Re: [Marxism] absolute truth and marxisms: a few points

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louise Walker" <louiserw2003@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition"
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 4:13 PM
Subject: [Marxism] absolute truth and marxisms: a few points
*****************


Thanks to comrades for much light and no unnecessary heat on Louise's
topic of absolute truth. I think it's a very important one -- we
shouldn't misunderestimate philosophy. I'd like to risk adding a few
words from my perspective. As Louis says, that has been influenced by
Roy Bhaskar (among many others), but I am very far from claiming the
slightest expertise on Bhaskar's work -- much less would I make any
claim to represent it.

To approach the subject in terms of the challenge of relativism to
rationality (universality), I suggest making a distinction between
*relativity* as an unavoidable fact and *relativism* as an
irrationalist theory. All views are relative in multiple ways, just as
colours and sounds are relative to our senses -- they are different,
for instance, from the colours and sounds a dog sees and hears. That
does not make them not true, nor even partial in the sense of biased.
They are partial in another obvious -- but perhaps unimportant --
sense; they are not the whole truth, which may be what is meant by
someone's using the word absolute.

Relativism as put forward by Protagoras and the Sophists is not about
the fact -- which can be granted -- of relativity of statements
claiming to be true, but about their universal validity. It is the
theory that what is true for you (what you assert to be true) is not
necessarily true for me. That view is self-referential and
self-defeating -- I can reply that that theory itself is true for
Protagoras but not for me. But in fact in both cases there is a
negation of the rational concept of truth; the latter implies that if
it is true (for Protagoras) it is necessarily true for me also -- and
that, whether I accept it or not.

The importance of this is in the area of value-relativism; for that
theory there not only are in fact no experts in values; there could
not be any such, in principle. To continue with the distinction I made
above, recognition of value-*relativity* is merely the recognition
that what gives you pleasure, what you like or want, is not
necessarily what gives me pleasure. Value-*relativism*, on the other
hand, reduces goods, values and ideals to likes and dislikes, to
arbitrary choices, to the individual's will. It follows that what you
assert to be good, valuable or ideal (or their opposites) is only what
is so for you; it is not necessarily good, valuable or ideal (or their
opposites) for me. This is not merely a case of relative (rational)
needs -- as quinine is good for you if you have malaria, but not for
me if I have not. It is a question which arises in other than moral
situations, but they do highlight it; rape, pillage and murder cannot
be bad for you but not for me.

But such relativism is the basis of enlightened bourgeois modernity,
which is a social contract between mutually hostile, paranoid
possessive individualists, who have now morphed into corporations (as
legal persons). It is equally the basis of post-modernism, an
anti-universalist position the bourgeoisie falls back on when
enlightened modernity's alleged "universalism" does not have the
desired result of repressing the resistance of the dominated and
exploited.

Postmodernism follows Nietzsche's irrationalist transvaluation of all
values, his account of the genealogy of morals.  For him, the Jews
under Roman domination saw themselves as good and the Romans as evil,
whereas the Romans saw themselves as good and the Jews as no-good --
i.e. bad. To my mind Nietzsche is simply wrong to impugn the values
(and the motive -- alleged resentment) of *his construction of* the
Jews, and to favour the Romans (as life enhancing!). What is wrong
with Nietzsche's picture is that in the real world the Jews simply
evinced a normal human concept of natural justice, like that of
Socrates; whereas if Nietzsche's "Romans" had one at all, it was the
natural justice of the food chain or the pecking order, in which might
is right -- like that of the Sophists.

What is opposed to both the modernist and the post-modernist
relativisms is the concept of reason.  Specifically it is the concept
of Aristotelian universal "right (just) reason", which governs
passions in the light of the common good, which guides and judges
critically; not of instrumental reason, which, in its modernist or
post-modernist guise, serves, ministers and panders to passions such
as greed .

Sometimes Marx seems to be being presented as a relativist, albeit a
class relativist. In my opinion, whereas he recognises the fact of
class-*relativity* in areas such as actually existing morality, for
him the peculiarity of the proletariat, of the universal class, is
that, having no other class to exploit, it can abolish class and
establish humanity, whereupon all ethics and morality will be relative
only to humanity -- i.e. absolute. His Aristotelian critique of
capitalism (e.g. in terms of pleonexia -- insatiability) shows that he
sees the proletariat as jettisoning the Sophistic and bourgeois
possessive individualist view of human nature and all views of justice
etc. connected with it.

Those with an empiricist or sociological background find difficulty in
understanding Marx's concept of justice. Since 1971 Marx has been said
by various interpreters to have a concept of capitalism as just,
unjust, neither and both. The difficulty stems from an un-Marxist
bourgeois reading of his analysis of the capitalist mode of production
as being split into two levels; (just) exchange of the equivalents
labour power and wages at the market level, and (unjust) use of the
labour power as labour, including surplus labour, at the level of
immediate production. Class relativity and perspective make an
appearance at this point. The bourgeoisie and its economics can see
only the exchange of wages and n hours labour -- from their
prospective, a paradigm case of the political rights of man, an Eden
of liberty, equality and the rights of property; anything else would
involve destabilising cognitive dissonance. Marx advances a
proletarian critique of that, seeing from that perspective only one
"economic" capital/labour relation; that of coerced exploitation and
theft of surplus labour through the coerced sale of labour power for
wages.

However, the theoretical analyses from the two perspectives, that of
capital and that of labour, relative though they are, are not of equal
theoretical validity, nor are their consequent value-implications
(e.g. justice, but also pleonexia, alienation etc.) of equal validity.
To claim that they are would be analogous to the manner in which the
bourgeoisie reduces cases of oppression to bargaining moves in
identity politics, and manipulates insurgents into accepting the ploys
of academic conflict resolution. As in the case of the Romans and the
Jews, one side is right and the other is wrong. Absolutely!

Comradely,

James Daly





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