----- Original Message ---- From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com>
It isn't a question of "blame"; it's a question of finding the "cause" of various kinds of oppression in the "superstition" and "prejudice" of the oppressed, i.e. in an inability, varying in degree, to use one's reason without guidance from another (this idea of the "cause" sublating Kant on "enlightenment").
Engels, in endorsing this idea in the context of elaborating Hegel's ontological claim that "reason governs the world," claims, following Marx in the 1843 letter to Ruge and applying the idea to the Prussian despotism of Frederick William III, that this despotism was "justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects" who therefore "had the government they deserved," but this is misleading because individuals are not, on this understanding of them, blameable.
Their "superstition" and "prejudice" are the outcome of the inconsistency between "the ensemble of social relations" in which they develop and live and the relations required for the full development of "enlightenment" in the above sense.
According to Marx, however, this inconsistency, as "self-estrangement" within the labour process, is positively developmental of mind and so ultimately self-transcending. This, he claims, is the "dialectic" at work in "capital."
This essential aspect of Marx is missing from the post-structuralist "concept of multiplicity of oppressions."
"No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow-minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement: 'All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.' That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings and censorship. That is how Frederick William III and how his subjects understood it. But according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: 'In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.' A particular governmental measure — Hegel himself cites the example of 'a certain tax regulation' — is therefore for him by no means real without qualification. That which is necessary, however, proves itself in the last resort to
be also rational; and, applied to the Prussian state of that time, the Hegelian proposition, therefore, merely means: this state is rational, corresponds to reason, insofar as it is necessary; and if it nevertheless appears to us to be evil, but still, in spite of its evil character, continues to exist, then the evil character of the government is justified and explained by the corresponding evil character of its subjects. The Prussians of that day had the government that they deserved." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
Ted
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