Re: Doug Henwood/Mark Jones exchange (from LBO-Talk)

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Doug Henwood/Mark Jones exchange (from LBO-Ta,
el 29 Apr 00, a las 23:15, Henry C.K. Liu dijo:

[...]

> Revolutions are as inevitable as business cycles.  Those who buy into the "end
> of history" are in the same fantasy boat with those who hope for the end of 
> the
> business cycle.  It is a fundamental truth that GREED, the driving force 
> behind
> capitalism, is self destructive. It is the nature of greed to escalate risk
> toward suicidal ends. The very defintion of risk is built on danger.


This statement by Henry Liu has been criticized as psychologist:
"What do we Marxists have to do with things such as greed,
selflessness, weariness, joy, fear, boldness, and all these
"individualist" deformations of thought?"

I would say that if we have nothing to do with any of those things
above, and of course with billion basic human feelings and instincts
more, then we are not true to our legacy. One of the great tragedies
of Marxism during the now almost dead 20th. Century was, precisely,
the separation between subjectivity and objectivity in a large
section of Marxist practice and thought. In so doing, Marxists aped,
mostly unknowingly, the "antinomies of bourgeois mind", as Lukacs
called them, and broke up society into two layers, the one of the
educators and the one of the educated (in a complex process that most
probably began with the birth of Soviet as well as Social Democrat
bureaucracies during the early years of the century).

The whole long debate on the autonomy of economic forces, a debate
where the Soviet bureaucracy put to work some of the best minds in
economic policy of their time (Varga, Lange, and others), would have
been spared with just presenting the points of view of Social
Democrat economists, such as the Swedish school of welfare state
economics.

The intrinsic progressiveness of the Soviet or Soviet-influenced
scholars lay in that they planned for societies where the bourgeoisie
had been effectively uprooted (or, at least, strongly coerced into
abiding to the law of the majority --this is a caveat that seeks to
brush away any debate on "state capitalism":  what I am saying here
has little to do with that debate). But their common point of
departure was the reactionary assumption that economic life
constitutes a separate parcel of human existence.

In this, Marxist mind and action has been infested by fetishism of
commodities to an extent that has helped rout our best efforts. Why
should Soviet citizens not display interest in the Western ways of
production (I am talking the language they must have probably thought
in, and this is intentional), since the basic idea the "economic
planning - economic freedom" debate was the same and one, namely that
economy belongs to a different, OBJECTIVE, realm of things? If this
is so, then economic goals can be set with no interest to more basic
matters, such as instincts, desires and hatreds by concrete human
beings.

The qualitative is thus set apart from the essential core of our
theory, and with it flies away the dialectical nucleus of Marxism.
When Marx defines (somewhere in _Capital_, please help!) the
capitalist as the "intelligent miser", he is resorting to what Henry
Liu has called our attention to. Yes, capitalism is based on greed,
in fact it is based on quantitativisation of human life, and this
quantitativisation (value against worth, exchange value against use
value, bourgeoisie against proletariat, and so on) can only have
production move forwards through greed.

When Marx tells the capitalist that it is "another thing that beats
in your heart, not your own feelings", he is by no means pointing out
to a supposedly essential objectivity of social relations (on this,
Althusser and his followers were equally wrong!), but to a collective
subject, the human community, which through a particular form of
social organization had organized the whole productive capacity
around a single, unilateral, abstract law, the law of increase (this
is the only law an abstract, quantitative determination can follow).
And this law was enforced on the whole of society by turning greed
the only individual basis for existence.

It is not a matter of ethics. It is a matter of concreteness. Let us
put it in some kind of "metahistoric" verbiage: Capitalism has
unleashed greed and the worst traits of human existence in order to
fulfill the task of overcoming the crassness and pettiness of pre-
capitalist modes of production.  Once this task is finished (and it
has been finished), there is no reason to keep our society on these
rails any more. So that, yes, our struggle is also -and basically- a
struggle against greed as a foundation of society, not in the sense
the Medievalist Romantics fought it, but in the sense that greed has
given us all it could. It is time to move on to greener pastures.

And the (probably overly abstract) way Henry puts it, the affirmative
statement that "greed is self destructive" (in fact, there is no
human feeling and action that is not self destructive!) should be
read this way: a social system based upon a negative human drive
cannot last forever. Why does such an elementary idea generate
reactions is a mystery to me.

Or it is not.





Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx