On 2010-03-10, at 10:05 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Chris says that you can absorb Marx into Hegelianism. Well, you can assimilate the Left Business Observer into the Fountainhead (or Heidegger into Hitler, you might say) if you want to but you would be mistaken.
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> Not for the first time Ted outlines Hegel's theory and attributes it to Marx. Ted says "Forces of production" are objectifications of ideas. That's what Hegel thought. This is what Marx said:
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> 'it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. "Liberation" is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse'
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> Liberation in an historical and not a mental act - write those words on a post-it note and stick them on your monitor.
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> Forces of production are not simply mental ideas realised, because they incorporate non-mental elements, natural forces, which for Marx, where he is at odds with Hegel, exist outside of the Idea. What technology does, says Marx, following Francis Bacon, is not overthrow natural laws, but mediate them. More than that, he says that the division of labour itself is a nature imposed necessity, whose exigency is not wholly transcended but only moderated in its operation by the social organisation of production.
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> So I am still of the opinion that Charles has a better grasp of Marx than Ted, and am still reluctant to attribute the failure of the cultural revolution to the endemic stupidity of the Chinese people.
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Perry Anderson offered a lucid materialist explanation of the idealist trend in Western Marxism:
“The circle of traits defining Western Marxism as a distinct tradition can now be summarized. Born from the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European capitalism after the First World War, it developed within an ever increasing scission between socialist theory and working-class practice...The result was a seclusion of theorists in universities, far from the life of the proletariat in their own countries, and a contraction of theory from economics and politics into philosophy.
"This specialization was accompanied by an increasing difficulty of language, whose technical barriers were a function of its distance from the masses. It was also conversely attended by a decreasing level of international knowledge or communication between theorists themselves from different countries. The loss of any dynamic contact with working-class practice in turn displaced Marxist theory towards contemporary non-Marxist and idealist systems of thought, with which it now typically developed in close if contradictory symbiosis.
"At the same time, the concentration of theorists into professional philosophy, together with the discovery of Marx’s own early writings, left to a general retrospective search for intellectual ancestries to Marxism in anterior European philosophical thought, and a reinterpretation of historical materialism in light of them. The results of this pattern were three-fold.
"Firstly, there was a marked predominance of epistemological work, focused essentially on problems of method.
"Secondly, the major substantive field in which method was actually applied became aesthetics – or cultural superstructures in a broader sense.
"Finally the main theoretical departures outside this field, which developed new themes absent from classical Marxism – mostly in a speculative manner – revealed a consistent pessimism. Method as impotence, art as consolation, pessimism as quiescence: it is not difficult to perceive elements of all these in the complexion of Western Marxism. For the root determinant of this tradition was its formation by defeat – the long decades of set-back and stagnation, many of them terrible ones in any historical perspective, undergone by the Western working class after 1920.”
-Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), pp. 92-93.