envy, sadism, and crude communism

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

If I don't jump on in this thread I will miss the opportunity perhaps
for a lifetime. I want to echo Doug's praise for this remarkable quote
by Ted from Marx's early manuscripts (thanks Doug for making clear you
were not being ironic - one does not always know!).

This comes at a moment for me in my personal trajectory, where after a
lot of hesitation I am reading Freud's final work "Outline of
Psychoanalysis" in the new 2003 translation which is closer to the
German original.

I am struck by how Freud fundamentally declares what seems to me to be
arguably a dialectical materialist stance, which of course comes from
deep German philosophical roots - that there is much in the
psychological as well as the physical universe that we do not know
directly from our sense organs. These consciously bring us only in
touch with immediate surface phenomena. Rather we have to look beneath
the surface to discover the forces and their dynamical interaction to
have a theory of what is really going on. Cosmic physicists would
agree without hesitation.

Freud however was not a *historical* materialist and was explictly
critical of the dictatorial tendencies he saw associated with the
marxist movement.

The link I suddenly see in the passage that Ted quotes and the
adjacent text of the cite, is that it provides a bridge between
psychology and society at a valuably and extremely high level of
abstraction. One of the dilemmas in interpreting the success and
failures of the state centralist societies that came into existence
largely through Lenin's inspiration is the problem of lack of labour
efficiency, and loss with time of revolutionary commitment by the mass
of workers who often ended up resenting the privileges of the state
intelligentsia. Understandable though that is, it suggests to me a
society caught between primitive conceptions of communism and a more
scientific communism.

It was a contradiction that Marx was well aware of eg in the case of
Russia, that historical developments could leap forward with
progressive aspects of primitive communism straight to socialism
without going through a capitalist stage. In post revolutionary China
there was an attempt at an accelerated leap from socialism to the
communism of the communes, without going through capitalism,  which
relied a lot on envious motives as well as inspired egalitarianism.
Now the retreat in China to something that often looks
indistinguishable from rampant capitalism except for the attempts to
maintain a strong state in relation to the world, appears to represent
the resurgence of primitive selfish motives which are the other side
of the coin of the idealism of crude communism.

The Trotskyist criticisms of state centralised socialism, whether as a
deformed workers state or a state dominated by a new capitalist class,
while often correct in some respects, seem to me not to wrestle
profoundly enough with the historical contradictions. And in a country
like the UK where we still have a large state sector, it seems to me
to be inadquate just to mount a rearguard defence, despite evidence of
inefficiency and lack of customer appeal to the recipients of those
services.

This post probably is too big a stretch in too many directions, and
makes partial sense only to me, but Ted's quote seems to me to free up
the parameters of the marxist debate in potentially creative ways. (Of
course some though would say that in 1844 Marx was still not a
scientific socialist.) I suppose I am looking, hopefully with others,
for a redefinition of a historical materialist project, that is
flexible enough to take into account psychology as well the inexorable
development of the means of production, and is still historically
optimistic.

Chris Burford
London



----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 2:56 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Hubbert's peak


> Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> >Like the sadism to which they are closely linked, envy and
> >insatiable greed are protean.  Marx points to them as the
> >psychological basis of "crude communism".
> >
> >>General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in
> >>which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in
> >>another way. The thought of every piece of private property as
such
> >>is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form
> >>of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that
> >>this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition.
> >>Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this
> >>levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a
> >>definite, limited standard.
> >>
> >>How little this annulment of private property is really an
> >>appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the
> >>entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the
> >>unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs
> >>and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has
> >>not yet even reached it.
> >>
> >>The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages
> >>paid out by communal capital - by the community as the universal
> >>capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an
> >>imagined universality - labour as the category in which every
> >>person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and
> >>power of the community.
>
>><http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.ht
m>
>
> I'm in awe. Really. This is sublime stuff. I haven't read this in
> years, so thanks for the reminder.
>
> Doug
>