Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 03:44:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: M-I: Re: M-SCI: Dialectics of Nature (Special fun word game at end!)



Siddharth,

It sounds like you have a problem with Marx. Virtually every term I used
in my post based on the Latin "socius" is found through and through Marx's
work. It seems as though you are unhappy that Marx was a social scientist 
and a historian. Okay, but then why make Marx something he wasn't?

When Marx talks about the precision of natural science he is referring to
a set of logical (deductive) and empirical (inductive) procedures that
produce heuristic frames, theoretical statements, and conceptual formats
that correspond with observable reality. He is not suggesting that the
social world is the natural world. This is a common error made by
nonhistorians and nonsociologists (those who choose to remain ignorant of
these areas, anyway): they neglect the historicity of language and other
social contexts and processes (a consideration that is demanded by the
system of historical materialism!). When Marx was writing, social
philosophy (political economy, sociology, etc.) was just becoming accepted
as science (Comte attempted to scientize his theory of society in the Law
of Three Stages, Spencer was scientizing social study by making the social
system identical with biological systems, and there were others). Marx
therefore had to refer to his methods as being rigorous, i.e. in the mode
of natural scientific method, in order to assert the scientific character
of his analysis, which was in fact scientific. To lift text that is nearly
150 years old out of its historical context suggests that some basic
instruction in social science is in order. 

This argument brings me to once again confront the strawman my opposition
is constructing (and they cannot really even dispose of this "carefully"
constructed nemesis!). I have not denied the importance of, and in fact I
have advocated, rigorous scientific theorizing and procedure. This has
never been my argument. Siddharth finds it odd, I gather, that of all the
superstructural elements that Marx identified, he left science out.
Moreover, at least I see this implication, Siddharth believes Marx did
this so he could somehow assert he was using an eternal objective
procedures for prying apart the totality of social formations. Yet, as
Moishe Postone pointed out (in an earlier quotation), that because Marxian
theory recognizes its historical specificity, it can analyze itself and
its methods in an epistemologically consistent manner, locating "itself
historically by means of the same categories with which it analyzes its
social context." Thus Marx, by refusing to reify logic, was able to see
his logic determined by the social formation he was analyzing, and
therefore employ critique as a method for accounting for this variable in
the analysis. This leads Marx to emphasis praxis, the unity of theory and
practice. It is impossible for subjects to extract themselves from
the social and material reality they are producing, and that was produced
for them by past generations. 

Siddharth treats social relations as a superficial feature of society,
taking a backseat to productive forces. But in Marx's system the relations
and the forces of production are deep structures, deeply interpenetrated,
only analytically separable. For example, the struggle to reclaim a
portion of the surplus workers produced that lead to a reduction in the
workday, and put real limits on the amount of surplus that the capitalist
could extract everyday (absolute surplus value/product), led to an
intensification of the organic composition of capital (relative surplus
value production) through the introduction of labor-savings machines. Here
it is the reverse of the order that Siddharth apparently lays such stress
on: a struggle at the level of social relations of production forced a
change upon the forces of production. Siddharth appears to posit a
structuralist position devoid of human agency. We might remind him that
even the forces of production are also intrinsically human and humanized. 

Social reality is not as simple as physicists and biologists would like to
make it, and their models are inadequate to capture the complexity and
subtly of the social world. In the 1700s the social world was supposed to
be law driven, mechanical, like the eternal clock that unwound the
universe in God's absence. In the 1800s the social world was an organism,
its parts interrelated in a teleological manner, evolving under internal
differentiation driven by functional imperatives and adaptation to its
environment. Marx, by constructed historical materialism, put social
science on its own theoretical and methodological footing. He defined the
paradigm of social science. Ideology prevailed, ultimately, and forced
historical materialism to the margins, and structural-functionalism, the
mother of all organic analogies, reified and superimposed on the world by
bourgeois ideologists, dominated until its inability to explain social
reality proved it undoing. What Siddharth and others do by taking Marxian
social science and mapping it upon the natural world, is the same thing
bourgeois ideologist do in reverse. Rather than forcing upon social
reality natural science conceptual systems, dialectical materialists force
upon the natural world the Marxian conceptual system--but even more than
that: they claim that this method reveals objective reality independent of
social relations, when objective social relations are what Marxian social
theory is trying to make subjective! In doing this they violate both the
form and content of Marxian thought.

Other than correcting these mistakes that Siddharth makes here, which I
think are instructive for the larger debate, his contribution adds nothing
new to the debate.

Andrew Austin

PS. How long did it take you to count all those times I used the root
"socio"? Just a wee bit obsessive, aren't we?

PSS. For those of you who are still mystified by mathematics, who assume,
like Kant, than certain mathematical and logical systems exist *a priori*,
just substitute the word "numbers," in the sentence "numbers existed prior
to humans," with "words," rendering: "words existed prior to humans."
Sounds goofy, doesn't it? Try it with lots of sentences. Here are a few: 

"Mathematics existed prior to human beings." (substitute "linguistics.")
"Mathematical systems existed prior to human beings." (sub "mathematical
	systems."
"The Dialectic existed prior to human beings." (substitute "The
	Syllogism" or, maybe better, "God.")
"The universe operates according to a logic." (substitute for "logic" the
	word "idea" or, maybe better, "God.")

Think of more. It's fun!



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