Re: Zizek extols Mao (I believe...)

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect pointed to Zizek on Mao:

> http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm

There we find the following:
> The further key point concerns the principal ASPECT of a  
> contradiction; for example, with regard to the contradiction  
> between the productive forces and the relations of production,
>
> the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally  
> play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a  
> materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain  
> conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and  
> the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and  
> decisive role. When it is impossible for the productive forces to  
> develop without a change in the relations of production, then the  
> change in the relations of production plays the principal and  
> decisive role.
>
> The political stakes of this debate are decisive: Mao's aim is to  
> assert the key role, in the political struggle, of what the Marxist  
> tradition usually refers to as the "subjective factor" - theory,  
> superstructure. This is what, according to Mao, Stalin neglected:  
> "Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR from first to  
> last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned  
> with people; it considers things, not people. /.../ /It speaks/  
> only of the production relations, not of the superstructure nor  
> politics, nor the role of the people. Communism cannot be reached  
> unless there is a communist movement."

This misinterprets Marx.  Forces and relations of production are  
"subjective."  They express the degree of development of human  
"subjectivity," the degree of "development of the human mind."

“accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of  
social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge  
(scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of  
accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation -  
which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it - of the  
existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity.  These  
objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be  
constantly produced anew and consumed anew.”
<http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1863/theories- 
surplus-value/ch21.htm>

Marx opposes this “idealism” to “the crude, material fetishism into  
which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings ‘of this  
incredible cobbler’, McCulloch” and to the mistaken interpretations  
of his own “materialism” such as Mao's and Zizek's.

"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here  
as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly  
performed anew, of socially producing men.  Compare this 'idealism'  
with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory  
develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch,  
where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but  
even the difference between  a living organism and an inanimate  
object.  And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of  
bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been  
preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the  
satisfaction of coarse appetites."
<http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1863/theories- 
surplus-value/ch21.htm>

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric  
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human  
industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will  
over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of  
the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge,  
objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what  
degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of  
production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process  
of social life itself have come under the control of the general  
intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree  
the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the  
form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice,  
of the real life process."
http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ 
ch14.htm

The related failure to perceive relations of production as  
"subjective," i.e. as the creation of human subjects and, hence, as  
alterable by them, is another key expression of "fetishism."

Marx conceives the labour process as developmental of human mind and,  
hence, successive forms of this process  as internally related stages  
in an historical process of "education."

Conceived in this way, the development of "forces of production"  
within a stage comes into contradiction with the "relations of  
production" that define that stage because those relations ultimately  
"fetter" this development.  The development of mind expressed by the  
development of these forces, however, creates a "subjectivity" with  
the power to transform these relations in a positive way i.e. with  
the power to create new relations more compatible with individual  
development.

Ted