over many years. On the other hand, I never lost contact with moral outrage, since the intervening decades supplied plenty both in the news media and within my own life, especially in working life under bosses who were assholes mostly writ large, sometimes writ small. In forty years I only had one boss who tried not to deliberately screw me, except in very small ways. The rest were characters out of Dickens with the gleam of coil in their eye.

So then, to the individual, capitalism presents itself as the boss and the job. At that level it is absolutely impossible not to have an emotional reaction that is first and foremost realized by the mind as a moral and ethical reaction---usually outrage. That was certainly my experience. The more systematic view, arises later, as I followed the money, and the relations of labor, and their constructions of my sensibilities.

This dynamic or dialectic between the individual and the social relation and construction finally dawned on me one day, when I wondered why the boss was always in a bad mood when he handed out paychecks? Payroll was a great day. I always looked forward to it.

This was the reaction of my worst boss on pay day. He was loathsome, brooding, dower, and tolerated no excited conversations from his employees---frowning with dark looks if two people gathered. When the boss was in a bad mood, everybody had to be in a bad mood. He was impatient with any show of cheer. He often tried to invent reasons for everyone to stay late on Friday, especially pay day Fridays. So he too saw capitalism as a moral and ethical condition. He had to part with his money. He hated that, like all good capitalist do.

If you want to see high moral outrage, swindle a capitalist to his face. You can watch the physiology of murderous hatred in the dull red skin tones that creep up his neck engulfing his jawe, ears, cheeks and forehead. It is magic. I watched this happen to my most dreaded boss by accident when he opened some official looking mail and realized by his own mistake, he owed the state hundred of thousands of dollars. I excused myself quietly. I was reminded of this scene recently when the bankers had to sit and listen to Congressional scorn over their bonuses.

``Thompson [Rousseauian] had to ignore the Faustian-demonic encomium of capitalism inherent in Marx, and so he had to oppose critical theory, and then theory tout court.3 Anderson later described this decomposition of Western Marxism away from class to the people in conceptual terms.''

Well, in concrete terms of `real life' while theory isn't confined only to practice and experience, it definitely has to be interlinked with these or it simply isn't believed or understood. So I could turn it around and say that Rousseauian socialism, gives the human concretness and understanding to the more abstract elements of Marx as a critical theory. After all there are the people who do constitute labor and others who constitute capitalists. There is a prolitarian culture that the prolitariat are want to destory, since they would have to destroy themselves.

There is also a concrete experience that corresponds to the alienation of labor from its creative production or schema of value. Where we or rather I recognized somebody else, not me would own, possess, and gain all I gave in my labor.

This kind of alienation even in its theoretic dress is actually a distinct experience. I'll descripe an example. I spent about a year working as a carpenter apprentice in commerical-institutional grade construction in a remodeling job of California Hall. Back then the building housed the Chancellors Offices, the Letters and Sciences graduate division offices and some other administrative functionaries.

California Hall was built in 1906 in the Hearst neoclassical style, and a beutiful example at that. The exterior is covered in granite carved as a greek style temple, topped with giant hand made titles, made in Port Costa. The mechanical detail of the roof is done in copper sheeting that turns to a green patina, and the four sets of giant doors are made of oak approximately eighteen feet tall with custom bronze fittings. The interior halls were done in a terrazzo flooring and the main interior doors off the corridors are solid oak, designed to match the main doors in sub motif. It's like the neoclassical beaurcratic palaces of Washington DC or Paris, done in the high national state architecture. I worked in each phase of the job on all these elements.

About three years after finishing the project, I had to go over to this building on some staff errand for student services. I walked into the front lobby on one side and admired the dual elliptical stairs that separated the entry way from the long first floor corridor. The stairway was done in marble with bronze bannisters. Wow what a fucking job that was and what a palace this is, I thought. All the pride and value of craftsmenship was owned by somebody else, my bitterist enemy the haute bourgeoisie of the state public officials who I battled daily in education reform.

This existential moment was augmented by all the years of academic and art struggles, along with the political struggles that made the place famous. The depth of my love-hate relationship to the place is amost boundless. Talk about alienated labor, from construction to philosophy, from education to political economy, to history. Now the bastards have the nerve to sent letters requesting money as an alumni. Kiss my ass. Go get it from the governor.

The Depression era song, Brother can you spare a dime, captures some the above.

Gotta cut it off here. This is a fine essay, but it is too big to match point on email---by just me. And fine writing too. I would sure like others to read through it and make their own bones of contention and agreement. The below quote is about a third of the way through.

Carrol, shame on you for hiding the essay in a thread on pro-sports, and reducing it to an answer to the endless carping over moral views.

Here is a quote to tease the list interes:

``...The emphasis in Wood's work on the separateness or autonomy of the economy and the economic points, rather promisingly, I think, towards a much-needed Marxian political science. This autonomy of the economy may account for peculiarities in English political culture that would, according to Perry Anderson, explain the lack of a radical socialism in Britain, the substitution of class culture for class and the notorious (and idealized) absence of great, salvic social theorems in the national culture. But the sudden modernization of Britain under Thatcher and Blair yields surprising results, as Anderson himself recognizes in another of his breathtaking surveys:

`By the [nineteen-]eighties, the net effect of these changes was a marked disjuncture between high culture and politics in Britain. In most European cultures, such a pattern has historically been quite frequent. In many, indeed, the normal stance of intellectuals has tended to be oppositional, swinging against the pendulum of regimes rather than with it. In England, this has not been so. Here, the larger portion of the intelligentsia has generally sung in harmony, if not unison, with the established power of the day, from the time of Coleridgesrst scoring of its part after the Napoleonic wars. The present position is an anomaly in this record.'

Nevertheless, the problem remains: part of the Left will see class in cultural and political terms, and this is indeed an effective aid to sustaining an oppositional stance against a rotten regime in the name and on behalf of a people judged capable of achieving for itself a cultural and moral autonomy vouchsafed by a working-class politics. The case of England is crucial for several reasons: it is traditionally the distant mirror of capitalism.30 It cannot possibly be denied that the shift to culture in class theory was and is caused by the fate of socialism (i.e., of the workers movement): to succeed only in the sense of making capitalism more modern, democratic, secular and (perhaps) egalitarian via cross-class alliances forces the workers movement to abandon the specic proletarian calling envisaged by Marx. Western and Northern social democrats, Eastern and Southern communists alike have replaced emancipation with equality, Marx with Rousseau. Marxian socialism has never been attempted politically, especially not by Marxists.31 Egalitarianism and statism (in democratic and tyrannical versions) were the hallmarks of the main offcial versions of socialism, everywhere.''

CG



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