Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Marx, social genius
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:31:33 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Carrol,

Am I correct in adding "scare quotes" to "social genius" as well as to "providence" in this passage?

Dick (Moodey, Richard W)

-----Original Message-----
From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 11:16 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


Here is the passage from Marx, _Poverty of Philosophy_, to which I referred to in my earlier post. Almost all terms which identify some factor or other as prior to history -- spirituality, Progress, etc.-- are I think synonyms for "Providence" as discussed in this passage. Marx himself did not wholly escape from such providential thought until the _Grundrisse_. (In his early works he more or less accepted some version of technological determinism, and Technology in that sense was ahistorical and providential.)

Carrol

*****
Henceforth, the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality; the bad side, that which negates it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. In short, equality is the primordial intention, the mystical tendency, the providential aim that the social genius has constantly before its eyes as it whirls in the circle of economic contradictions. Thus, Providence is the locomotive which makes the whole of M. Proudhon's economic baggage move better than his pure and volatized reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter, which follows the one on taxes. 

Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today to explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing. It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing facts. 

It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history. 

Of course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century. To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means of production, etc., worked providentially for the realization of equality is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them. Economists know very well that the very thing that was for the one a finished product was for the other but the raw material for new production. 

Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that social genius produced, or rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim of transforming the settlers into responsible and equally-placed workers: and you will have effected a substitution of aims and of persons worthy of the Providence that instituted landed property in Scotland, in order to give itself the malicious pleasure of driving out men by sheep.*****



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