On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The slogan did not drop from the sky, not was it innate in Marx's (or > Dilke's or Chapman's or Steward's) mind. Instead, it was the labor > movement that spawned the slogan for workweek reduction. Then, the > slogan helped unite the movement. I think it's a mistake to think that > somehow the slogan alone will help revive the movement. > Well, no. it was the demand for shorter work time that spawned the labor movement! It is true that resurrecting the slogan alone will not revive the labor movement. However, consciousness of the historical role of the slogan is essential if there is to be any hope of reviving the movement. Below is a passage from Raya Dunayevskaya's the American Roots of Marxism that I just stumbled across this morning. I quote it not because I am an adherent to her thought or because I got my ideas from it. I'm not and I didn't. I quote it because of convergence -- she came to very similar conclusions as me regarding Capital -- and what is vital within it -- following an entirely different course of inquiry. "The least known part of Marxism is its American roots. I'm not referring to any organization that called itself Marxist either in Marx's own time or ours. Of many of those Marx said, "If this is Marxism, I'm not a Marxist." He found he had to separate himself from the self-styled Marxists in America who tried to evade the whole issue of the Civil War by saying they were opposed to "all slavery, wage and chattel." Marx was actively and unashamedly on the side of the North. The mass demonstrations in England which stopped the British government's flirtations with the thought of entering on the side of the South and the role of The Workingman's International Association, headed by Marx, is certainly an important manifestation of the relationship between the Marxist concept of freedom and the American. "The most glorious page in American history was written by the Abolitionists. Here is how one of their great leaders, Wendell Phillips, expressed the struggle between the North and the South: "By the South I mean a principle, and not a locality, an element of civil life, in 14 rebellious States. I mean an element which, like the days of Queen Mary and the Inquisition, cannot tolerate free speech, and punishes it with the stake. I mean the aristocracy of the skin, which considers the Declaration of Independence a sham and democracy a snare--which believes that one-third of the race is born booted and spurred, and the other two-thirds ready saddled for that third to ride. I mean a civilization which prohibits the Bible by statute to every sixth man of its community, and puts a matron in a felon's cell for teaching a black sister to read. I mean the intellectual, social aristocratic South--the thing that manifests itself by barbarism and the bowie-knife, by bullying and lynch-law, by ignorance and idleness, by the claim of one man to own his brother....That South is to be annihilated. (Loud applause.) The totality of my common sense--or whatever you may call it--is this, all summed up in one word: This country will never know peace nor union until the South (using the word in the sense I have described) is annihilated, and the North is spread over it…Our struggle is between barbarism and civilization. "Wendell Phillips further spelled this out most concretely when he said that unless Blacks become the basis of Southern Reconstruction we might as well not have fought and won; we will retrogress to another form of barbarism. "The question of land and the peasant as the prerequisite for a successful revolution was brought home to us in the Civil War. Frederick Engels, Marx's great collaborator, had written before, in this analysis of the Peasant Wars in Germany, that because the German Reformation in the 16th Century had betrayed the peasant revolts by not giving the peasants land, the country itself "disappeared for three centuries from the ranks of countries playing an independent part in history." We still suffer from the incomplete revolution in the South where the Negro did not get his "40 acres and a mule." (I hope everyone has read W.E.B. DuBois' BLACK RECONSTRUCTION, one of the greatest contributions--and certainly the most original--to that period of America's development yet hardly known because it was written by a Negro and supposedly for that reason was "prejudiced." Many a so-called objective historian has yet even to see the problem, much less to analyze it profoundly.) "We must now proceed to the changes in Marx's greatest theoretical work, CAPITAL, made under the impact of the decade of the 1860's in general and the Civil War in the United States in particular... "Joseph Schumpeter considers Marx's materialistic conception of history as nothing short of a work of genius, whereupon he complains that Marx overestimated the value of philosophy in general and of Hegelian methodology in particular. He proceeds to call Marx the most erudite of all economists and cannot contain his praise for Marx's "idea of theory," of being able to transform "historic narrative into historic reason"; whereupon he proceeds to dissect him as "economist" only and disregard entirely what made it possible to transform historic narrative into historic reason, or how Marx's "idea" of theory evolved. He does this not maliciously or even consciously--it is impossible for an intellectual nowadays even when he admires another intellectual with whom he completely disagrees, to conceive of the fact that genius has any connection with common man's activity. Marx, on the other hand, always felt the pulse of what he called "the spontaneous organization of the working class," and never more so than when he worked on "theory." "Marx had been working out his economic theories ever since 1844. By 1859 he finally published what he considered to be the first volume of CAPITAL, which he had called CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. But he no sooner published it than he was dissatisfied with it. Under the impact of the Civil War he returned to the manuscripts and began a thorough overhaul, in structure and form particularly. The two most fundamental reorganizations occurred in 1863 and in 1866 and the work was then finally published in the form we have it today. "It was in 1866 that he added the section on "the Working Day," which will illuminate what Schumpeter calls "the idea" of theory and what I call the Humanism of Marxism or Marxism as a theory of liberation. It completed Marx's transcendence of both classical political economy and Hegelian philosophy, the two main sources of his theory, and the creation of a new world view of history which was solidly based on the actual activity of man. "First, there was the relationship of the abolition of slavery to the struggle for the eight hour day. As Marx was to write in CAPITAL: "In the United States of North America, every independent movement for the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of Labor at Baltimore (August 16, 1866) declared: 'The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working-day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.' "The workers having by their own "correct instinct" formulated a demand in almost the precise terms that Marx had worked so hard to present to the First International, the theoretician's mind took wing. New categories were created, a step forward in philosophic cognition was made, and a new way of thinking resulted." -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
