Re: [OPE-L] rosa luxemburg

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [OPE-L] rosa luxemburg

> Dear Rakesh,
> Luxemburg, like Marx and Engels, regards
> Hegelian logic absolutely necessary as a method of thought. But it
> must be put on a rational basis to overcome Hegel's reversal of
> subject and object.

Not sure whether Marx's dialectic has even this negative identity with Hegel's. Althusser did raise some interesting questions here, no?

> Luxemburg rejects any approach to Marx
> from Kantian point of view - to his epistemology as well as to his
> social and political theory.

To quote out of context, Kant's theory of transcendental consciousness is curiously "asocially social". It's social in the sense that it's shared and it makes social relations and even objectivity of a kind possible (this was Lucien Goldmann's point in his dissertation on Kant, inspired by Adler) but it's not itself the result of social relations (Marx Wartofsky wrote about this somewhere), and inherent in the pre social subject. Which also gives his theory of consciousness a fixed character and critical anthropology and philosophy have been relativizing the a prioris ever since--Boas in anthropology, Foucault in genealogy and Michael Friedman in physics.

 

The asocial sociality Kant seems to have found in emerging bourgeois order can be found in transcendental consciousness.

Look forward to your comments, Dogan.

Thanks much for sending the paper.

Rakesh

> Sorry fro keeping short. But I am on my
> way to the conference. Thank you for your questions. On my return I
> will reply properly.
>
> Yours, Dogan
>

 
-----Ursprüngliche Mitteilung-----
Von: bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx
An: OPE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Verschickt: Do., 29. Mrz. 2007, 17:35
Thema: 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.

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