Re: Did Marx Speak of Marxism?
- From: brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)
- Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:51:37 CST
"Ron Peterson" <ron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
The most close quote I have found is: "Communism as the positive
transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and
therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for
man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as
a social (i.e., human) being - a return become conscious, and
accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This
communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as
fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man
and man - the true resolution of the strife between existence and
essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between
freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be
this solution. (p. 135)"
I'm not particularly qualified to translate this passage into the
modern idiom, but I feel I should be able to do it in principle, and
so feel obliged to give it a try. I hope others will correct me and
offer better explanations.
1. Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as
human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of
the human essence by and for man...
We live in a world in which human relations are governed by the need
for capital's self-expansion, which in turn is based on private
property. Although we created private property, its dynamic in the
capitalist system now dominates our lives. The change from the
capitalist system should allow us to be governed by our social needs,
not the drive for profits; it would put people before profits.
2. ...communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as
a social (i.e., human) being - a return become conscious, and
accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development.
A recovery of the independence of our social being means that our
consciousness will be shaped by our real human needs, not the
artificial needs created by capital. However, this does not mean the
abandonment of the great wealth and technology that marks the
capitalist era, but a subjection of that wealth and technology to
social and individual needs rather than the the need for capital's own
self-expansion.
3. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and
as fully developed humanism equals naturalism...
Naturalism is much discussed today and in a sense not unlike how Marx
is using the word. If you refer to the Wikipedia definition of
"naturalism", you will see that it has a variety of meanings, but not
all are relevant to Marx.
a. Methodological naturalism assumes that observable events in
nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the
existence or non-existence of the supernatural. It can be argued
that religious life represent an alienation from what is
distinctively human, and that by focusing on real human relations
and circumstances, we are in a position to find real solutions to
our problems, not imagined ones in the sky by and by.
b. Humanistic naturalism: an outlook that places the emphasis upon a
naturalism based upon scientific reasoning. I believe that
however one feels about his success, there's no question that
Marx pursued a scientific grasp of society, of history and the
capitalist economy. However this definition can raise problems,
such as I mention in relation to postivism below.
c. Sociological naturalism: the view that the natural world and the
social world are roughly identical and governed by similar
principles. People without much knowledge of science sometimes
take this to imply this means we should grasp society in terms of
positivism. Clearly, this is not what the author of the
definition intended, and it certainly is not true of Marx.
If "humanism" means a focus on what is really human, our potentials,
our aspirations, and our limitations, then the only way to realize
human potentials is to grasp mankind in realistic terms and not in
relation to the supernatural or to the external forces represented by
capitalist dynamics.
4. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and
as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and
man - the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between the individual and the species.
The reference here is to a series of ontological contradictions that
Marx inherited from his European culture. One is the nature-human
dichotomy, in which the latter acquires his creative capacity from god
and so is fundamentally distinct from nature. While most of us no
longer attribute human creativity to god, it remains difficult to
explain, although it is clearly very real. I have my own theory (based
on a re-interpretation of the Marxist notion of contradiction), but
others have their own. An important point is that Marx here believes
he has found at least the beginning of an answer to some of the most
fundamental issues in, particularly European, thinking, and trying to
link them with the mundane questions of economic analysis.
Man is often seen as having an uncomfortable, even contradictory,
relation with nature, in which being natural threatens to reduce what
is distinctively human. Marx feels that we are quite natural, but
nature at a higher level. This point has been much discussed, although
it is not currently fashionable. This higher level has been called the
"oosphere" or the level of consciousness in which human intentionality
becomes the determining factor in the natural system, not a dependent
variable.
I suppose that by the man-man relation, Marx is speaking of human
conflicts. He argues at length elsewhere that human nature is really
social, and that were we to respond to our real nature, we would of
course enter into positive social relations. Our social conflicts
arise because of external factors. This is a big and difficult issue,
but Marx is having an intellectual adventure here, and I suppose
giving himself a little license to speak with abandon.
The strife between existence and essence is a deep philosophical
issue. We are in part what we are at the moment, which is a product of
the past and defined in static terms; but we are at the same time
dynamic beings constantly transforming what we are to create ourselves
anew. This is a classic philosophical contradiction. My own take on
the resolution of this problem is that if we understand everything as
processes, then causality becomes probabilistic and we can constrain
the probability distribution of possible outcomes by an act of
will. This neatly resolves the contradiction between being and
becoming, freedom and necessity, etc. Marx does not develop a similar
argument, for he could not anticipate the future course of
science. However, I believe that contained in his notion of
contradiction is an incipient assumption that all things are processes
that are opposite with respect to entropy. All we can say, I suppose,
is that Marx had an intuition that his basic approach to issues had
the potential to untie the Gordian Knot of a set of important
philosophical contradictions that had crippled European thinking.
The issue of freedom and necessity is somewhat an artifact of the fact
that Marx lived when positivism was in its heyday, which troubled
people at the time (Henri Bergson, William James, Nietzsche, etc.) who
would not accept that human life was mechanically determined. To some
extent the problem became less pressing when positivism subsequently
lost its glamor, but the issue remains (unjustifiably, I believe)
important in such fields as historiography.
The comment about objectification vs. self-confirmation sounds as
though extracted from post World-War II existentialist literature ;-)
Are we an object that is merely the product of external
determinations, or are we free self-created beings? Again, this is a
contradiction that arises primarily because of the ontological
categories embedded in European culture.
The question of the individual vs. species, is, of course, a perennial
issue (usually called the nature vs. nurture controversy), and it is
not satisfactorily resolved today. However, Marx's insistence that we
are social beings, combined with what I believe he implicitly assumes,
that we represent an emergent process, suggests that the individual is
a fully social product and yet at the same time emerges as a unique
being. This is generally accepted today, but usually by employing a
factor analysis that includes the individual personality as one
factor. I personally consider this approach very weak and that Marx
intuited a solution far more satisfactory.
5. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to
be this solution.
This is a reflection of the Hegelian influence on Marx. It is an
outlook not very fashionable today when most historians no longer
believe there is any fundamental explanation of the historical
process, and their explanations tend to be short range. This gives
Marx's comment a quaint tone, although there are still a few who seek
a meta-historical grasp of the basic dynamic of human history. I
certainly wish them well, for I'm one of them.
The reference to "knows itself to be the solution" seems right out of
Hegel (the Owl of Minera takes flight at the gathering of dusk). It is
a kind of systems analysis in which a mature system locks itself into
a characteristic mode of behavior and acquires a more functional
relation between its parts and the whole. This makes the logic of the
system more transparent to its observer, but where Hegel and Marx
speak of "knowing itself" seems more than just this. I suppose a
naturalistic explanation is that since human history is the story of
developing consciousness, the full development of the human system
reaches the point at which human consciousness fully understands
itself and also its being a functional part of the socio-economic
whole.
However, Marx was no functionalist, and there may be a (logical)
contradiction here between system transparency and his (systemic)
notion of contradiction. He did assume that the future communist
society would not be based on classes and would therefore not be
contradictory, but I fear that this does not remove such a
contradiction that I believe exists between man and nature. Marx took
the optimistic view that a socially non-contradictory society would
have a non-contradictory relation with nature, but there are many,
including myself, who doubt it.
Let me end by suggesting that you not take this passage too
seriously. Marx's real achievement was not as a philospher (although
that was his original training), but as an economist, historian and
occasional political organizer. In this passage, I suspect he is
struck by the profound philosophical implications of the method he
used to understand the economic system, but he abandoned any effort to
develop them. Here he does little more than indulge himself by hinting
that his methodology could resolve some basic philosophical issues. If
we today would like to explore the philosophical issues more deeply,
we should not explore the early Marx, but instead look deeply into his
late work, Das Kapital, to understand the conceptual tool that is now
referred to as a (systemic, not Kantean) contradiction. I also suggest
that Engels' Dialectics of Nature has a lot more to offer in this
regard than the negative view that is often taken of it.
I hope I have satisfied your need for someone to parse the quotation
from Marx and have not made things even more obscure for you.
--
Haines Brown
KB1GRM
ET1(SS) U.S.S. Irex 482
.
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