[lbo-talk] Jacobin debate up

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Sun Oct 23 07:42:06 PDT 2011


Carrol Cox wrote:


> It is difficult to turn this into a step in an argument; that is, I don't
> know how it can be debated either way. The passive is perhaps revealing:
> "Human history understood as a developmental process.. ." Well, why
> understand it that way? Ted has argued that Marx understood it in that way.
> I think it would be possible to find passages in Darwin allowing the same
> understanding to be ascribed to him. I believe that I have written in the
> past that while neither Marx nor Darwin believed the Doctrine of Progress,
> both were, after all, Victorian Gentlemen, and as such often slipped. No
> one is free from ideology, not even Mars or Darwin, and Progress was deeply
> roted in the technology and the Anglo-Centrism of Victorian England. At the
> century's turn Kipling, rising to the defense of U.S. barbarism in the
> Philippines, summed up the irreducible core of this ideological principle in
> the White Man's Burden.

It's an interpretive claim connected to taking issue with your alternative claims about the role played by ethics in Marx. The "argument" defending it follows what you quote. You ignore this argument in what you say here.

Specifically, the claim is that Marx treats history as an educational process developing the individual powers required to actualize ideal relations, these relations constituting the ethical aspect of a truly good life.

This treatment, as he himself explicitly acknowledged, appropriates Hegel's "dialectic of negativity" in the form given it in the Phenomenology. There this dialectic works through self-estrangement within the labour process.

"The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm

This developmental idea assigns an essential role to unethical motives (to what Hegel calls "passions") understood as a form of self-estrangement. So, not only are such motives not judged moralistically, they are given an essential role in bringing about progress toward the actualization of ethically ideal relations (elaborated as relations of mutual recognition). This progress consists in the development of the "species-powers" such actualization requires.

One example of Marx giving "passions" this role is found, as I pointed out, in his account in Capital of "primitive accumulation." There he claims the transformation of "petty property" relations into capital/wage-labour relations was brought about through "the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." This transformation, he also claims, was progressive in the above sense; it created relations more conducive than petty property to the development of "species-powers." In fact, throughout Capital Marx treats capitalist motives as "passions" in this sense.

Another example is the role Marx assigns to these passions in possibly bringing about a progressive transformation of developmental conditions in British India. There the progress he anticipates is the ending of the "isolation" characteristic of the Indian peasant commune. According to him, such isolation is a barrier to individual development because "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections." He makes the "prejudice" and "superstition" (as opposed to "enlightenment") it generates responsible for the extreme form of despotism characteristic, so he claims, of mid-19th century France, Prussia and Russia as well as India.

He claims that, jn bringing about this transformation, England was "actuated only by the vilest interests," but "whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history".

"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm

This largely ignored developmental aspect of Marx has political implications. To know whether "socialism" in Marx's sense can emerge in a given context, e.g. the contemporary U.S., it's necessary to know whether conditions in that context have been consistent with the development of the individual "species-powers" initiation of a successful socialist transformation requires.

This is the question Marx attempts to answer in his 1881 examination of conditions in the Russian peasant commune. The main negative condition to which he points is "isolation," a condition he again links to extreme despotism.

"There is one characteristic of the 'agricultural commune' in Russia which afflicts it with weakness, hostile in every sense. That is its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this type but which, wherever it is found, has caused a more or less centralised despotism to arise on top of the communes." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm

A context from which extreme despotism emerged was not a context in which the degree of developed individual powers required for a successful socialist transformation existed.

Ted

One example is the positive role Marx assigns to



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