Re: [Marxism] ForLiberation Newsletter

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

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> Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 17:45:53 -0400
> From: "Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>
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> On 4/9/07, Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:>
> 
> > 3. Any alternative to religion must a) represent a transcendence of
> >    circumstance, not just in thought, but in terms of real
> >    possibilities, and b) it also must point to a transcendence by our
> >    social being (individual and society as aspects of one process),
> >    rather than just as individuals.
> >
> > 4. Marxism offers a way of seeing things in terms of contradiction. A
> >    contradiction represents both the potentials for transcending what
> >    exists and the need for doing so, and our consciousness arises from
> >    this contradictory reality rather than being external to it. To
> >    represent the world in thought as consisting of contradictions
> >    offers an alternative to religion, and to base one's actions on the
> >    emergence of objective contradictions offers the possibility for
> >    material change that religion lacks to any significant degree.
> 
> A Spinoza-influenced Marxist (like, say, Negri) may eschew
> transcendence and favor immanence. 

Without reading Negri, I'm left a bit in the fog here.

> I don't yet quite know what I think of this Spinoza-inspired vision
> of Marxism (of which Negri is a major proponent), but I find it
> increasingly attractive. Obviouly it stresses subjectivity much more
> than objective factors or conditions. It is rather situationist in
> this regard. It may even help to get beyond the mechanical thinking
> that the "Leninist style" which Joaquin critiqued recently is prone
> to. (Although Lenin himself seems to have been situationist himself,
> and, as Joaquin has pointed out, what came to called the "Leninist
> model" had very little to do with Lenin's actual concrete practice).

And, again, terms like objective factors and subjectivity leave me
uncomfortable. Should we not in principle try to resolve this
conceptual contradiction? Without exploring the issue here, it seems
to me that a reconciliation might require that we see things as
processes rather than as things and employ a probabilistic
causality. There are good reasons to do so even outside a Marxist
perspective. 

Is transcendence/immanence necessarily contradictory? I thought one of
the beauties of the idea of contradiction was that it is
simultaneously immanent and transcendent. Oh, well. I can't really
come to grips with these issues without agreed upon cogent definitions
of the terms. There is a range of concepts that are defined as being
poles of a conceptual contradiction (cartesian mind/body,
subject/object, matter/spirit or idea, contingent/absolute,
particular/universal, individual/society, feedom/determinism, etc.) If
our concepts are implicitly contradictory by definition, I don't see
how progress can be made without redefining them in non-contradictory
terms. That is, the contradiction should not be ideational, but
instead be seen as the nature of matter.

Haines Brown 

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