affinities and traits
Aug 20 2007 16:04
1. The project that reduces communism to a form of production, particularly self-management, is inherited from classic reform liberalism, and those that propose self-management end up separating instances of function from general relations ... my understanding is that the argument for the self-management of production proposes social reforms based on further rationalisation of production under the sign of need and utility which take the place and role of Value. This advances the radical liberal agenda only one step: form capital viewed as 'a necessary evil' entwined in social production to the idea that it could become an unnecessary evil if a new conception of necessity is politically asserted.
2. The critique that proponents of self-management have made of anti-capitalist activists on the basis that they are ‘liberals’ is ill-founded on two bases: A. most beyond the pale anti-capitalists are romantics not liberals (because these do not endorse liberal institutions); B. Where anti-capitalists are rightly identified as ‘liberal’ this designation becomes inappropriate as a term of dismissal and critique as those who are making it, it turns out, are equally identifiably liberal (ie in favour of the administration function of liberal institutions in society).
3. Members and associates of the Libcom group have recently made assertions in support of the retention of existing institutions within a future communist society (a futile exercise when they are not in a position of power to test the feasibility of any of these proposals). As a consequence they have drifted into a workaday utopianism extrapolated from the politics of the structures that already exist. A consequence of this is that they appear to be trapped between both endorsing the function of specific institutions (police, law, prison, to name the three most recent) whilst opposing the general social relation – a classic (if topsy turvey) liberal dilemma.
Aug 20 2007 16:20
#2
Quote:
A consequence of this is that they appear to be trapped between both endorsing the function of specific institutions (police, law, prison, to name the three most recent) whilst opposing the general social relation – a classic (if topsy turvey) liberal dilemma.
That told 'em. Debates between self-identified communists are rarely useful though, what outcome do you envisage in making these assertions?
Aug 20 2007 16:26
#3
anyway redtwister did say that laws are possible? i really think that liberalism is a better solution than fascism; tho i dunno if that means that suport for anti-fascism is neccessary. yeah bordgia "could" break bricks 
many thanks lem
Aug 21 2007 00:21
#4
Quote:
The project that reduces communism to a form of production, particularly self-management, is inherited from classic reform liberalism, and those that propose self-management end up separating instances of function from general relations ... my understanding is that the argument for the self-management of production proposes social reforms based on further rationalisation of production under the sign of need and utility which take the place and role of Value.
Bravo.
But just to quibble a bit. While I certainly agree with fort-da game's general drift, I think it's important to see self-management as a product of "workerism" - essentially the urge of those who identify with the role of the worker under capitalism and wish to build a fair capitalism that retains current relations but undoes the inequality of the bourgeois market or equalities within bureaucracy. Such a tendency will always exist as long as capitalist relations exist. That is why it is important to reject it on a continuing basis rather than thinking it is a simple mistake which can be corrected as a one-time error.
Lem and Catch just seem like they are engaging in gutless apologetics here. Regular commentators Dundee, Cantdocartwheels and Syndicalistcat certainly endorse prisons, laws and police. Their workerism is quite clear. A post revolutionary society according them will have a large (self-managed) bureaucracy which would exert controlling authority over a large portion of each person's life (I know Syndicalistcat spins this as "there would be a lot of negotiation" - spin it that way if you wish). Prisons are a logical part of their fantasy. I more or less agree with Redtwisters' points but he should be clear enough that folks can't twist them for their convenience.
Red
Aug 21 2007 00:35
#5
your a fantasist "red" - did rosa lichtenstein out fantasize you is that why you're here?
Aug 21 2007 03:38
#6
RH:
Quote:
Regular commentators Dundee, Cantdocartwheels and Syndicalistcat certainly endorse prisons, laws and police. Their workerism is quite clear. A post revolutionary society according them will have a large (self-managed) bureaucracy which would exert controlling authority over a large portion of each person's life (I know Syndicalistcat spins this as "there would be a lot of negotiation" - spin it that way if you wish). Prisons are a logical part of their fantasy. I more or less agree with Redtwisters' points but he should be clear enough that folks can't twist them for their convenience.
I never advocated prisons.
anyway, i know that won't stop you from your usual dishonest sectarian methods. "self-managed bureaucracy" surely seems to be a contradiction in terms. unlike you i actually have a program to dissolve the coordinator class (the "bueaucracy"). negotiation is a horizontal interactive process, between communities and workplace self-management organizations, as part of participatory planning. I know of course you won't bother telling us how you think social production could continue to be carried on without markets or bureaucratic central planning. handwaving is your style.
Aug 21 2007 05:37
#7
RedHughs wrote:
Lem and Catch just seem like they are engaging in gutless apologetics here. Regular commentators Dundee, Cantdocartwheels and Syndicalistcat certainly endorse prisons, laws and police. Their workerism is quite clear. A post revolutionary society according them will have a large (self-managed) bureaucracy which would exert controlling authority over a large portion of each person's life (I know Syndicalistcat spins this as "there would be a lot of negotiation" - spin it that way if you wish). Prisons are a logical part of their fantasy. I more or less agree with Redtwisters' points but he should be clear enough that folks can't twist them for their convenience.Red
I think you'll find fort da game was referring to "members of the libcom group and their close associates" - unless that includes everyone who posts on the forum I don't see that I'm engaging on apologetics on behalf of those three, all of whom I have strong disagreements on a number of issues.
Aug 21 2007 06:07
#8
OK,
I apologize if Syndicalistcat didn't advocate prisons. I apologize for treating those advocate laws with a broad brush (though I guess I might have imagined that it is hard to advocate laws without advocating prison). I suppose I also actually ask whether Syndicalistcat opposes prisons or not, as well.
Anyway, if you are interested in honest discussion, why not honestly say that our perspectives are miles apart. I can see the logical behind your "horizontal planning" - it makes sense in a world where only those things that are first planned happened. If you find a world in which people act first and only coordinate second to be totally insane, so be it. I find such a world to be both plausible and desirable.
Cat, I actually do appreciate many of your posts and observations. If you could let go of the need to disprove the very existence of any theory to the left of yours, you would be fine to have a discussion with. But I do find this need to be a bit telling in itself.
Best,
Red
Aug 21 2007 06:17
#9
I'm for prisons and not necessarily opposed to executions, torture and inhuman cruelty either.
Aug 21 2007 06:27
#10
Uh,
Catch, I believe your initial post contained the word "everyone". Later parts involved statements that akin to "police do do some good but of course I'm oppose the police". Ever think about the idea that the good is the enemy of the best?
Quote:
I think everyone is opposed to the institution of prisons continuing, however there's an openness to the idea that isolation of those who constitute a strong violent threat may well be necessary.
This weasely bollock - bullshit - hooey - balderdash. It akin to the speeches of pigs in Animal Farm. Perhaps the new phrase should "every time hear someone 'express an openness', I reach for my revolver". There is quite a population of frequent posters who are definitely fixated on "rapists, murders and child molesters" and the need to imprison them. The long, long prisons thread is shot through-and-through the paranoid ravings of the average person who believes that newspaper and television give portrait of life under capitalism in Britain or America (or whatever awful part of the global one might choose).
Red
Aug 21 2007 07:31
#11
Quote:
This weasely bollock - bullshit - hooey - balderdash. It akin to the speeches of pigs in Animal Farm. Perhaps the new phrase should "every time hear someone 'express an openness', I reach for my revolver". There is quite a population of frequent posters who are definitely fixated on "rapists, murders and child molesters" and the need to imprison them. The long, long prisons thread is shot through-and-through the paranoid ravings of the average person who believes that newspaper and television give portrait of life under capitalism in Britain or America (or whatever awful part of the global one might choose).
right ok, forget the media image of predators round every corner. are you saying there will be no violence/rape/child abuse/sociopaths in communism? i hope you're right, but surely you must concede you can't be sure. thus, how do we deal with it if it happens? it's a complex issue wrought with risks involved in any (non-)response, and it's just posturing to label everyone who isn't utopian about it as a stalinist.
a couple of people have been actively pro-punishment, everyone else has seen some kind of separation of dangerous people as a last resort (behind rehabilitation, restrative justice etc). like catch, i find these 'will communism have...' debates pretty dull, but being labelled a stalinist/liberal/utopian (!) for simply not dodging the fact people might still do bad stuff to each other in a communist society is pretty lame.
Aug 21 2007 09:29
#12
catch wrote:
I think the idea of having "laws" post-capitalism is bollocks, redtwister dealt with this well, but written down rules are quite likely I'd have thought.
Largely a matter of semantics though really. I mean, we don't really have the language to properly discuss a future communist society precisely because we do not live in one, any more than medieval peasants could properly discuss labour value.
RedHughs wrote:
Catch, I believe your initial post contained the word "everyone". Later parts involved statements that akin to "police do do some good but of course I'm oppose the police". Ever think about the idea that the good is the enemy of the best?
Isn't this obvious to all but the most unwashed "ooh authority is bad" anarcho-twat? Obviously he's not in favour of the boys in blue who help break strikes and are uniformly racist, or their continued existance in a communist society. He's merely acknowledging that they perform some functions which are indispensible to any mass human society. I mean, I'm against the use of explosives in warfare, but all for their use in, say, mining or demolishing unsafe buildings.
And again it's largely down to semantics and the language of the epoch we live in, isn't it? I don't think anyone on here is advocating prisons as they exist now being perfect, or that, come a revolution, their existence should just be frozen as the rest of society changes around them. But, as has been extensively argued elsewhere (and no point in dragging the whole debate up again, at least not on this thread) you cannot rule out the possibility of there being a need for some place where people who are a danger can be detained. The equivelent we have today are called prisons, so how can we really discuss them without using the only terminology at our disposal?
Quote:
There is quite a population of frequent posters who are definitely fixated on "rapists, murders and child molesters" and the need to imprison them.
On the contrary, I think it's fairly likely to come up on a nine page thread regarding the need for prisons.
Quote:
The long, long prisons thread is shot through-and-through the paranoid ravings of the average person who believes that newspaper and television give portrait of life under capitalism in Britain or America (or whatever awful part of the global one might choose).
I was going to respond, but actually I've decided that with unsubstantiated and barely comprehensible comments like the one above you've waived any right to take part in rational discussion.
Sep 8 2007 12:05
#13
Negation 1973 wrote:
http://libcom.org/library/lip-and-the-self-managed-counter-revolution-negation
If only for this reason, the struggle of the proletariat can no longer be the struggle of the workers' movement either in its aims or in its means.
Despite “this reason” being a bit long, it’s a true statement. There are implications in terms of the outcomes communists can generate. It accounts for the communists’ incapacity to form a party, despite having numerous bureaus on the case.
Sep 8 2007 16:33
#14
Lazy Riser wrote:
Negation 1973 wrote:
http://libcom.org/library/lip-and-the-self-managed-counter-revolution-negation
It is no longer a matter of the associated proletarians becoming their own capitalist but of destroying the capitalist form itself, the firm, along with wage-labor and the market.Despite “this reason” being a bit long, it’s a true statement. There are implications in terms of the outcomes communists can generate. It accounts for the communists’ incapacity to form a party, despite having numerous bureaus on the case.
My motivations: Pathology, strange visions, etc. What interests me most is the baggage carried forwards through critique of previous forms. In a similar relation to that of Bataille and the jumping bean I want to give a precise account of how what has been apparently excluded, becoming a denied quality, still continues to exert its definition on the critique that has surpassed it.
In the example you cite, it seems to me now that the critique of self-management and the proposal for self-management must exist simaltaneously and the relation between the two cannot be resolved; nor can it be said that one pole precedes the other ( i.e. in some proposed phases/stages theory). All we can say is that the two positions together describe a moment which in itself was actually abandonned at that moment because of the advance of other forces which rendered both positions obsolete individually and in relation, forces which neither pole included in their accounts. We might also note that these forces did not use critique and advanced indifferently to the discussion (as if the discussion had no merit). We might say that this rendering obsolete of crucial debates is the revenge of traits and affinities upon critique. Under such circumstances it has become utterly impossible to gound allegience in rationality or analysis.
The dead end of '73 is reencountered by T/C twenty years later but with nothing self-organised (no workers' movement) for it to orientate itself to... thus its circular concept communisation
Sep 8 2007 17:09
#15
Quote:
There is quite a population of frequent posters who are definitely fixated on "rapists, murders and child molesters" and the need to imprison them.
what to do then about the rapists, murderers and child-molesters?
Sep 8 2007 17:34
#16
Quote:
What interests me most is the baggage carried forwards through critique of previous forms.
No doubt. And as we know, communism is a hobby for those psychologically predisposed to Hegelian deliberations. Defensive and negativist modes of thought. An inclination towards bureaucratic and metaphysical activities, when critiques are bound to be less relevant than their subject. In the end only crisis can save communism, because only accumulation can generate collective action.
Quote:
It is no longer a matter of the associated proletarians becoming their own capitalist but of destroying the capitalist form itself, the firm, along with wage-labor and the market.
As if it ever was “a matter of the associated proletarians becoming their own capitalist”. An application of values to belief, when the belief itself is conjured from motivation rather then fact. What is it that communists must believe about the nature of the human species or of historical processes? Anything?
Quote:
what to do then about the rapists, murderers and child-molesters?
Why do anything? Why should it matter more to "anarchists" than to their next door neighbours?
Sep 8 2007 17:39
#17
it doesn't need to matter more: i suspect your next door neighbors have an opinion about it.
Sep 8 2007 17:56
#18
No doubt. Some of them even feel the need to let everyone know their views on the unsavoury subject at the strangest times. The mixture of sex and violence can play havoc on the old id, no wonder the fragile psychologies drawn by the heady scent of internet-anarchism are so fixated by it. Internet forums, anarchists, rape fixations, a classic trinity like Moe, Larry and Curly.
Sep 12 2007 11:25
#19
newyawka wrote:
what to do then about the rapists, murderers and child-molesters?
There have been enough threads on ‘what to do’. This is intended as a discussion of what motivates the discussion of ‘what to do’ and specifically why the critique of liberal reforms are fated to fall back onto liberal reforms.
Liberalism is essentially defined as the assertion of an abstract human freedom but this may only be actualised within concomitant constraints on freedom (other unacknowledged limits also function of course).
The limitations instituted by liberalism are intended to optimise the performativity of the abstract individual at the level of behaviour. Liberal society is the result of progressively modelled inter-relations between individuals.
A list of the constraints (which are values other than freedom) that liberalism places on freedom: an emphasis on utility of acts; on instrumentality of relations; on rationality of measures; on predictability of psychological reactions; on adherence to self-interest as inscribed by rights; on administration of policy by experts.
The means by which liberal political freedom and its simultaneous constraints are realised: political reform according to principles of rationalisation; penal rationalisation; town planning rationalisation; social health rationalisation; education rationalisation – and most importantly a continuous strategic investment in economic relations and infrastructure.
These reforms are developed and implemented by an array of specialised institutions according to the method of: 1. data collection/analysis; 2. evaluation of data and proposal of appropriate measures at the level of data (i.e. in the abstract); 3. strategic implementation of policy on the basis of a quantitate/abstract understanding of a society comprising numbered quantities of abstract individuals.
Marx:
Quote:
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.
This quote ticks all the liberal boxes I have listed above and we can see plainly that as the externalising tendencies of ‘critique’ subside back into the mode of proposing ‘what to do’ a fundamental return to the metaphysics of the received, the real as rational and the rational as real, is adopted. This metaphysics situates itself within an account of process and necessary continuity which may or may not be called dialectical materialism.
Sep 17 2007 18:28
#20
The discovery of continuities within proposals that appear as breaks in societal organisation is perhaps inevitable but to deny their existence is a mystification. The continuities in marxism function at the level of perceived historical ‘development’, the placing of modes of production in history, the identity of productive activity with human society.
The metaphysics of Marx proposes that the break between communism and previous historical forms is made on a relatively facile level (it reverses the attribution of significance in the relation between living and dead labour) and even then, objectively, it is only a break in the terms that it is an outcome of previous accumulations/expropriations of form – in is the events of 1848 in thought.
The left-critique of capitalism accepts the fundamental objectivity of capital’s social categories and perceives that communism must be realised through the further extension, via rationalisation, of capitalised subjectivity (i.e. ‘stripping off its (society’s) mystical veil'), and ensuring the definition of non-mystical life by identity with production – life under communism is production. The means of rationalising both production and subjectivity is ‘planning’ i.e. the bringing under control of anarchic productive forces via a transference embodied in a conscious decision making body that is integrated into production – the rationalisation appears simultaneously in both the working class for itself in relation to capitalist contradiction and the communist 'programme' which is purportedly the expression of the class for-itself.
Marx:
This, however, demands for society a certain material groundwork or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.
Higher communism is not possible unless the condition of ‘the equality of every kind of (that) labour,’ is met first in the production of commodities, it is via the establishment of the domination of life by the abstract equivalence of commodities that human beings first encounter the potential of a real community between each other, ie the determination of life by production for need.
The abstraction of human social relations caused by the capitalist productive relation is ‘inverted’ to become the actualisation of the communist productive relation. In this formulation, alienation is historically necessary for the realisation of human capacities – commodity production is the objective precondition of communist society (via proletarian subjectivity).
Of course, it is contingently true that capitalism does precede all that might follow it, if anything – but Marx makes an argument for an unavoidable ‘process of development’, that is for intrinsic continuity at the level of objective development of use-value as expressed in the development of social institutions as the actualisations of need – from this, we see that for Marx the content of communism is already fixed historically in the processing of pre-communist forms and is thus dictated to humanity by the history of alienation. It is the equivalent of saying we shall achieve sanity only if we first pass unwillingly through states of derangement.
Dec 9 2007 03:06
#21
fort-da game wrote:
The discovery of continuities within proposals that appear as breaks in societal organisation is perhaps inevitable but to deny their existence is a mystification. The continuities in marxism function at the level of perceived historical ‘development’, the placing of modes of production in history, the identity of productive activity with human society.The metaphysics of Marx proposes that the break between communism and previous historical forms is made on a relatively facile level (it reverses the attribution of significance in the relation between living and dead labour) and even then, objectively, it is only a break in the terms that it is an outcome of previous accumulations/expropriations of form – in is the events of 1848 in thought.
The left-critique of capitalism accepts the fundamental objectivity of capital’s social categories and perceives that communism must be realised through the further extension, via rationalisation, of capitalised subjectivity (i.e. ‘stripping off its (society’s) mystical veil'), and ensuring the definition of non-mystical life by identity with production – life under communism is production. The means of rationalising both production and subjectivity is ‘planning’ i.e. the bringing under control of anarchic productive forces via a transference embodied in a conscious decision making body that is integrated into production – the rationalisation appears simultaneously in both the working class for itself in relation to capitalist contradiction and the communist 'programme' which is purportedly the expression of the class for-itself.
Marx:
This, however, demands for society a certain material groundwork or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.Higher communism is not possible unless the condition of ‘the equality of every kind of (that) labour,’ is met first in the production of commodities, it is via the establishment of the domination of life by the abstract equivalence of commodities that human beings first encounter the potential of a real community between each other, ie the determination of life by production for need.
The abstraction of human social relations caused by the capitalist productive relation is ‘inverted’ to become the actualisation of the communist productive relation. In this formulation, alienation is historically necessary for the realisation of human capacities – commodity production is the objective precondition of communist society (via proletarian subjectivity).
Of course, it is contingently true that capitalism does precede all that might follow it, if anything – but Marx makes an argument for an unavoidable ‘process of development’, that is for intrinsic continuity at the level of objective development of use-value as expressed in the development of social institutions as the actualisations of need – from this, we see that for Marx the content of communism is already fixed historically in the processing of pre-communist forms and is thus dictated to humanity by the history of alienation. It is the equivalent of saying we shall achieve sanity only if we first pass unwillingly through states of derangement.
On the first paragraph: It seems to me that Marx identifies human production as the metabolic relation between human beings and Nature. Thus production is not in identity with human social relations, but rather plays a critical role in their formation because it is what mediates the relation between human beings and the world out of which they must reproduce themselves.
On the last paragraph: It seems to me that Marx does not so much place the essence of human beings in producing, but in their sociality, their interdependence in their reproduction. Since social relations are not fixed once and forever, neither would "human nature" be fixed, except that human beings are always "social animals". Marx certainly argues that the first step to breaking with being mere animals involves becoming alienated from nature, becoming increasingly social rather than natural beings, and so the development of social relations also entails, as a matter of historical record, the alienation of human beings from each other as much as it does from nature.
Had human beings not alienated themselves from nature, society is not a question. Had human beings not alienated themselves from each other in relations of objective domination, individuality would not be very much of a question. Rather than a requiring insanity to reach sanity, rather it is more analogous to the development of a child, from material dependence on their mother directly for food, to a variety of relations of dependence on adults in relations of personal domination, to a period where the child becomes an individual in conflict with parental authority. Without this conflict, an individuated personality does not develop. In the process, a young adult forms their own relations with people on their own terms, people whom they choose to be with who are not their family. Only in this way does one become an adult.
Keeping in mind that this is merely analogical, I think it nonetheless provides some idea of the process that must be gone through to have a real adult. Of course, this process is not the same in all places at all times. It can take a myriad of concrete forms, it can even be short-circuited in a multitude of ways. It might be the ergon of the process of maturation, but as it takes place through all kinds of conflicts, under specific conditions which interrupt or speed-up or in other ways make its actualization only possible, there is no guarantee. And yet, should that maturation not happen, then we can hardly discuss an adult. We recognize people who not only are childish, but people who die in the bloom of youth, who are mentally impaired, etc.
Communism might be the ergon of the human species in Marx's view, but only understood as the actualization of a potential that only itself materializes out of a long period of development, of stops, starts, dead-ends, etc. And there is nothing saying that that actualization need ever be achieved. I think Marx looks at the matter in much the same way that he argues that only in comprehending our own physiology and development do we find the means to grasp that of the ape, even though the ape precedes us. As such, only from the view of this society, which takes the world as its object, which makes all things into equivalences of value, does even a view of humanity as such, of our being a species, or even a world history become meaningful. Marx is, however much the postivists, empiricists, and others riddled through with atomist bourgeois ideology, an essentialist, an organicist, even a teleological thinker, but not in the way that most people think of teleology, more in the sense that developmental biology is teleological.
As such, i agree with your characterization in the penultimate paragraph, but you extrapolate incorrectly then in the last in talking about 'unavoidable'. What Marx seems to argue is that that individuation from nature, and individuation from community have been necessary parts of the human species maturing into social individuals, not merely animals, not merely social beings with little individual capacity, and not merely individuals with no conscious sociality. This development is not unavoidable. The human species could have been snuffed out along the way, by natural disaster, by itself, and in fact still very well might be, by natural disaster precipitated by itself. Homo Sapiens could have gone the route of Australopithecus. Even those things aside, there is nothing to say that human beings might not have stayed at the level they were. Necessity is meaningless if it cannot be interrupted by accident, just as accident has no meaning if it is not accident in relation to something necessary.
As such, the proletariat is less subjectivity in a positive sense, than in the negative sense, as the negation of all previous social relations of personal and objective domination, out of which the social individual might arise. Marx certainly does not see communism as the realization of capitalism, of rights, of democracy, or any of the rest. The proletariat is not all of the workers organized as workers, as wage-laborers, celebrating being workers. If that were the case, Marx would never have talked about the proletariat as a universal class. When he does, it is openly in a negative sense (suffering no particular wrong, but being wronged in general.)
In any case, I happen to think it is worthless to defend or comprehend Marx while trying to run away from his essentialism, organicism, etc. The Second International, Diamat, Colletti/Timparano/Althusser and their progeny, all tried (Trotskyism and Maoism were always merely derivative of these.) Look at them.
Cheers,
Chris
Dec 9 2007 20:41
#22
Chris:
Quote:
In any case, I happen to think it is worthless to defend or comprehend Marx while trying to run away from his essentialism, organicism, etc. The Second International, Diamat, Colletti/Timparano/Althusser and their progeny, all tried (Trotskyism and Maoism were always merely derivative of these.) Look at them.
First of all, what are you saying Trotskyism and Maoism are derivative of? This is horribly confused.
Secondly, to take one name out of your list of infamy, Colletti most certainly defended Marx's essentialism :
Quote:
In ‘value’ or money the human essence is certainly estranged from man: man’s subjectivity, his physical and intellectual energies, his work-capacity, are removed from him. But—this is the decisive insight of the Manuscripts—the ‘essence’ in question is clearly recognized to be no more than the functional relationships mediating man’s working rapport with nature and with himself. His estrangement, consequently, is the estrangement or separation of social relationships from himself. This argument again reproduces the general form we noted above, considering Marx’s analysis of the modern representative state. The latter creates a separation between ‘civil society’ and the heavenly or abstract society of political equality. When real individuals are fragmented from one another and become estranged then their mediating function must in turn become independent of them: that is, their social relationships, the nexus of reciprocity which binds them together. Thus, there is an evident parallelism between the hypostasis of the state, of God, and of money. ("Introduction." [Marx's] Early Writings, 54).
Colletti considers this analysis of capitalist social relations as "one of the high points of Marxist theory" (54). Do you think Cyril Smith is good on this point? I'd say Colletti is even better.
Have you even read Colletti and Althusser? Althusser has a rather prominent place for dialectical materialism in Marxist theory . . . . Colletti . . . does not. Althusser wanted to excise Marx's theory of fetishism from Capital. Colletti spent many, many pages trying to draw attention to its importance. If you understood any of this you would not group them together as you did.
I am also curious about this:
Quote:
Marx certainly does not see communism as the realization of capitalism, of rights, of democracy, or any of the rest.
I think there is an important sense in which Marx looked forward to the realization of democracy. You may not be satisfied with 1843, but Marx wrote: "The political republic is democracy within the abstract form of the state." (Early Writings, 89) Marx thought that "the political state disappears in a true democracy." (88) (my bold) But let us go to 1871. On the Commune:
Quote:
Those 20 delegates, chosen by the majority of the bataillons of the National Guard, composed the Central Committee, which on the 18th March initiated the greatest revolution of this century and still holds its post in the present glorious struggle of Paris. Never were elections more sifted, never delegates fuller representing the masses from which they had sprung. . . . The general suffrage, till now abused either for the parliamentary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play[x] in the hands of the ruling classes, only employed by the people to sanction (choose the instruments of) parliamentary class rule once in many years, [is] adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the Communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation. (my bold) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm#D1s1
The Leninist critique of democracy and self-management is a relic adopted by the mystics of the communist left!
Dec 10 2007 01:44
#23
Chris, are you denying that dialectical materialism was both "essentialist" and "organicist" (whatever the latter means... I assume you're referring to some variation or other on the "internal relations" theme)?
And to I agree with Dave C that to lump Colletti, Althusser, and Timpanaro in together (even on the issue of Hegel and dialectics), and then to go a step further and lump all of them in with dialectical materialism (!) is to show signs of not having read any of them.
As for the "necessity" and "accident" argument, you cannot defend the notion of "necessity" without some kind of diety or supernatural power (whether it is the Christian god or "Spirit" or whatever). If you don't use said diety/supernatural power to defend your notion of necessity, then what in fact you will have to resort to is some kind of "regularity theory" (i.e. things don't have to happen in such and such a way, but they perhaps do). But then the words "necessity" and "accident" won't actually add anything to your argument -- all you'll be saying is "It is likely that such and such occurs, but it may not occur for such and such reasons", and so on.
Why a communist would try to resurrect a religious argument of this sort is beyond me. There has been a lot of work done in these areas, and the religious theories just don't work.
Mike
Jan 21 2008 15:53
#24
Chris,
I am not going to respond to the main body of your text, as the issues involved would demand an initial familiarisation of the terms you are using and that seems like a lot of effort... maybe next time. Anyway, I was talking to a nurse recently about the psychology of the patient/healthcare prof. relation and she said how it is well known that patients often only get to say what is really on their mind just as they put their hand on the door handle and are about to leave, ‘Oh, there was just one more thing I should have mentioned...’ On the principle that there is significance in parting words, I want to talk about your last paragraph and relate it to the (now very) vague content of this thread.
Quote:
In any case, I happen to think it is worthless to defend or comprehend Marx while trying to run away from his essentialism, organicism, etc. The Second International, Diamat, Colletti/Timparano/Althusser and their progeny, all tried (Trotskyism and Maoism were always merely derivative of these.) Look at them.
Why? I am not sure what you mean by ‘Look at them’. You might be saying, as one who is revolted by dog shit on his shoe, ‘look at that!’ But I am going to interpret it as meaning, ‘it is important to read the works of these people so as to learn important lessons...’ the motivation for my interpretation of what you have written is that it favours what I want to talk about. So, what would it mean if I did ‘Look at them’? What would it mean for me to plough through all that theorising? In general, I am less and less sure what role theories of class struggle are supposed to play within class struggle. And I am even less able to identify the mechanism that is supposed to filter such ideas into other people’s activities. There seem to be two issues here:
1. I do not see any imperative reason to read important works except to the extent that one may reapply those terms which seem appropriate in the description/explanation of one’s own experiences. Most theoretical works would invert that relation and via injunctions they insist that we must fit our lives into their concepts. However, I suppose that you agree with me that the theory which is directed against capitalism is a product of the writer’s experience of conditions, it is a by-product if you like of what is going on at the particular moment it was recorded. But then you seem to imply (I may be wrong) that such by-products are not simply an outcome but might also be recycled or fed back into the struggle against our conditions and that from this feedback a virtuous spiral might be established between consciousness and activity.
If I understand you correctly on the above then we disagree on this, I think theory tends to have an influence only on those who are already theory-ready and even then the relation between that and lived life is characterised by abrupt disjunction. I see no means by which the reading of theoretical texts would alter the course of a current in a particular struggle and still less impact on the general tidal movements of society. It seems to me that the writings you mention mark the dead-end of a particular moment, such texts (all texts) exist where lived experience has been thwarted. As an adjunct to this, It seems to me that an increase in pre-subjective knowledge of conditions in no way alters the relations upon which conditions are built – knowledge of power relations exists in a bubble given off from the relations. In fact, I would think it is more likely that quite the opposite proposition holds true: the more understanding an individual is of his conditions, the more likely he is to become inhibited by that knowledge (I once worked with someone who was always talking about getting revenge on the ‘bastards’ upstairs and to their faces he cringed like Uriah Heep, he had a stroke and that was the end of it, a mate of mine called it ‘angry sickness’). The mass scale of cynicism and despair so prevalent today does not indicate an absence of consciousness but a surplus. It is not knowledge that is lacking.
2. The second issue has something to do with agreement and is related to the above. Are you suggesting that if we read the same books and that if we attempt to consciously participate in a defined tradition based upon that reading then that would move the tradition forward? The implication is that only our lack of agreement is holding the movement back. Again, I would suggest it is not the lack of agreement, or even the different temporalities of agreement, that is holding back our real movement. By definition, critical thought is divergent, and yet for two hundred years pro-revolutionaries have attempted to halt critique at a certain point and then declare the coherence of an organisation based on the agreement of principles. This coherence is ideal, and the principles are no more than thoughts which must give up their wandering ways so as to facilitate the accumulations of an arbitrary tradition. There is no evidence to prove, and plenty against (i.e. it leads to stupidity), that the best expression of communist aspirations is to be found in an overly-coherent arrangement of the revolutionary subject around a body of texts.
What is the point in me reading the same books as you? How depressing it is that we draw our ideas from such a narrow body of work when the entirety of human history is available to us. Can’t I trust you to read the books you think important and then might it not be better if I read different books to you? Might we not cover more ground if we combine, for example, your sunny disposition and my saturnine good looks? In other words, can’t we make a virtue out of the divergence of thought rather than, in bad faith, trying to exaggerate the common ground?
As a further example of the limits of the agreements expressed in the unified political subject I ask you to consider the Battle of Borodino. You are of course aware of Hegel’s comments concerning Napoleon’s attempt to bring his constitution to Spain – the Spanish, Hegel observed, were not theory-ready. Spain marked a historical frontier, Napoleon’s information arrived too soon in the organic development for its reception. However, the Battle of Borodino stands as the first historical indicator of an actual geographical limit to any and all historical subject’s attempts at reorganising human society according to the convergent principles of a unifying political programme.
In geographical terms, it seems to me that the coherent political subject begins to overextend its supply lines a hundred miles west of Moscow (Paris to Moscow is the absolute physical limit of a sustained single idea) and in temporal terms the longest that the subjective revolutionary party could sustain itself would be the length of time that exists between the battle of Jena and 1812, or vice versa between the dates of the 18th Brumaire and the Battle of Jena. And we must remember that these frontiers were established in near optimum conditions, reaching their zenith in 1848. Since the first half of the Nineteenth Century revolutionary attempts based on convergent political programmes have existed in ever diminishing locations and for ever shorter moments in time.
I do not think it is possible any more to map ‘world-historical activity’ backwards onto a set of principles which a very small number of pre-existing individuals who are bound to a Jacobinist tradition and who happen to think their’s are principles so important that they might be the key to history. The problem I am attempting to locate exists in what we might call marxism as bonapartism, or more generally: there is an absolute disjunction between (i) our inability to accurately predict future events, and act strategically, according to our wish to alter conditions in the world and (ii) the infallibility with which we use hindsight. It is very simple to fit battles into history when we look backwards, how could Bonaparte not have been defeated (the marxist demon on our left shoulder tells us, ‘his position, after all, was riddled with the contradictions that are inherent to the position of the bourgeoisie’)? Strategy is an easy game after the fact but even after two centuries we have neither decisive strategic vision nor logistical capacity... in fact, both of these are in perpetual decline. Even given optimum conditions the subject may impose, dictate and decree, there still exists a moment which Hegel calls ‘reaction’ in which the world springs back into shape –
‘...how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;’
But it is not simply a matter of objective reaction, there is also an overextension of what was only ever an agreement between a thought and the subsequent actions related to it. There were too many starlings not enough crops, too many insects not enough starlings. Most importantly, it is not possible to create a new society based on a set of privileged thoughts.
We see this ‘absolute disjunction’ in operation in contemporary attempts to fit, for example, 9/11 into a model of historical movement that indicates ‘decadence’. From within the perspective this situating of events in context all makes sense and confirms the existence of a historical movement of the type hypothesised (a perfect tautology), it proposes that events of this type will increase in frequency and will become more and more closely tied to underlying decline in the economic relation. However, from outside the analysis there appears no objective proof at all, the analysis itself seems to swing back and forth between deductive and inductive reasoning, first the rule proves the meaning of the event, then the existence of the event proves the importance of the rule. It is good luck for those who adhere to such principles that they do not also have to prove them in government. And for those who do not accept convergent political theories such as ‘decadence’, it is still not clear how to distinguish which battles are constitutive/determining of other events and which remain merely as indicators of underlying forces (most of us have got no further forward in our relation to the world than breughel’s ploughman).
I apologise again as I have certainly not responded to the main body of your text and also for having deliberately read too much into your hand-on-the-door-handle sentence, all for my own rhetorical purposes, I look forward to your response if you think this worthy of it.
happy new year,
A.
I haven't read more than a page or two of that thread, those discussions are generally pretty uninteresting, however:
I think everyone is opposed to the institution of prisons continuing, however there's an openness to the idea that isolation of those who constitute a strong violent threat may well be necessary.
Similarly the role of the police includes things like forensics - which have applications to industrial accidents and all kinds of situations. The police also do actually give directions to people and other rubbish like that. Again, this isn't an acceptance of the institution of the police, but the recognition that in order to maintain order they've taken on some roles that previously had nothing to do with law enforcement.
I think the idea of having "laws" post-capitalism is bollocks, redtwister dealt with this well, but written down rules are quite likely I'd have thought.
Generally this kind of "would we have this, or would we have that" bores the crap out of me though.