Re: re-evolution

[Justin Schwartz <jschwart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luftmensch argues thar Marx did not give up his early vision of humanism
on which Communism is the solution to the riddle of history and the telos
or aim towards which it is tending. He cites as support Marx's later talk,
e.g., in the reamrks on the progressive nature of British Imperialism in
India. This is not a good argument. The later remark just shows that Marx
believed in historical progress through a series of stages. It does not
show that he retained the earlier, essentially Hegelian, picture of a goal
in which all conflicts are resolved. Evidence that he did not: note that
in the 1859 Preface Marx insists only that communism will resolve
"antagonistic" conflicts, explicitly excluding from the scope of these
individual conflicts and including only those arising from the social life
of individuals.

Marx does seem to have rather inconsistently believed that Communism was
inevitable. This is inconsistent with his other views because on his own
account Communist revolution requires class consciousness, and nothing in
his own story guarntees that the right sort of class consciousness will
coincide with the circumstances in which it can effectual a revolution, or
indeed that it wil arise at all. But even setting that aside, the picture
of why Communism is inevitable is quite diferent in the later writings.
It's driven, he thinks after 1845, by the conflict between the relations
and forces of production, not by the unfolding of the human essence, as in
the Paris Manuscripts.

I agree that the notion of alienation he deploys in the earlier writings
plays an important role in his later thinking. (See, e.g., my "What's
Wrong With Exploitation?" Nous, Summer 1995.) But this role is normative
rather than explanatory: alienation from human anture is an effect of
exploitation and an objection to capitalism; self realization is a reason
to have socialism/communism. In the earlier writings, disalienation is
self-executing and lacks what he later calls a material basis.

Whether this makes Marx a "humanist" in any interesting way depends on
what one means by humanism. It's not a term he uses himself.

Changing the subject:
>
> More or less an illustration of the above - similar variables under similar
> circumstances giving rise to similar consequences.
>
Even in a deterministic theory, you only get the same results if all the
laws and the initial conditions are the same. If there is even a slight
difference in the initial conditions, it can amplify and produce
drastically different results. This is the point of the butterfly effect
discussed in chaos theory.

In a social context, moreover, we have no particular reason to think that
any social generalizations are deterministic rather than irreducibly
probabalistic. If the latter, even with the same laws and initial
conditions we can get wildly different outcomes.

So I agree with Luftmensch (how about that!) that:
>
> In other words, similar variables under similar circumstances need not give
> rise to similar consequences.

--Justin




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