Re: [Marxism] Religion, the proletariat, Marxism, and revolution

[Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There were a number of points in James' interesting reply that
troubled me.

> J. D's reply. (edited): -- To my mind this ambiguity is the crux of
> Marxism.  I think the Promethean motif is the antireligious,
> militantly secular side of Marx and Engels -- hatred of the unjust
> Zeus.

> The religious motif on the other hand is significant (however
> ironic) in the early Marx, for instance in the "Critique of Hegel's
> Philosophy of Right: Introduction"

I believe we have to sharply distinguish (early) Marx and
Marxism. Marx wrote well over a century ago, and lived in a material
and a cultural situation that was quite fluid and in some ways
nascent. In any great pioneer thinker, there's bound to be
inconsistencies, ambiguities and outright error, but we don't judge
them in such terms, but rather for their opening of new horizons for
us. It is our job as his heirs, not only to straighten things out to
capture the essence of what he said, but far more importantly to
remain responsive to our developing material and cultural
circumstances. There's a real danger that we tar Marxism with the
brush of (early) Marx.

The study of the early Marx is an interesting academic exercise in
culture history; Marxism today is an ideology appropriate for class
struggle. We need to be clear in our own minds which we are up to.

> Taken with his saying that advanced societies hold up the mirror of
> the future to backward societies (England to Germany), this led to a
> rigidifigation of "historical materialism" as a mechanistic stagist
> prediction of communism as the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of
> working-class interests in a utilitarian sense.

Why? What Marx's point presumes is only that material life constrains
development, and in particular capitalism is a system that enjoys
certain possibilities for development and not others. Yes,
superficially this might seem like einer Vernunft der Geschichte
because there might seem certain logical relation between the past and
future, but actually this relation does not entail any innate
idea. There's no logic involved here; only matter. The present
constrains the probability distribution of future possibilities. This
does imply we accept the reality of unobservables, which today is
fairly conventional in the philosophy of science (scientific
realism). As for Marx, it is broadly felt that he was a scientific
realist. 

> But in the CHPR:Intro and in the Communist Manifesto he envisioned
> the proletariat as the *universal* class, and proletarian revolution
> as liberating all humanity, precisely because it would end the
> tyrannical mechanistic pressure of the capitalist system which
> depended on everyone pursuing their individual "economic" interests.

Not sure here, but surely this universality should also be understood
in material terms, not as an abstract idea. The worker, as a social
being, depends on society for his development rather than private
possession, and the broader the society he encompasses, the greater
his real potential for development.

> In Wages Price and Profit he condemned the confining of labour's
> demands to the economic, which could only perpetuate the Hobbesian
> possessive individualist system -- and he pointed out that
> revolutionary change could only come from the demand for the
> abolition of the wages system. This demand totally -- infinitely --
> transcends bourgeoisified sectional interests, ...

Perhaps this is what you are suggesting, but just to be sure, the
abolition of the wage system forces workers into an individualist mode
(negotiating wages), but it is important to mention the positive side
as well - what is gained as an alternative to one's having to develop
through wage negotiation?
 
> I cannot trace an excellent article written about 10 years ago (by
> Arrighi?  In New Left Review?) which takes up a similar theme, about
> an alleged dichotomy in Marx's thought between the proletariat as
> the wild-eyed revolutionary victim of total immiseration (Third
> World...?), and the proletariat as the trade union bureaucrat, the
> disciplined gravedigger (First world...?).

Without digging up the Arrighi article, it strikes me off hand that
this might imply a false dichotomy. Where absolute exploitation occurs
(and today it seems ever less based on a Third World/First World
distinction), the struggle is naturally _against_ the structure of
exploitation; where there is relative exploitation, it seems more a
struggle _for_ reform. In terms of capitalism's deepening
contradictions, are these not the same struggle in different
circumstances or different aspects of one struggle for working-class
development? In the former case, you are attacking the instruments of
exploitation to gain room for development; in the latter, you are
trying to get a bigger chunk of surplus value in order to develop in
the available space.

> The mechanistic interpretation of historical materialism's "the
> inexorability of a law of nature" is very relevant. I think,
> following Roy Bhaskar, that a law of nature for Marx [as for
> Aristotle and Hegel] means the working out of the *nature* of
> something. It does not mean the Popperian covering law explanation
> of one phenomenon by the mechanistic causality of another. Marx's
> philosophical formation had nothing to do with the empiricist
> mechanism of the next generation, which he and Engels attacked in
> the person of Duehring.

Yes, Bhaskar is right here, it seems, but he certainly did not
originate the idea. The "Feuerbachian transformation" in Marx is
surely an example of this. Inexorability we would understand today in
terms of a probabilistic causality, and I see nothing in Marx that
would suggest he meant otherwise (for example, The 18th
Brumaire). There is surely no implication that the inexorability of
historical development in Marx was at all detached from empirical
specificity. The categorical distinction between empirical specifics
and abstract general law is an artifact of capitalist ideology, and is
not found in Marxism, which the two seem merely the two aspect of one
process, a real causal potency and an empirical constraint on its
possible actualizations.

Haines Brown

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