Subject: Re: AUT: Free Will???
From: chris wright <cwright.21stcentury-AT-rcn.com>
Date: 05 Jun 2003 23:14:42 -0500


I am happy mostly with Harald and Miyachi's points on free will and
causality and I find Ilan's stuff intriguing, even if we will disagree
on the matter of causality (and given the limited nature of this list, I
am not expanding into intensive study of particulars for anything, which
is central to any meaningful notion of dialectic, as dialectic assumes
that one can grasp something only by taking that thing or things or
relations or whatever on its/their own terms and by studying the whole
range of details in order to find the internal logic or development,
which to me seems rather close to Ilan's notion of interaction, as
opposed to the old Engelsian imposition of a 'dialectical
interpretation' with categories imported from outside the relations
themselves, which would be, as such, metaphysics.  Hegel rejects exactly
this in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, as certainly as
he critiques Newtonian and mathematical scientific reasoning in the
Science of Logic.)

But Harald has another good point here that I want to expand on
slightly.  One problem with seeing base-superstructure causally, aside
from what Harald raised, is that class struggle becomes the mere medium
through which the really fundamental structures interact.  Class
struggle becomes secondary.  But if we understand base-superstructure
not as causal (base causing superstructure), but as ways in which the
totality of contradictory social relations, relations of struggle,
manifest themselves at different points, as different moments, in
specific forms of appearance/modes of existence, then it allows us to
grasp structures as dynamic, fluid and therefore mortal, and also as our
products.

If all of this is product of human activity (practical-critical, ie
mental and physical, not merely 'material'), then human activity must be
at the core, and if that human activity is one based upon alienated
labor, in whatever specific form (capital-form or slavery-form or
feudal-form, etc.), then classes and class conflict will express the
real movement corresponding to that form of alienated labor and they
will provide the real ground upon which structures arise, and class
struggle has primacy, not interactions between the base and
superstructure (which are the not unimportant forms of appearance of
this struggle, but not its content.)  Otherwise, human subjectivity and
all hope of revolution as self-determination, goes out the window and
then we need either intervention of The Party, The State, The Militant,
etc. ie of some agent outside/above the class which becomes the real
subject, while the class becomes a mere object for it to act upon.

The rejection of the causal understanding of base-superstructure is
essential to the idea of revolution as the self-determination of the
mass of human beings, of the proletariat.  Otherwise we are in the muck
of technological determinism and the old and useless argument over
whether material means of production or social relations of production
dominate.  It is a false question posed by a misunderstanding of
base-superstructure which leads to conclusions drawn long ago by the
statists.  As I have been recommending, Rubin is a good antidote to this
kind of reasoning.

Cheers,
Chris

On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 12:40, Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <topp8564-AT-mail.usyd.edu.au>
> To: "Aut-Op-Sy" <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
> Sent: 5. juni 2003 16.23
> Subject: Re: AUT: Free Will???
> 
> 
> Thiago writes:
> 
> << Take the Asiatic MP. When there is change in the technoeconomic
> structure in form of the development of largescale waterworks requiring
> coordinated controls (never forgetting that for Marx the technoeconomic
> structure is made of social relations), a set of effects follow upon the
> superstructure, .... >>
> 
> A relation is not the same as a simple cause-effect. If you
> look a bit closer in what you wrote above, you will find that
> you in part explain "the susperstructure" with "the super-
> structure". What is this "the technoeconomic structure
> being "made of social relations" but the smuggling of the
> "the superstructure" back into "the base."
> 
> Or is it so that on the first day God created largescale
> waterworks, and then came those human beings?
> 
> No one doubts that we have to adjust to the world
> of our own making, but it thus not follow from this
> that there is only one way to adjust to it.
> 
> If take this logic to its logical limit, a social revolution will
> always be a logical impossibility, as surely "the base" is
> not likely to change from one day to another through
> some magical trick.
> 
> Harald
> 
> 
> 
> 
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