Ted Winslow posts:
Like "true reality," the "true human being" is the end point of a historical
process of development. The "true human being" is "freedom" as the
actualization of "reason." Its development and maintenance involves a never
ending "struggle" with "brute emotions and rude instincts."
"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. The
state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and violence, of
untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings. Limitation is
certainty produced by Society and the State, but it is a limitation of the mere
brute emotions and rude instincts; as also, in a more advanced stage of
culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice and passion. This kind of
constraint is part of the instrumentality by which only, the consciousness of
Freedom and the desire for its attainment, in its true – that is Rational and
Ideal form – can be obtained. 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."http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm
But this is Hegelian not Marxist and totally Idealist. Are you trying to
stand Marx on his head?
Cheers ken.
From: Ted Winslow <[email protected]>
To: Progressive Economics <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Roubini: Marx was right: Negation of the negation
Carrol Cox wrote:
> My three favorite quotes from Marx (young Marx, Marx of the Grudrisse,
> Marx near the end of his life)
>
> Young Marx: No recipes for the cookshops of the future.
That's from the 1873 afterword to the 2nd German edition of Capital:
"Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I
treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine
myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing
receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm
What can be accomplished through "the mere critical analysis of the actual
facts" is elaborated in the Sept 1843 letter to Ruge:
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can
therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness
and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its
obligation and its final goal."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
Moreover, in that letter Marx draws the same contrast between "the mere
critical analysis of the actual facts" and "writing receipts ... for the
cook-shops of the future":
"And the whole socialist principle in its turn is only one aspect that concerns
the reality of the true human being. But we have to pay just as much attention
to the other aspect, to the theoretical existence of man, and therefore to make
religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism. In addition, we want to
influence our contemporaries, particularly our German contemporaries. The
question arises: how are we to set about it? There are two kinds of facts which
are undeniable. In the first place religion, and next to it, politics, are the
subjects which form the main interest of Germany today. We must take these, in
whatever form they exist, as our point of departure, and not confront them with
some ready-made system such as, for example, the Voyage en Icarie."
>
> Grundrisse: The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape."
> (Not, notice, theother way around: This is the basis for the common
> phrase, "The present as history." We can only understand the present if
> we look back on it from the future, as history. But the "no recipes"
> statement warns us against empirical prediction; hence that future point
> can only be a hypothetical point: Rosa Luxemburg: The final goal not
> some vague vision of socialism but state power. (She, mistakingly,
> thought she had a Party, not knowing the future of the SPD. But the
> general point still holds.)
The reason the later is a key to understanding the earlier is that, as is
claimed in the letter to Ruge, the later was present in the earlier as its
telos. Marx claims to be able, by means of a critique of capitalism ('existing
reality'), to develop communism ('true reality') as "its obligation and its
final goal," i.e. to predict it. Marx again explicitly contrasts this idea
with the "immature communism" of Cabet, etc, who, he says, claim to find
"communist" phenomena in the past rather than in the future.
"The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of
genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its
thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.
Whereas the still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a
proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical
phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the
historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical
pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.).
By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process
contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its
being in the past refutes its pretension to reality."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
This way of understanding the "critique" that is Capital is explicitly
confirmed by the 1877 summary of it:
"At the end of the chapter [on primitive accumulation] the historic tendency of
[capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own
negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that
it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the
greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the
integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property,
resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot
do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not
furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing
else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the
chapters on capitalist production."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
>
> The Old Man: (Reported in some MR page filler some years ago. A New
> York reporter interviewed Marx in the garden of his London home. At the
> end of the interview proper, the reporter paused and then asked:
>
> What is?
>
> Marx (after a pause so long the reporter though he had fallen asleep):
> Struggle.
>
> Not victorious struggle. Not a sham struggle embroidering predetermined
> history, but just: Struggle. No prediction of the outcome. No recipes.
> No sure-fire 'theory' of revolution.
>
> Just struggle.
Like "true reality," the "true human being" is the end point of a historical
process of development. The "true human being" is "freedom" as the
actualization of "reason." Its development and maintenance involves a never
ending "struggle" with "brute emotions and rude instincts."
"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. The
state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and violence, of
untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings. Limitation is
certainty produced by Society and the State, but it is a limitation of the mere
brute emotions and rude instincts; as also, in a more advanced stage of
culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice and passion. This kind of
constraint is part of the instrumentality by which only, the consciousness of
Freedom and the desire for its attainment, in its true – that is Rational and
Ideal form – can be obtained. 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."
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm
Or, as Goethe puts it at the end of Faust:
"Ay, in this thought I pledge my faith unswerving,
Here wisdom speaks its final word and true,
None is of freedom or of life deserving
Unless he daily conquers it anew."
Ted
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