Re: AUT: RE: Dave's Comments on Marx

["Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Dave,

Sorry for the late reply. Been a bit ill.

I think that I understand the point that you are trying to make. I'm not sure it would be adequate to say that there is anything necessary about Lenin's approach to Marx at all. I agree to a large extent your conception of Marx's vision, but I see him as being far less determined as you portray him. The "science" of revolution as you put it never compromises the role of the worker in its own liberation. You could perhaps argue that certain things are implicit in his argument, but even there I can't see in anyway why this compromise would be necessary. Luxembourg's critique of Lenin is very telling in this regard, because here are two very powerful minds that see the "necessary"... the "what is to be done?" in very different lights. In two manners that are at various levels incompatible with the other. They are both trying to fill in blanks that Marx never fills in himself.

I see Marx as being far too careful for Leninism. When you read Lenin's writings and interpretations of Marx I have almost always had the impression that these were such drastically different men. That Lenin would come to conclusions that I could never see Marx as advocating. None of this is to denegrate Lenin's genius. He was just no Marx. Marx is too much a scientist and a philosopher... he wants to have look at things, to be able to grasp certain things before he proceeds to make these things his objects.

 Thus I disagree with your conception of a Marxist paradigm. Especially if it is taken from this basis. When you say "Marx's declarations to the contrary" I think we are taking a step that overdetermines retrospectively something that does not exist. Marx's indeterminacy... his confusion over certain matters. Here is a man haunted to a very great extent by the present and his role in the forging of the present. When I questioned you the last time it was only in this regard of keeping open this critical realism of Marx's, not our own dogmatisations of him. His faith in ceasless analysis, science, critique... not letting any idealist cover over the facts of humanity's situation for the sake of some feel good present.

As far as a contradiction inherent in his historical materialism, I also don't see that. While I don't advocate in anyway holding on to his now ancient ontology and perspective of humanism, I don't believe that the problem so much lies in a disparity between our "dehumanisation" and revolutionary action, as between a common dehumanisation and a vanguardist revolutionary action. It is still an "economic" problem, but one of getting beyond the reintroduction of this State/Capital coupling that made the Bolshevik revolution such a harsh and difficult project to which they succumbed in the end.

I believe we have discussed it here before, but Marx has these very infant ideas... you mentioned species being (I think) and other places where he speaks of the "social brain". He is clearly worried how the development of capital will provide the opportunities for the proletariat to overcome its dehumanization. The contradiction that you speak of, the way that I see it at least) is not so much a contradiction as a formal limit to the realisation of the common... or communism. Occassionally people give me the impression that that this understanding that Russia's working class underdevelopment was to paralyze from its very first moments the future of the revolution is something of a "cop-out"... that some just say that but of course it would have been doomed regardless because its just not possible etc etc. I don't see it that way. Marx's admonitions to the Russians of their lack of readiness... his repeated statements to the effect that social cooperation would be an essential aspect of communist revolution goes against any perspective in my view that he did not see this problem between dehumization and the potential for workers revolution.

That said. This is not to say that Marx leaves underdeveloped many notions that could be interpreted in a myriad of ways. I just want to clear away some of this rubble that says Marx WAS this determinism, this history, when he was and still is speaking so many different perspectives of our possibilities as "humans".

Cheers,

Lowe


>I believe that there is something at the heart of Marx's view of the world that has led to Leninism and to the disastrous results of revolutions made in Marx's name.







>While Marx clearly saw the industrial proletariat as the agent of revolution

>against capitalism, his view of workers as dehumanized is inconsistent with

>the idea of workers fighting for revolution as conscious historical subjects.

>Marx's model of history endows the proletariat with an historic mission at the

>same time as it deprives the proletariat of the human qualities which would


>enable it to fulfill this mission.



>Marx accepted the capitalist view of human motivation: "individuals seek only


>their particular interest," he declared (Marx's emphasis). For Marx,

>self-interest is fundamental to historical materialism as a science. Only

>self-interest is scientifically valid as a motivation; the rest is "ideology." Marx's

>belief that he had discovered a "science" of revolution rests on his notion that

>the relations of production and the economic forces which they constitute

>operate independently of men's will. He does not mean by this that individual

>thought or initiative is not possible or not a real factor in society, but that

>individual acts often have results contrary to their intent, and that the

>economic forces constituted by the sum of individual actions act according to their


>own laws.




>Marx finds all the laws of history and economics to be finally derived from

>the contradiction between the self-interest of the individual and the "general

>good" of the community. As the individual acts to pursue his particular

>interest, he sets in motion forces which drive history forward. As Engels expressed

>it, "...it is precisely the wicked passions of manâ??greed and the lust for power

>â??which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of

>historical development." Marx thought his great accomplishment was to find the

>eventual destruction of capitalism and the creation of a fully human society in the

>operation of economic forces arising from individual acts based on


>self-interest.




>Workers as individuals in Marx's paradigm do not have any goals beyond their

>individual interests. They do not act in conscious pursuit of revolutionary

>goals, and they do not act to fulfill a vision of human life and values

>fundamentally opposed to the capitalist vision. They have goals larger than their

>particular interests only as they represent man's "species essence" seeking to

>fulfill itselfâ??that is, only as abstractions.

>

>Though it is destined to act as the agent of revolution, in Marx's paradigm

>the working class puts an end to human exploitation not as a conscious goal on

>behalf of all humanity, but as the inevitable by-product of ending its own

>exploitation. It accomplishes the general interest of humanity by acting in its

>own self-interest.

>

>The problem with which Lenin was confronted by Marx's ideas was essentially

>this: In a world driven by economic forces governed by their own laws, how do

>human beings consciously intervene in history to make a revolution? If the

>proletariat has been dehumanized, how can it act as a conscious revolutionary

>force?

>

>Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party was his attempt to create a

>revolutionary force which would act on the basis of its own consciousness to

>fulfill a revolutionary program on behalf of all of society. He was attempting

>thereby to solve at one stroke the fundamental problems of revolutionary practice

>which the Marxist paradigm of history presented. If workers have no goals as

>individuals which rise beyond the capitalist motivation of self-interest, then

>it is not possible for workers as a class to be the source of revolutionary

>consciousness. If workers are dehumanized by capitalism, they cannot be the

>source of the restoration to humanity of its full human nature.

>

>Marx's declarations to the contrary, the logic of the Marxist paradigm is

>that workers can only be the beasts of burden of the revolution, not its

>conscious creators. In his conception of the revolutionary party, Lenin was supplying

>to Marx's science of revolution the historical subject, the conscious creator

>of a fully human society, which the making of revolutionary history demanded.

>Historical materialism was based on the contradiction between actions to serve

>individual interests and effects which serve the general good. In the

>revolutionary party, Lenin was positing a body which would act consciously and

>scientifically on behalf of the proletariat and the general good.

>

>The power of Marxism to inspire and to mislead derive from the same source:

>its credibility as a science of history and revolution. By analyzing capitalism

>and demonstrating its impermanence, Marx convinced people that they could

>understand and transform human society in its totality. By building his science

>on a view of people which saw them as dehumanized by capitalism and which

>denied them motives other than narrow self-interest, Marx created a system of

>thought in which working class revolution could only be brought about by a party

>with larger motivesâ??revolutionary goals for all of societyâ??which substituted

>itself for the working class and acted on its behalf. Marx thus created a

>science of revolution against capitalism which preserved capitalism's most

>fundamental characteristicâ??its view of working peopleâ??and which guaranteed that any

>revolution made in his name would repeat the fundamental characteristics of

>capitalist society.

>

>Lenin's theoretical achievement was to elevate human consciousness to a plane

>where it was capable of formulating goals other than those which, according

>to the Marxist paradigm, economic conditions impose, and where it could act

>consciously to create the conditions for the revolutionary transformation of

>social reality. Leninist theory enabled revolutionaries for the first time to

>break free from the tendency of the Marxist paradigm to trap human actors within

>the possibilities and movements of larger economic forces.

>

>It is no mistake that only Marxist-Leninist parties have succeeded in making

>revolutions based on Marxism. The world-wide influence of the Bolsheviks in

>the wake of the Russian Revolution was not simply a function of the prestige

>they enjoyed as the leaders of the first successful workers' revolution. It was a

>function of the fact that only they had discovered how to practice Marxism as

>a science of revolution.

>

>For all its disastrous effects, Leninism represents an historic advance in

>the history of revolutionary thought, and in the ability of human beings to

>become the conscious makers of history.

>

>But however great Lenin's achievement, it consolidated the dehumanized view

>of workers fundamental to the Marxist paradigm, and gave further impetus to the

>tradition, already well-established in Marxism, of seeing middle-class

>intellectuals as the source and guiding force of revolutionary consciousness. It has

>led to revolutions which are technocratic and dehumanized, and has resulted

>finally in the widespread discrediting of the idea of revolution itselfâ??until

>the Marxist paradigm of history is finally overthrown.

>

>Dave Stratman

>Editor, New Democracy

>newdemocracyworld.org

>5 Burr Street

>Boston, MA 02130

>617-524-4073

>

>

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