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

["Sol Dollinger" <soldoll@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

C.L.R. James was not a great Trotskyist.  He retained his own political
group within the Schachtman party and also within the Socialist Workers
Party.  His state capitalist position was an obstacle to complete
integration in either organization.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Jones <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, April 30, 2000 1:34 PM
Subject: RE: Doug Henwood/Mark Jones exchange (from LBO-Talk)


>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?
>
>