Re: [OPE-L] rosa luxemburg

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [OPE-L] rosa luxemburg

> Hi Ope list memebers,
>
>
>
> as promissed some time ago please find attach my paper on Rosa
> Luxemburg. It is mostly a translation of an early German version with
> some aditions.
> Dogan

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> Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:rosa
> luxemburg confe#21CAD7.DOC (WDBN/MSWD) (0021CAD7)

Hi Dogan,

Just reading your most interesting paper. Questions already coming to mind especially in light of the excellent (yet controversial) paper on Marx and Hegel I just read in the latest Science and Society by Sean Sayers (his work on contradiction is also of enduring significance).

A couple of quick questions:

1. How does Luxemburg understand Marx's critique of the Hegelian dialectic--its idealism (which Grossman, Chris Arthur and Tony Smith all see as mirroring both the delusions and rapacity of 'self-expanding' value), its delusive resolution of contradiction (e.g. universality or bureaucracy resolves contradiction between particularity or people and monarchy or generality), its insistence on identity rather than unity of opposites (Godelier insists on difference)

2. What do you (and did RL) make of not the epistemological nihilist or ethical neo Kantianism but the social scientific neo Kantianism of Max Adler? Kant did in a limited way break out of atomistic ontology at least in Adler's reader. This shared aspect of classical German philosophy was important for Marx.

Here's an example:

Marx believed "that the content of every individual consciousness was necessarily socialized; language itself, in which that content is expressed, is of course a social inheritance. Kant's theory supplies this idea with an epistemological basis. There is a profound analogy between

Kant's refutation of the apparent substantiality of the self, and Marx's critique of commodity fetishism and reject of the 'reified' appearances of social phenomena. The life of a society is nto secondary to that of the

individuals composing it, but is a network of relationships comprehending those individuals. Man is a social being in his very essence, and not simply because he associates with others for reasons of instinct or calculation. Just as, in Marx's analysis, the apparent objectivity of commodities resolves itself into social relations, so the appearances of

personal consciousness resolve themselves into a general consciousness (das Bewusstein uberhaupt) linking individuals with one another. Whether we know it or not, in communication with others we relate our thought to

transcedental consciousness. A reality which cannot be directly perceived, but is accessible to critical analysis  is manifested in the relations between human beings, just as value is manifested in exchange value." P. 263-4 of Main
Currents of Marxism, vol II.