Re: [Marxism] Challenge to Lenin & Trotsky experts

["james daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Masterson" 
<steve4masterson@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: "marxism list" 
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 2:06 PM 
Subject: [Marxism] Challenge to Lenin & Trotsky experts

I agree with Steve Masterson's appreciation of the importance of his 
quotation from Marx, which is a port of entry to the heart of Marx's 
thought. It is the key to the understanding of his third thesis on 
Feuerbach.  "The [enlightenment -- J.D.] materialist doctrine that men are 
products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men 
are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it 
is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs 
educating.  Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society 
into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in [the enlightened --  
J.D.] Robert Owen, for example). The coincidence of the changing of 
circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally 
understood only as *revolutionising practice*".
The reformist enlightenment preached the possessive individualism of 
"rational" (i.e. profitable -- cf.  "rationalisation") self-interest to the 
workers.  Mill and Owen argued against the naked bourgeois class interest 
interpretation of this ideology, and bent it towards reformist social 
democracy.
Marx,on the contrary, saw in the proletariat a potential for a revolutionary 
change in human relationships, but only if it abandoned "the muck of ages", 
whether the enviousness of crude communism, or the huckstering (see the 
first thesis on Feuerbach) over wages ("Critique of the Gotha Programme"), 
and aimed at the abolition of the wages system ("Wages, Price and Profit").
How to get from the amorality of huckstering to the transcendent generosity 
of communism is the problem.  Mechanical Marxism sees technological and 
economic determinism as solving the problem, by an increase in productivity 
which solves the problem of scarcity.  Concern with morality is seen as 
un-Marxist: Marxism is seen as immoralist, to use Allen Wood's phrase.
Utilitarian progress is seen in terms of the same kind of "rational" 
interests as those of the bourgeoisie, but, this time round, as they are 
sought by the working-class. This particular omelette is seen as justifying 
breaking any eggs, including summary execution of those who do not agree 
with the mechanistic idea of science. Trotsky in "Their Morals and Ours" at 
least argued that the goal did not justify such oppression of the working 
class by its leadership, precisely because that would not bring about the 
desired result.
This thread thus ties up with the thread about Marxism and science. 
Empiricism, positivism and mechanism go together with bourgeois politics and 
economics, as in Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (Plato, Hegel 
and Marx), from which George Soros borrowed the name of his well-endowed 
society for the promotion of capitalist democracy. Marx's realist philosophy 
of science (Wissenschaft, knowledge) is in fact Hegelian and Aristotelian. 
So is his criticism of capitalism and its political economy.  His criticism 
is also Feuerbachian, seeing in the lives of French Communist workers the 
embryo of universally loving human relationships -- which Marx called 
communism, and which totally transcends the possessive individualism of 
bourgeois enlightenment.
Mechanistic Marxism is eurocentric, and crushes the desire for liberation of 
marginal human beings, including indigenous peoples, the victims of 
imperialism.  Following the same tradition as 19th-century British workers, 
Irish Marxists murdered those who sought *national* liberation.  They were 
helped by an ideology which in the name of science imposed Oliver Cromwell 
as a world historical hero for all of humanity, and made Catholicism for 
ever and everywhere a legitimate target for Protestantism. I think that 
R.H.Tawney's history in "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" is a useful 
antidote to mechanistic Marxism.  He makes the case that both Tudor and 
Stuart monarchies tried to stem the tide of enclosures of the common land. 
Noting that historical point does not make me a defender of theocracy. I 
would remind Louis that I recently wrote to the list that Ian Paisley's 
demand that since Irish republicans had sinned in public they must repent in 
public was theocratic.

Comradely,
James Daly

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