[Marxism] Steve Masterson's challenge

["michael a. lebowitz" <mlebowit@xxxxxx>]

Steve Masterson cited Marx's point about ridding 
ourselves of 'the muck of ages' and issued a challenge:


> My challenge then, is for any comrade to find just a couple of quotes
>   of a similar character, of the essence of Marx, from either Trotsky, or
>   indeed, Lenin, or any other `Marxist' for that matter. I do this with the
> greatest respect for the struggles, abilities and sacrifices of all
> these comrades and millions of others ? but what I am stressing is
> that the real essential Marx has not been understood at all.

The following excerpt from 'Beyond CAPITAL: 
Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class' 
addresses the questions he says have not been understood:
-----
            Indeed, here is the Law for which 
all else is commentary. Just as every activity of 
the worker alters her as the subject who enters 
into all activities, similarly the process in 
which workers struggle for themselves is also a 
process of production, a process of purposeful 
activity in which they produce themselves in an 
altered way. They develop new needs in struggle, 
an altered hierarchy of needs. Even though the 
needs that they attempt to satisfy do not in 
themselves go beyond capital, the very process of 
struggle is one of producing new people, of 
transforming them into people with a new 
conception of themselves--- as subjects capable of altering their world.
            Nothing is more central to Marx?s 
entire conception than this coincidence of the 
changing of circumstances and self-change (i.e., 
the concept of ?revolutionary practice?)! The 
failure to understand this concept leaves 
theorists with an irresolvable dilemma: how can 
the old subjects, the products of capital, go 
beyond capital? If their struggles are for 
material needs (and nothing more), how can they 
ever rationally opt for the uncertain future of a 
society without capital as the mediator?1 Marx 
understood, though, that people are not static, 
that the struggle for material needs can produce 
new people with new, ?radical? needs.2
            Woven into his work from the time of 
his earliest writings is the red thread of the 
self-development of the working class through its 
struggles. This concept explicitly surfaced in 
his Theses on Feuerbach, where he introduced the 
concept of revolutionary practice; and, he evoked 
it over a quarter of a century later, following 
the Paris Commune, when he observed that workers 
know that ?they will have to pass through long 
struggles, through a series of historic 
processes, transforming circumstances and men? (Marx, 1871b: 76).
            As Marx recognised, this central 
idea of the development of human beings through 
their activities was the rational core of Hegel?s 
concept of the self-development of the 
Idea/Spirit, which develops and increasingly 
realises its nature through the creative 
destruction of all its successive forms of 
existence. Hegel?s ?outstanding achievement?, 
Marx wrote in 1844, is that he ?conceives the 
self-creation of man as a process,? that he 
grasps human beings ?as the outcome of man?s own 
labour?­although, to be sure, ?the only labour 
Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental 
labour? (Marx, 1844c: 332-3). In the fluid 
idealism of Hegel, Marx uncovered the centrality 
of human activity and practice for human 
development that was missing from the materialism 
of his predecessors (Marx, 1845: 3).3
---
        Steve can also find the questions he 
raises addressed directly in my ?Beyond the Muck 
of Ages,? in Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas 
Psychopedis (eds.), Human Dignity: Social 
Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism  (UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005) .

        cheers,
        michael

Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6

Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
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Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-4111
fax: (58-212) 573-7724
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