Re: [Marxism] Theory of Violence

[Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I am glad you think the syllogism is valid.

I was being generous. But my main point is that syllogisms don't prove
anything except in its own terms, in terms of formal logic, and formal
logic has little relevance to emergent social processes.

> You talk of the state being superstructural and I’m not sure
> where you are locating the government.

It seems to me the concept "superstructure" remains contentious. All I
can do is give my own take on it, for better or worse. The basic idea
is that capitalist (and all less developed social formations) are
contradictory. This means that the system cannot have a functional
coherence and requires the presence of an institution to keep the
system functioning. This is called its "superstructure" because it is
a structure outside the basic socio-economic structure of society and
serves to hold it together. I see superstructure as including
anything that has that function. Conventionally it refers to the state
and to ideology.

Given this definition, the government is not part of superstructure,
although the state is part of it. Obviously (I hope) we are taking
about institutions that often, perhaps usually, have a dual
function. A policeman will help little children cross the street
(governing function), but he also carries a sidearm that serves to
convey to the citizenry the brute realities of the existing power
structure (state function). An ideology is not true or false, but is
one sided in that it represents a truth for a part of the social
whole, but (necessarily because it is contradictory) not the entirety
of the social whole.

> I would probably locate the government there moulding the state to
> the ever-changing interests of the ruling class but sometimes being
> deflected a little from its course by the struggle of the workers.

Unless you adopt an anarchist position that would make any government
at best useless, I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Most
people assume that complex societies have needs that everyone has an
interest in being met. As I said before, I don't want to debate
this point because the anarchist position has ideological function for
a class other than my own.

> I’m not sure why you say that only units of a certain size can
> engage in politics.  Didn’t the feminists used to say the
> personal is political and isn’t the patriarch usually the
> `harmony-preserving institution’ in the family?

I don't know that we disagree here. I (somewhat adventurously)
suggested that politics presumes large complex social units that are
more likely to give rise to needs specific to the whole. The point
that the personal is political simply says that these needs of the
whole reflect (for a reductionist) or emerge from (for a realist) the
needs of individuals. I don't know that I'd assume that personal
relationships in the family are the same as the relation of individual
and state; there are good reasons to suggest the state is not the
family writ large. I am, of course, speaking of modern societies.

> I think you can have politics in archaic pre-state societies,
> especially in times of hardship, in fact I think you can have
> politics in monkey troops.

For there to be politics, I believe we can't refer to a situation
where the social whole reduces to a collection of individuals. If that
were the case, then society would be nothing more than the sum of the
private relations among individuals (as found in bourgeois
ideology). I'm no primatologist, and so am not sure of the relation of
individual monkey and troop. So. to cut to the chase, there's
structural causality that suggests the causal relation among system
parts is modified by the structure of the whole (through feedback
loops, etc.), in contrast to the idea of an emergent system in which
the whole has acquired some independence of its parts. These emergent
systems reflect the scientific consensus today, and reductionism is
probably a dead horse.
  
> >Besides my question about your syllogism itself, I'm uncomfortable
> >seeing a syllogism being used as a substitute for social
> >analysis. In other words, a syllogism cannot yield a social
> >"theory", and formal logic can't be applied to such emergent
> >processes as human society. We can't generate truths simply by
> >manipulating words or by playing with logic. This, I believe, is a
> >fundamental Marxist objection.
> 
> I can’t imagine Marxism objecting to the drawing of
> conclusions.

I did not suggest that we can't develop hypotheses and devise some way
to judge their relative merit, and I referred only to a project in
which statements that are truthful about the world are constructed
solely from logical propositions.

In social affairs, we construct hypotheses by the method of abduction
(sometimes called retroduction). Then we need ways to evaluate the
relative truth value of these hypotheses in a manner that does not
involve predicting the outcome of tests. There are various techniques
that are mentioned, but I won't go into them here, for it is a big and
difficult topic.

These hypotheses are not the fruit of logic, but are causal
explanations based on our active intervention in the world. I'm not
suggesting we should throw logic out, but we need to see its
limitations. For example, a basic law of logic is that of
non-contradiction, but clearly when we are speaking of processes,
contradictions are commonplace. Also, emergence makes no sense in
logical terms (where one and one do _not_ result in two). Arguably,
process escapes logic, as perhaps does probabilistic causality (plenty
of logic around, such as the field os statistical mechanics, for
stastical inferences, but not probabliistic causal   powers).

> The idea that violence is the continuation of politics surely cuts
> through a lot of obscurantist nonsense about violence being the
> product of human nature or evil or mental illness etc. just as
> Clausewitz clarified the nature of war.

Nothing you have said suggests that violence is _necessarily_
associated with _government_, although I readily admit that the state
_necessarily_ relies on force, which may or may not be violent
(unconstrained; illicit). If I'm put into jail by the government or
the state, that is an example of force, but not necessarily of
violence. My placement there could result from a proper judicial
process that is sanctioned by the government.

You received some advice regarding your mail utility. I recommend that
you take it seriously

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM

         
        

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