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

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor  dijo:
>
> > Well, well, Nestor, you continue to surprise me with your elegant
> > thought-processes. But what does this exactly mean:
> >
> > > 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.
> >

Well, no sabres intended, just clarification sought. And thank you.

I agree entirely and I'm gonna quote myself to prove it (sorry for
repetition):

CLR James, in 'Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin' reflects on the
sense of mounting excitement he felt when he first seriously addressed
the Hegelian insight of the later Lenin, and hoiw this forced its
way through the discourses of Lenin's praxis so that the recognition of it's
presence was both unexpected and almost epiphanic for James. In the 'Notes'
(p146), James describes the puzzlement he (James) felt at reading another
Lenin speech about trade unions:

'I have read those last articles of Lenin's till I understand,
not only what he wrote, but what was implicit. In the beginning of one
of them, 'How to Reorganise the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection', he
[Lenin]  says: "This crisis is a crisis like the Civil War, in other
words, it is the gravest crisis of the Russian Revolution." He says then:
"How did we meet the crisis of the Civil War? We dug deep down into the
deepest layers of the population, to find the most devoted, self-
sacrificing forces." Then the article seems to fall away from this
level. He goes into details about choosing good administrators and
training them carefully. But think of Lenin as he had always been.
Also let us recall here this very Civil War. In the Crisis of the Civil
War, in his speech to, I think, the Fourth Conference of Trade Unions,
he makes what is the most revolutionary speech I have ever read anywhere.
It is possible to read that speech for years and not understand it.
On that I can give unimpeachable evidence. At any rate I understand it
now. It says approximately this: "The revolution is in desperate crisis.
The only thing that can save it is you, the workers, organised in your
factory committees (the basic organisation of the workers). Take over.
RUN PRODUCTION.  Run everything. If you take over everything we can
win. If you do not take over..."

'Those who read this _may_ understand it (CLR James continues). That I
have leave to doubt. It is very VERY, VERY hard to realise what this
means. So ingrained is the bourgeois habit of thinking in terms of
organisation, leaders, policies, instructions, discipline: discipline,
which is very good medicine for petit-bourgeois radicals but is not
needed by the proletariat. But you do not understand Lenin in 1923 [sic:
the speech was made in 1920 or 21, I think: MAJ] unless you understand
this uncompromising appeal to the masses _in their factory committees_
to take over.'

James ends this thought with the notion that before his death Lenin was
proposing to embark on a kind of Cultural Revolution: 'a tremendous
appeal in the old leninist manner to the great masses of the workers --
the deepest layers'.

In these pages, incidentally, the great Trotskyite CLR James criticises
Trotsky's stance on trade unions and workers control as ruthlessly as
Lenin himself had, when he harshly castigated, time after time, the
emptiness of Trotsky's posturing about 'democracy' while always couching
his demands in a kind of abstract, bureaucratic formalism of shuffling
functionaries around. And James adds: 'In these last articles [of
Lenin's] the emphasis that Trotsky has given to the attacks on Stalin
and the petty measures about the administrators is totally false'.
Rereading some of this material, I too was struck with the degree to
which Lenin's bete noire, in his very last writings, was Trotsky, not
Stalin, although I don't offer this thought as some kind of reflexive
protectiveness about Stalin, far from it. In terms of their
administrative methods, there wasn't much to choose between Stalin and
Trotsky.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, in his _Intellectual and Manual Labour_ discusses
Taylorism at length, and without reading this seminal work, no
discussion of Taylorism and industrial democracy is worth jack shit.

Braverman knew Sohn-Rethel, and acknowledged so far as I know the
difference between them: Braverman was an industrial sociologist of
Marxist hue, Sohn-Rethel a very great philosopher, not a kantian as some
who presumably have not read him say, but the greatest Marxian
critical-liquidator of kantianism. Sohn-Rethel's principal contention
was that in the monopoly capitalist labour-process the division of
mental and manual labour is inscribed in the Newtonian (classical)
physics which underpins the very machinery of production.

Indded, fixed plant and machinery, almost until the present day, has
represented the accumulation of capital (C) in relation to (V) in the
form of the modification of natural materials according to the simple
dynamics and geometries of the Newtonian synthesis. According to Sohn-
Rethel, the essence of Newtonian mechanics over its Cartesian etc.
competitors was not just that it worked, but that it was based on
an immanentism of space and time and the nature of objects suspended
within space and time, which Kant tried to capture theoretically.

Newton took the guesswork out of such things as describing the parabolas
of cannon balls or the shapes of engineering structures or the dynamics
of steam engines. Capitalism enshrined the objectification of labour in
machinery by first of all installing it inside the heads of the scientists,
draughtsmen, engineers, who designed the machinery according to the
Newtonian calculus.

Artisans were downgraded not merely by the deskilling piece-production
beloved of Adam Smith but by the fact that the world they fashioned in
iron, steel and concrete, came to them preconceptualised, and the
master-code of capitalist control of all social reproduction processes
was buried within the blueprints they worked from. As for the manual
labourer doing the actually shearing, grinding, riveting, etc, while
as Marx rightly said, there was gold also in his head, nonetheless his
objectification within the great Newtonian machinery was for all
practical purposes, absolute.

>From that moment, when the production of absolute surplus value
in the manufactory had become the production of relative s-v in the
true industrial factory, and capitalism at last stood on its
'adequate' (Newtonian) basis, labour in production lost all
objective possibility  of control over its own process, i.e.,
the capitalist labour process,  and with that, the working class
lost all possibility of its own immediate emancipation and self-
transcending. In Lenin's terms, the Party that appealed
to the 'Dark Forces', the people of the abyss, to save the revolution,
and promptly incarcerated them within its facsimile of industrial
capitalism -- that Party became an uneasy battleground,
a two-way transmission system, within which this truth was set after
1920 to work itself out in history. But, as they say, there was
No Alternative.

This was the mode of production and its agents, which the Bolsheviks
inherited. Unsurprisingly, it was the most advanced sectors of the
Russian proletariat who proved most reactionary in practice, as we have
seen, and they did their best to advance their own sectional
interests and to thwart the revolution even at its direst moments of
truth. Bolshevik distrust of intellectuals (engineers, scientists) was
born then as well as earlier; Stalin solved the problem of the _trahison
des clercs_ in his well-known way. Lenin time after time did it by
appealing over their heads, over the heads of his whole party in fact,
to the 'deepest layers', the darkest forces whose emergence into the
light of history after July 1917 delighted him as much as it dismayed
Menshevik members of the aristocracy of labour and terrified the middle
classes and true intelligentsia.

I think that this breach with what I should call the post-kantian
rationalism of the Enlightenment, which forms the basis of
all political discourse on the 'organised' Left thru the workers'
movement from 1848 to Lenin's time, is also the essence of Maoism
and the specific content of the GCPR. This is why I am uterly convinced
(as Sohn-Rethel was) of the profound historical and materialist
significance of Maoism, and since as Goldner says it is not a question
of 'right or wrong', for Marxists, but of disineterring the material
basis of consciousnes, discourse and action (not that you'd think so
from this hate-infested, judgmental and paranoid M-Int list, I'd have
to believe almost axiomatically, and I DO believe as a matter of
materialist conviction, that if Maoism was capable of this kind
of post-enlightenment breakthru, it was because history istelf
allowed it and ordained it, and that's important.



Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList

PS what's a facon anyway?