shirtless helots & neo-asceticism

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> I wonder which Marxist thinkers of the 20th century Doug has in mind when
> he refers to this "ambivalent" attitude. G.A. Cohen? Frank Furedi? John
> Roemer?

Ernest Mandel, for one, who wrote the passage appended below. I'm
also curious what you make of these comments by your "muses."
Mariategui, writing scornfully of those who "dreamed of nobly leading
a revolution of the shirtless helots," added:

> Obeying a tendency to sublimate one's emotions, this type of
> socialist - whose services no one thinks of denying, and among whom
> some extraordinary and admirable spirits rise to great heights -
> pulled from the gutter the sentimental cliches and demagogic images
> of the era of sansculottes so as to inaugurate a paradisiacally
> Rousseauean age throughout the world. But, as we have known for some
> time, this was absolutely not the road to socialist revolution. Marx
> discovered and taught that one had to begin by understanding the
> necessity and, especially, the value of the capitalist stage.
> Socialism, after Marx, appeared as the conception of a new class, as
> a theory and movement that had nothing in common with the
> romanticism of those who repudiated the work of capitalism as an
> abomination.

And one of your other muses, Gramsci, wrote of the "progressive"
aspects of "Americanism and Fordism," saying they were "links of the
chain marking the passage from the old economic individualism to the
planned economy."

> Certainly nobody whoever faced arrest or torture.

Plenty of which has happened in countries that called themselves Marxist.

And now here's Mandel, who faced arrest and torture under the Nazis,
as I recall, though he was Belgian, and may therefore lack the moral
standing to speak on this issue.

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396:

> 6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the
> wage-earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and
> civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually
> completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both
> quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid
> holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and
> qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent
> to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content
> by capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is
> a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any
> rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond
> justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization
> of consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of
> needs and consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism
> to a critique of civilization), turns back the clock from scientific
> to utopian socialism and from historical materialism to idealism.
> Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of
> capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material
> basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from the
> Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving
> towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits
> of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements
> for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided
> in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also
> therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development
> of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form
> has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the
> place of the natural one.'
>
> For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
> therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation
> of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of
> these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
> individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist
> sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean:
> rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which
> continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and
> one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship
> between the production of goods and human labour, which is
> determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that
> henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum
> production of things and the maximum private profit for each
> individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum
> self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must
> be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms
> of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural
> environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same
> time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with
> material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich
> individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial
> self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his
> consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e.,
> democratically) subordinated to his collective interests.
>
> Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system
> of needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in
> some circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The
> exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things
> of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new
> qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the
> natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery,
> creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself;
> the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being,
> production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs,
> because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being
> as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in
> order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable
> of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a
> condition of production founded on capital....