[lbo-talk] agricultural productivity

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Apr 23 08:36:41 PDT 2010


Ted, your problem is that you see history as the realisation of a preconceived scheme, the self-actualisation of mind. But Marx sees it differently. He does not say that mankind strives to develop mind. He says that 'in the social production of their existence, men enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely the relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production'. (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface, p 20, Lawrence and Wishart edition). Because you resist the materialist conception of history, you insist on translating Marx's concept, the 'development of the material forces production' into something quite different, the development of mind.

But Marx says 'My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which under the name of "The Idea" he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea". With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.' (afterword to the Second German edition of Capital, vol 1, p 29 of the Lawrence and Wishart edition).

Worse still, your method inverts Marx's. Marx sought not to reduce complex reality down to an abstraction, but the opposite, to show how the social essence develops to assumes its multi-form character. (That is why he dismisses those economists who are satisfied to show that money is a commodity like any other, and insists that the more demanding task is to show how the money form necessarily arises out of the eschange of commodities.) That is why all your posts are the same: whatever the question is, the answer is always 'the development of Mind'. Those youthful sixties protestors could be forgiven for chanting 'One Solution: Revolution!', but it is not very impressive in a grown man.

Finally you give the game away by insisting that freedom is nothing more than the 'recognition of necessity' (citing Engels). But Engels also talked about 'ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom' (Utopian and Scientific Socialism) Engels means that understanding nature and society (i.e. the recognition of necessity) is the means by which we can make the leap from necessity: 'The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself.' Your rather more proscriptive idea of freedom sounds to me like a curriculum of study set before mankind, as if they were bored students.

Marx talked of communism as a little philosophising in the morning a little fishing in the afternoon, which sounds like fun, to me. But most of all he did not waste his time dreaming about what would happen in the future, because he was most interested in what was happening in the present. That is to say that he did not erect the Communist Utopia as an ideal before which the present-day must be condemned, but sought to identify those forces in the present-day which would accelerate change for the better. To that extent he saw the development of the productive forces, and with it the mobilisation of a great army of labour, as ingredients for a transcendence of the limitations of capitalist society.



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