Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: the expression "political economy"

[Ted Winslow <winslow@xxxxxxxx>]

Jim wrote
>
> Mine didn't use the phrase "bourgeois thinker," but I agree: one can learn
> from people like Keynes. Keynes fills in a lot of gaps in Marx's vision of
> macroeconomics, for example. Even an anti-Semite and eugenicist like Irving
> Fisher had some good things to say, e.g., his theory of debt
> deflation-driven depressions. Even Milton Friedman has a couple of things
> to say, as when he clarifies neoclassical theory so we know better what it
> is we oppose.

I didn't intend to suggest that Mine had used the phrase "bourgeois
thinker".  What I was getting at was the idea that seemed implicit in her
question that Marshall and Keynes could not have radical ideas because they
were not in some sense or other "radicals".

Ironically, the "bourgeois thinker" Marshall is, on the question of the
ontological basis of the role Marx assigns to "class" in his philosophy of
history, more Marxist than some Marxists (at least so it seems to me).  This
is because Marshall understood Marx's use of the idea of "class" to be a
dialectical sublation of the treatment of human history by Kant, Goethe and
Hegel as a process through which the human essence is actualized.

One aspect of the understanding of the human essence underpinning this
approach is the ascription to persons of the capacity to develop what Hegel,
as I pointed out in an earlier post, called a "will proper" and a "universal
will".  This too is a very old idea.  Here is Aristotle's statement of it in
the Ethics.

    "What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance
are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned
with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the reasoning
must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the
latter must pursue just what the former asserts.  Now this kind of intellect
and of truth is practical; of the intellect which is contemplative, not
practical or productive, the good and the bad state are truth and falsity
respectively (for this is the work of everything intellectual); while of the
part which is practical and intellectual the good state is truth in
agreement with right desire.
    "The origin of action - its efficient, not its final cause - is choice,
and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end.  This is
why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a
moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a
combination of intellect and character.  Intellect itself, however, moves
nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical; for
this rules the productive intellect as well, since every one who makes for
an end, and that which is made is not an end in the unqualified sense (but
only an end in a particular relation, and the end of a particular operation)
- only that which is done is that; for good action is an end, and desire
aims at this.  Hence choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative
desire, and such an origin of action is a man." (Ethics, The Student's
Oxford Aristotle, vol. 5, 1139a)

(Here by the way we have the basis of the key distinction I pointed to
earlier between Marx's materialism and the "scientific materialism" not only
of E.O. Wilson but of critics of Wilson such as Gould and Lewontin.  Marx's
ontology allows for self-determination and final causation as ultimate
"causes" - as does Aristotle in the passage I've just quoted; the
materialism of Wilson and Gould explicitly excludes such causes from playing
any ultimate role in determining what goes on.  Among other things, this
produces logical incoherence.)

Hegel's claim that the human essence is "freedom" is a dialectical sublation
of these ideas of Aristotle.

"That man is free by Nature is quite correct in one sense; viz., that he is
so according to the Idea of Humanity; but we imply thereby that he is such
only in virtue of his destiny - that he has an undeveloped power to become
such; for the "Nature" of an object is exactly synonymous with its "Idea".
...  Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not
exist as original and natural.  Rather must it be first sought out and won;
and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral
powers.  ...  To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably
requisite; and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects
and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating
itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition
thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and
incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its
natural inclination." (Philosophy of History, pp. 40-41)

As in Aristotle, the potential for "freedom" in this sense - a freedom whose
"concept" includes the idea that "Law and Morality" "are in and for
themselves, *universal* existences, objects and aims" - defines the human.
For Hegel, human history is the process through which this "idea" of
humanity is actualized.

In Hegel's account of this, "class" is given an essential role.  This is
found in his treatment of the master/slave "relation of production" in the
*Phenomenology of Mind*.  The position of the slave in this relation is to
an important degree positively developmental of "mind" i.e. of human
self-consciousness.  The slave is forced to labour under conditions of
deferred desire.  This, according to Hegel, leads to a kind of
self-consciousness able to move away from pure "immediacy" and  begin to
reflect on desires and the means of satisfying them.  This leads to the
development of "tools" as embodiments of the understanding of nature which
such reflection makes possible.  Tools mediate between desire and the
satisfaction of desire.  Their creation requires a consciousness with a
sense of future.  The development of mind that relations of production make
possible is reflected in the development of "forces of production".

The role Marx gives to relations and forces of production (and, as part of
this, the role he gives to "class" in the development of mind) is a
dialectical sublation of Hegel's dialectical sublation of Aristotle.

Since "freedom" defines all persons, it is always a mistake to condemn
individuals (e.g. Conrad Black) for the content of their will.  Where the
content isn't "good" it must be the result either of irrationality or of
mistaken judgment.  What characterizes the members of the working class,
according to Marx, is not the moral superiority of the content of their
"wills" but the possibility contained in their location in the "internal"
relations of production that define capitalism - their class location - for
the development of a consciousness and will sufficiently close to a
"universal" consciousness and  will to enable them to become the architects
and makers of a society from which all barriers to full human development
will have been removed.  It is in this sense that they are to be understood
as the "universal class".

"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same
human self estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened
in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and
has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat
feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and
the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel,
in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which
it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and
its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive
negation of that nature.
    "Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the
conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former
arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action
of annihilating it.
    "Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards
its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on
it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private
property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the
proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and
physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization,
and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that
private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as
it executes the sentence that wage labour pronounces on itself by producing
wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is
victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is
victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite.  Then the proletariat
disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.
    "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the
proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe,
because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in
the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the
semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life
of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in
their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet
at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss,
but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely
imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven
directly to revolt against this  inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat
can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without
abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions
of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of
society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it
go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of
what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment
regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what,
in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its
aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own
life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society
today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and
French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is
constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity."
*The Holy Family* (unfortunately I don't have the specific page reference
handy)

Ted Winslow
--
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