Joanna ------------------------------------------------
I think Marx's phrase made sense in its context (the result of a thousand years of total urban control over the peasantry. I don't think it makes much sense in reference to much of the history of the last 1 50 years. Again we are faced with the fundamental truth intellectuals find so repulsive: New thought comes from struggle, not the other way around. Theory only seizes the masses when those masses are already engaged in struggle. This is, also, the primary 'lesson' of Lars Lih's book. Lenin's message to the RSDLP was you are not giving the workers what they need. You can't theorize correctly unless you grasp what the local comities are doing and learn from them what they need. Hence that famous rule over which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split -- a rule which contemporary leftist ought to learn to apply to themselves in some form or other, even though no Party now exists. If and when a new Left Party or Coalition comes into existence it will be in response to the activities of local struggle groups*, but at the present such groups don't exist actively enough, partly because so many of the leftists who might make them work are content to sit on the sidelines and have correct opinions. [*This phrase is pretty absurd, but the absurdity flows from the reality or missing reality it tries to name.]
Perhaps what Marx was actually trying to grasp in the phrase was "the idiocy of unfreedom" or "the idiocy of non-struggle." In the 18th-19th centuries the occasions which triggered struggle, and thus the need for theory, were pretty much urban.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of michael yates Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2013 9:11 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Blog Post. The Road Beckons: Excerpt from Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate
in connection with Marv's note about Marx and the idiocy of rural life, this is from Monthly Review's editors in Oct. 2003. Recently, I spent a few months in the DC area. Every day, I watched the zombies walking around in a daze, going to work, coming home, never smiling and seldom saying hello. Sales clerks same way. People glued to their smart phones, never noticing the world around them. Traffic unbelievably clotted. Maybe this was the idiocy or urban life.
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>From Notes from the Editors, 10/2003:
Given the concern with changing conditions in rural society in much of this issue (as represented by the work of Amin and William Hinton) we thought that readers would be interested in the origin of a misunderstanding that surrounds Marx's thoughts on rural life. One often hears the criticism that Marxism was from the beginning an extreme modernizing philosophy that looked with complete disdain on rural existence. Did not Marx himself in The Communist Manifesto, it is frequently asked, refer to "the idiocy of rural life"? Here a misconception has arisen through the mistranslation of a single word in the authorized English translation of the Manifesto. This issue is addressed in Hal Draper's definitive, though little known work, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto (Berkeley: Center for Socialist History, 1998)an expanded version of his earlier work, The Annotated Communist Manifesto. Draper's Adventures includes a new English translation of the Manifesto, together with paragraph-by-paragraph annotations, and the most detailed history currently available of the various editions of the Manifesto in major European languages.
In Draper's translation the phrase "the idiocy of rural life" in paragraph 28 of the Manifesto is replaced with "the isolation of rural life." His explanation for this correction is worth quoting at length:
"IDIOCY OF RURAL LIFE. This oft-quoted A.ET. [authorized English translation] expression is a mistranslation. The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean "idiocy" (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here [in paragraph 28 of The Communist Manifesto] it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. In the Manifesto, it was being used by a scholar who had recently written his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy and liked to read Aeschylus in the original. (For a more detailed account of the philological background and evidence, see [Hal Draper], KMTR [Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978] 2:344f.) What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life. To inject the English idiocy into this thought is to muddle everything. The original Greek meaning (which in the 19th century was still alive in German alongside the idiom meaning) had been lost in English centuries ago. Moore [the translator of the authorized English translation] was probably not aware of this problem; Engels had probably known it forty years before. He was certainly familiar with the thought behind it: in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he had written about the rural weavers as a class "which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind." (MECW [Marx and Engels, Collected Works] 4:309.) In 1873 he made exactly the Manifesto's point without using the word "idiocy": the abolition of the town-country antithesis "will be able to deliver the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years" (Housing Question, Pt. III, Chapter 3)."
Marx's criticism of the isolation of rural life then had to do with the antithesis of town and country under capitalism as expressed throughout his work ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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