[lbo-talk] Oppression

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Mar 10 01:34:19 PST 2010


Ted: 'What they say, including what Marx says in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, is that the historical process is a process that substitutes rational self-determination for instinctive determination through "education" by means of "self-estrangement" within the labour process, a process defined by relations of production.. '

No, I think Charles has it better, your telling elides the difference between Hegel and Marx. Marx is a materialist. He sees the development of man arising out of the greater possibilities that come with the development of the forces of production. Without a surplus, there can be no 'self-development'. Without modern industry, there can be no class struggle, and no possibility of overcoming the 'self-estrangement' - which in Marx's account is not merely psychological, but a social conflict between the class that gains by its estrangement (the capitalists) and the class that can only experience that estrangement as misery (the working class). That conflict can only come to a head where the material conditions (i.e. productive forces) are developed enough to satisfy generalised plenty, or it will fall back into a mere peasant Jacquerie (take Engels' example of German peasant uprisings, or for that matter, Mao's Cultural Revolution, where the material conditions for overcoming self-estrangement fell short of the subjective ambition, dragging the revolutionaries down into barbarism).



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