OPE-L message, Re: [OPE-L] rosa luxemburg

Dogan:

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.

Rakesh:

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

Dogan:

Rakesh, I am not sure whether I understand you here. May I ask you to explore on this a bit. What writing(s) of Althusser's do you refer to?

Dogan:

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

Rakesh:

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.

Dogan:

Rakesh, I was just checking Luxemburg's letters on Kant. In a letter to Kurt Eisner she says Kant has nothing to do with socialism. If we take this in its most specific sense I would agree with her. I usually differentiate between two fundamentally different traditions in European philosophy: Cogito and Mirror. The relationship between Cogito tradition and socialism is more indirect than direct. It employs a methodological individualist approach. The relationship between mirror tradition and socialist philosophy is more direct. It employs a intersubjective approach. In classical German philosophy the former is employed in Kantian epistemology, though it is reduced to pure consciousness. The latter is employed by Hegel. In Hegelian view than there is no such thing that can be called "asocially social". That is to say consiousness is always social.

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

Kostenlos: AOL eMail
2 GB Speicherplatz sowie erstklassiger Spam- und eMail Virenschutz.
Sichern Sie sich Ihre persönliche eMail Adresse noch heute!

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.

Kostenlos: AOL eMail
2 GB Speicherplatz sowie erstklassiger Spam- und eMail Virenschutz.
Sichern Sie sich Ihre persönliche eMail Adresse noch heute!