Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 16:56:25 +0000
Subject: Re: absenting an absence was Re: BHA: JCR coup - an absence?


Hi Guenter,

>Just when it's getting interesting... :-)

MERVYN. I turn finally then to the relation between critical realism and
Marxism. This has recently been discussed, by Marxist critical realists
or other Marxists, in a number of books and articles, and there are a
range of widely differing views on the table. Informing them all,
perhaps, is a nagging worry that critical realism might transcend
Marxism, just as it has its own previous phases, or at any rate that it
aspires to do this; or it might 'outflank', or dilute and undermine, or
even 'revolutionize' it. Commonly cited issues, some of which we've
discussed already, include your refusal to accept (or reject)
metaphysical materialism; your prioritizing of absence over presence and
espousal of creativity ex nihilo; your alleged turn to historical
idealism; your discourse of the master and the slave rather than of the
capitalist and the worker and your recent position that there's no
uniquely privileged revolutionary agent; your allegedly un-Marxist
eudaimonism and perfectibilism, which is seen as unhistorical, abstract
and impractical; and of course the whole turn to spirituality and the
philosophy of meta-reality. The dominant attitude to the last within
Marxism can perhaps best be summed up in the following, penultimate
remark by Sean Creaven in a recent article which draws up a 'balance
sheet' on your book on dialectics:

"Of course, whether Bhaskar is able to build on his 'materialist
diffraction of dialectic' will depend on his ending his recent
unfortunate flirtation with irrealist dialectics (idealism, godism,
spiritualism, etc)." [Sean Creaven, 'The pulse of freedom? Bhaskar's
*Dialectic* and Marxism', Historical Materialism vol. 10, no. 2, p. 137] 

"Of course" - without argument that I can detect; and notwithstanding
that his remarks are published in a journal whose recent issues provide
evidence that something of a spiritual turn is going on within the
Marxist tradition itself, as elsewhere.

How do you yourself now see the relation between critical realism and
Marxism, and should Marxists be worried (and vice versa)?

ROY. Let me preface my remarks by observing that Marx's underlying
vision - of the society in which the free development of each is a
precondition for the free development of all - is the same as - in fact
is a very nice formulation of - a presupposition that was there in all
emancipatory discourse but is very explicit in the notion of the
Bodhisattva, in Mahayana Buddhism, that you can't have realization, or
true freedom, unless everyone is free. I think that's a very, very
inspiring vision. One of the nice things someone said to me in India
about the philosophy of meta-reality was that in a way I'd merged
Shankara with Marx - though actually I think I've done a bit more than
that, because of my explicit emphasis on concrete singularity and
dialectical universality, which in a way sometimes gets lost in the
Buddhist and Vedic philosophies. So I think the vision is there. That's
a spiritual vision in Marx - it presupposes an extraordinary human
potentiality that has never been done justice to or paid anything more
than lip service to in history, except in a few struggles - in a few
moments in a few struggles - and I would argue is a necessary
underpinning of ordinary life, whether revolutionary or non-
revolutionary. 

Which takes me to the second point which is truly valid within Marxism.
Marx's *Capital* Volume I provides, I think, the defining analysis of
the extraction of surplus value, and that's the fundamental mechanism of
contemporary societies. Even though we're now in monetarized form, even
though we have a multiplicity of other structures, I can't see anything
wrong with Marx's analysis of capitalism and the extraction of surplus
value. What the philosophy of meta-reality says is that, underpinning
the level of extraction of surplus value, is a level of free creativity,
free unconditional love - or love, spontaneity, ingenuity - for which
nothing is given. This is presupposed by capitalists and masters
everywhere, though not articulated in their discourse, and is continuous
with domestic labour, where it's a well-known lacunae within some
strands of Marxism. What's really interesting is that Marxists tend to
think of labour as being the moving element. But there's also labour-
power. We associate labour as the concrete thing, as that which produces
use values. We think of labour-power as an abstract homogenous uniform
entity and as having purely an exchange value, but this whole emphasis
on meta-reality says: hang on a moment, labour-power is OK for a certain
level of analysis, but behind that are all the potentialities and powers
of human beings as they evolved in history, and that's the essence of
the development of the human race. And so this is entirely consistent
with Marx. 

Thirdly, Marx was also right to emphasize, in *Theses on Feuerbach*,
that there's no way you can have a perfect society unless you educate
yourself. Who is to educate the educators? The idea of a perfect society
or perfect structural preconditions, and imperfect human beings, is
impossible, so actually perfection has got to start here. There's no way
in which I can change a social form except in virtue of my action, and
if I feel my praxis is wrong, the only way I can do it is by reflecting
on my practice in relation to that praxis. And if that's OK, there's
nothing more I can do about it. If I want to change it, I have to in
some way change my mode of insertion into that praxis, which means
transforming my own practice. And that was explicit in one of the very
early formulations of the transformational model of social activity as
highlighting 'transformed transformative praxis'. Immediately we
transform our own practice we transform all the dimensions of social
being. So all that too is entirely consistent with the true
understanding of classical Marxism. 

Turning directly to the question of the master-slave relationship. The
categories of capitalist and worker are designated by the category of
the real, the non-actual real; they're transfactual and structural, and
can't be read one-to-one into actual or empirical reality. Indeed, for
any one chunk of actuality in general, you can never be dogmatic about
what you're dealing with: people embody aspects of many different
polarities. Take the capitalist-labour polarity: a person embodies
aspects of both, or aspects which are defined by neither, though she
does play a role in relation to the reproduction of the mode of
production. Take a transport worker: a lorry driver is clearly a worker,
but is not officially there within Marxism. Even the capitalist pushes
pens, pays himself a salary and whatever, and the worker is going to own
something and have an interest at some level in capital. And once you
understand that there are other structures at work too, then the
complexities become far too immense to identify a single body of human
beings as the emancipators of all others. 

Of course, at any one moment of time there may be a group of people of
overriding strategic importance, for example, the miners in 1984.
Thatcher's action against the miners was an action designed to take out
the working class, they were strategically significant; and everyone
opposed to the totality of structures had a sort of ethical duty to
solidarize with the miners. So I'm not arguing there are not strategic
conflicts. Structurally we are all masters and we are all slaves. What
we need to do is get rid of the master-slave relations which in part
constitute us socially and in part we continually reconstitute socially.
It becomes very complex if you take the case of, say, the relation
between the colonizer and the colonized. Because typically the colonized
will imbibe the colonial mentality and seek to colonize somewhere else.
Within ourselves we colonize or oppress parts of ourselves. We're our
own worst oppressors. 

I can't see that in general you can argue that there's any other unit we
can emancipate (better, which can emancipate itself) other than the
whole human race, I really can't. It's a peculiar paradox, because I'd
be more orthodox than the orthodox in relation to the analysis of the
fundamental structures of capitalism, but I'm completely unorthodox when
it comes to concepts of class consciousness. Not because I don't think
concepts of class consciousness are important. But isolating a specific
category of people who are going to lead us all - that won't happen,
that's substitutionism, it hasn't happened. So that's not because I
don't respect the working class; it's because - where is the working
class? The working class is in all of us, and in a society like Britain,
the traditional industrial working class scarcely exists. 

MERVYN. So when you say we're all masters and slaves --

ROY. We, as empirical human beings, all embody aspects of master and
aspects of slave.

MERVYN. Some more so than others, obviously.

ROY. Definitely, but we have to look also at the more subtle aspects. I
was once involved in  a student organization which wanted to take
revolutionary Marxism to the workers. Sometimes we were trying to
leaflet a worker and you got it shoved back in your face - was that a
right or unright response? Had we really worked out what we were doing
in our leafleting? It didn't make sense, there was a lot of non-
communication. There's a lot of non-communication historically between
Marxism and the working class. And Marxism was supposed to be the
vehicle of working class ideology. Now, if one's talking strategically,
I don't see 'some more so than others'. What are we really saying? That
we don't want to get rid of all oppression? Certainly, from the point of
view of me, some people are more in need than others, and from the point
of view of strategic action, some people are better placed than others
to do something about it. But you can't say a priori who is most needy,
and you can't measure in a crude quantitative way the degree of 'working
classness' of a particular human being. If you could, it wouldn't mean
very much unless you could have comparable measures for all the other
master-slave relationships. So the master-slave relationship is a very
simple category which takes account of any relationship of oppression,
including those relationships in which we oppress ourselves.

MERVYN. Do you intend it to supplant 'class'?

ROY. Not at all. The concept of class has many uses. A simple structural
use following on from the analysis of capitalism is absolutely fine, but
what does it mean for action? What determines a political activity of
the agent will not only be just their class location, it will be all
these other determinants, how much of the TV they've been swallowing.
You may remember in *Dialectic* I give examples of the multiplicity of
master-slave relations which bear on any concrete agent. So where does
that person stand in relation to sexism? It can be very important; if
it's a male worker and he's chauvinist, probably he won't solidarize -
or won't find it very easy to solidarize in a maximally efficacious way
- with women workers who may be key in a struggle. Or he won't see the
need to abolish sexism within his own union. You can have a lovely
structural conception of class, but it won't specify anything in
particular except a tendency within an agent. Or you can define it more
intuitively, more concretely, in terms of the consciousness of a
particular group of agents. You might say they have high class
consciousness if they're committed to the goals of Marxism; but it's
slightly circular because the goals of Marxism are the goals of the
emancipation of the human race.

To take up the issue of idealism and materialism. In my entry on
materialism, in *A Dictionary of Marxist Thought*, I defined quite
nicely I think three forms of philosophical materialism:
epistemological, ontological and social (practical) materialism.
Basically, if you follow this definition, epistemological materialism
just means transcendental realism; ontological materialism specifies the
emergence of humanity out of nature; and practical materialism is
basically the transformational model of social activity. 
Now in those three senses Marx is, and should be, committed to
materialism. But there are other senses of materialism with which those
three are conflated and which have to be repudiated. First, there is
vulgar reductionist materialism, which is inconsistent with ontological
materialism because it denies the autonomy and specificity of human
beings and the products with which human beings are associated and
implicated.

MERVYN. But this wasn't subscribed to by the classical Marxists.

ROY. That's true, but then we have to know that one corollary of
ontological materialism is that what is going to be distinctive about
human beings and history is something which is going to be rooted in the
biological peculiarities of human beings. Often we haven't thought
through what is biologically emergent and distinguishes us from other
animals. This is where, as Marx said, what distinguishes human beings
from other kinds of animals is freedom from instinctual - which you can
also call mechanical - determination, and their freedom to act in a
planned, pre-meditated way; in short freedom to act intentionally - for
an idea. So ideas and consciousness immediately define the
distinctiveness of human beings. So when you're talking about human
labour, you're talking about intentional labour: labour which is
informed by ideas. 

That's very important when you come on to another form of materialism:
technological materialism. Actually, I think there's a lot to be said
for technological materialism (as a variety of historical materialism);
our forms of technology, the way in which a society reproduces itself
ultimately physically, the way we ultimately reproduce ourselves as
bodies, as labour-power, does play an enormous role in the evolution of
humankind. What is it, however, that distinguishes one form of
technology from another? It's what level of ideation we've achieved or
established as dominant. What distinguishes our contemporary era is the
cybernetic revolution - information technology. One of the great
failings of the Soviet Union was that it never came to terms with the
chip, a weakness deriving ultimately from its failure to transfer power
to the immediate producers who are spontaneously creative and would love
to play around with computers. In the seventies and early sixties I saw
it: the Soviets had a huge computer, and the Americans had a huge
computer in a building bigger than a car park, and it could print out
your name at the end; but the Soviets stopped there, the West carried
on. Really, there's a lot to be said for the simple idea that we were
initially distinguished from other animals by our capacity to discover
fire and the wheel, and so on. Now one of the things about capitalism is
that there is within itself a drive to produce new technologies, so what
distinguishes that piece of equipment over there is the fact that it's
an embodiment of 'computer technology' - all the ideas which must be
associated with the practices. When Marx critiques the speculative
illusion - when he critiques historical idealism - what he's thinking
about is the idea isolated from human beings. When I'm talking about the
role of ideas, I'm thinking of ideas as part of intentional practice.

MERVYN. Do you still, as in *From East to West*, hold that there's a
rising organic composition of ideas such that ideas potentially become
more important as history unfolds?

ROY. Ideas have never been more important than now; but the rate of
turnover of ideas, and the changes in ideas, and the level of ideation -
these are all things we have to be very critical of. My stress on the
role of ideas is not to say, oh yes, our ideas are really brilliant now,
because I think they're mostly crap. We've never been in our organized
society more ideationally superficial. We're living in a world of sound
bites. This is our level - our cultural level is appalling. Nonetheless,
ideas are important in history and can play an even more important role.

But there's no way you can assimilate my position and my critique of
vulgar materialism, which is the denial of the autonomy of ideas as
thought (as embodied) or unthought (as embodied in the practice of human
beings), to idealism. There's no way you can call me a historical
idealist in that sense, because ideas divorced from human beings and
their practices don't exist.

MERVYN. Well most Marxists would agree with your critique of vulgar
materialism --

ROY. Vulgar materialism - when I'm talking about technological
materialism, about technologies as forms of objectification in matter of
human ideas. That is, the idea in practices. Both the artefacts and the
human beings don't exist independently of practices.

MERVYN. My point is that it's not just the idea that's embodied in the
technology, it's the labour too, just as the emergence of human
consciousness itself was bound up with that of a labour process and its
products.

ROY. Absolutely, the technology is the product of the labour. But what
distinguishes one form of labour from another is, if you like, the
intentionality and the system under which it operates. So you have to
put the shoe on the other foot and ask: well, how is it then that
Marxists could show such disregard, historically, for ideas, for
education, for that form of education which is conscious self-
transformation, which would take classically the form of class
consciousness? How can Marxists make sense of Marxism except as a
materially embodied bunch of ideas? Marxism is ideas, critical realism
is ideas - take away the ideas and we're just left with words or
material things which are inert. And so actually the moving element in
history - if you like the key element in terms of development of
technology - is the ideas embodied in the material practices of,
ultimately, the production and reproduction of labour-power. That's
fine.

This connects up with the theme of masters and slaves and the problem of
agency. All working people are creative agents, which is what underlies
capitalism and indeed all production. And then we'll see, insofar as
we're all human beings, whether we're masters or slaves.  We've got to
get rid of that. This means changing our ideas, because intentionality
is absolutely irreducible, consciousness is irreducible. Marxism is a
theory which is a set of ideas which can inform the consciousness of
human agents, that's why it's so important. It's also important to be
reflexively conscious of it. But the most important thing that Marxism
has done is to produce a body of revolutionary ideology, revolutionary
thought, which can inform practice. 

MERVYN. Which is itself informed by the social context.

ROY. Of course, but that practice is always practice done under an idea,
so yes, of course, that's like an experiment in science. You have an
idea, you go and test it. So in a way we learn from the history of
failed revolutions, we learn from the Soviet experience - never again.
When we, the ordinary people, have power, do we not educate and empower
ourselves? Never again do we say, oh, we'll pass the buck to a group of
leaders; or, nice to have a moustache over there, looks like he's pretty
competent, we'll all go for a drink. We give that politics up. 

Experience was something that no one had really analysed in a
philosophically significant way. What people meant in science when they
talked about experience was controlled experimentation by skilled
perceivers, but no one had analysed it. When we just naïvely invoke
materialism, we have to unpack it, we have to say, what does it mean,
what are we critiquing, and we will find things which can rightfully be
said to be idealistic that need to be thrown out of the window. If we
don't believe in the social structure - out; the social structure is out
there, but also in here, and it loops through us. It feeds off our
greed, our desires, and really our vanity, that we've all got to be
somebody - we're part of it, we and it are inseparable. When we cease to
be capitalist human beings, capitalism will go, but we will have to shut
it off. 

MERVYN. Most Marxists seem to be ontological or metaphysical
materialists in a more restrictive sense than is caught in your
definition, 'the emergence of humanity out of nature'. Everything is
seen as deriving from 'matter' in some ultimate sense. You say that
you're neither accepting nor rejecting materialism in this sense, which
you see as a somewhat under-analysed concept?

ROY. I do think it needs to be articulated more. I think what you could
say is that consciousness has the unique power to rearrange matter,
matter in itself does not have a similar power or consciousness. From
'inert' matter evolved sentience and then consciousness. My argument in
these books and in *The Philosophy of Meta-Reality* is that
consciousness must be implicit, enfolded within matter, in the first
place. I also argue for possibilities which are actualized daily, for
example, in transcendental identification in consciousness, irrespective
of our material states and the centrality of these states in our social
life. None of this actually occurs without there also being embodied
human beings. It would be a further interesting line of thought to ask
what happens if we didn't have bodies? Would the consciousness as it
were survive, would it have powers of its own irrespective of body? This
gets us into the question of disembodied consciousness and those are
some of the issues which will be taken up in the further exploration of
6R, the sixth realm of re-enchantment. I think, for example, that if you
look at a concept like ideology, or the kind of concepts circulating
around September 11, or even the concept of the struggle of the working
class, these have to be made sense of as emergent ideational entities in
their own right. Classical Marxism regards consciousness as an emergent
power in its own right and a social form in its own right. You have to
understand language, or forms of painting, as social forms sui generis;
they're encoded in some way materially within us - otherwise, one
supposes, one wouldn't have the possibility of re-learning all the time.
Actually, we already have paradigms within Marxism of ideas existing and
acting in relative autonomy of their material context. 

MERVYN. When you say mind is enfolded within matter, is the other side
of that coin that matter is enfolded within mind? Have we got a dual
aspect theory here?

ROY. Through our conscious intentionality we can put matter in motion.
Matter itself can't put mind in motion. There's a unilateral asymmetry
between mind and matter. Once mind is on the scene, boundary conditions
may be given by physical laws, but what actually happens depends on
mind.

MERVYN. But matter is in motion prior to human consciousness.

ROY. That's right. At a certain point we have human consciousness, first
of all animal sentience. Other things being equal, human consciousness
takes over, now within certain limits, because this is a huge open
world. So what is the dominant force on our planet now? It's obviously
the products or re-products of mind - the technologies of destruction
which are destroying the planet. (But a meteor could crash into the
planet, and our fate could be altered - maybe for the better; it could
reverse certain ecological changes and give the species more time.) I'm
afraid there's a one-way scale: the medievals were right, the higher up
the scale you get, the more power you have. So the Bengal tiger is a
beautiful animal, and capable of beating man one on one in a contest
until man discovers the rifle; it's man's mind that allows him to
discover the rifle. The point is its quite clear that, once we have the
rifle, we have a way of dealing with tigers.

MERVYN. Actually historically it was spears and collective labour.

ROOY. But the interesting thing is that at that time there was an
equilibrium of the species - the tigers survived and thrived; it was the
great hunts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when
the white man was shepherded around Africa or India by blacks or browns
in search of sitting targets, and destroyed the tiger, and now its
terribly endangered, and all the species which existed in symbiosis with
it. So it's a one-way ladder unfortunately. A lot of people think
spirituality is mind over matter, and so they think you have to lie on a
bed of nails to prove your superiority of mind over matter, but every
time you lift up a cup of coffee you demonstrate it.

MERVYN. What is spirituality then? Could we end with a short definition?

ROY. Spirituality is total, consummate love - adoration - for everything
that exists and has value in its own right. A love which carries with it
boundless energy and respect for all forms of being. And that's the
ultimate cohesive force in social and natural life, and it must be
creative, on the move. This brings me nicely to the issue you raised
about creativity ex nihilo. We're continually evolving new
possibilities, that's the extraordinary thing. Anything new - all right,
there's a material cause: there's something there already - but anything
new also involves an element of ex nihilo; if there wasn't this 'out of
nothing' there could be no de novo (the emergence of the new from
something). Ultimately every change embodies an element of complete
novelty. If you could reduce change to pre-existing elements - if there
was no ex nihilo element - there wouldn't be any change, you'd be living
in a totally static world. And ultimately the extraordinary thing about
our world is that, when we reach particularly the levels of
consciousness, we can create new possibilities, we can change things.
And through the power of our love - our creativity - we can change
ourselves and change the world. That's my definition of spirituality.
Spirituality is not something static: it is growing, continual, love for
creation. An infinite and inexhaustible love for being and for life. A
yearning to see everything unfold.



Gnter Minnerup <g.minnerup-AT-unsw.edu.au> writes
>On Sat, 16 Nov 2002 12:31:10 +0000, Mervyn Hartwig wrote:
>
>>MERVYN. One of the interesting things is that some of the critical
>>realists most resistant to getting into *Dialectic* are Marxists. 
>
>>ROY. I know! You could say what's new? This was true in Marx's own time.
>
>>MERVYN. I turn finally then to the relation between critical realism and
>>Marxism. [snip]
>
>Just when it's getting interesting... :-)
>
>
>
>
>
>Gnter Minnerup
>Visiting Fellow
>Centre for European Studies/School of History
>University of New South Wales
>Sydney NSW 2052
>Tel. (+61 2) 9385 1363 (work)
>Tel. (+61 2) 9398 3646 (home)
>Email g.minnerup-AT-unsw.edu.au
>
>
>
>
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Mervyn Hartwig
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United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>

There is another world, but it is in this one.
Paul Eluard




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