Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 12:43:48 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: Request for help


Zeynep:

>I'm wondering if you could fit Marx into
>the above schema? On the one hand, Marx is the last blow to a certain view
>of history. He crossed individual actors from history and replaced it with
>classes. He showed that profit wasn't the god given right of capital and
>capitalists, but rather money stolen from the working people. He dethroned
>"profit" and showed it was exploitation. His concept of history and
>economics are from the point of view of the working masses, and for the
>working masses; a very important upheaval in the history of human thought.
>As such, his ideals inspired millions. As with Freud, his followers split
>into various "interpretations" and perhaps gave what he said more weight
>than to the method and the spirit in which he had done his own research. As
>Freud reached into the human mind and tried to unravel the raw, perhaps
>unpleasant truth, about what makes us tick, Marx reached into the depths of
>society and tried to unravel the truth about what makes societies tick. His
>answer was unpleasant to the powers-that-be. There are, obvious differences
>between Marx and Freud. Marx's theory is a theory for the practice of
>struggling for true human emancipation and liberation. I don't know enough
>about Freud to make more detailed comparisons.

Both Marx and Freud could be seen as dethroning the human individual as the
motive force of history, identifying forces larger than any of us that make
history behind our backs. But their determinism was hardly thoroughgoing -
unlike, say, Lacan, with his idea of language forming us and speaking
through the illusory subject. Psychoanalysis and revolution aren't the
business of rigid determinists; though on the one hand, the idea that we
make history but not with tools of our own choosing counsels modesty, both
modes of thought advise us that even with the appropriate dose of modesty,
we can change our lives. So even if there is a dethronement of the human
ego in both Marxism and Freudianism, there's also a re-enthronement
strategy involved in each. For Marxism, there's the expropriation of the
expropriators; for Freud, there's the promise that "where id was, there ego
shall be," or that hysteria can be transformed into "ordinary unhappiness."
This kind of rational re-enthronement drives lots of postmodernists nuts,
who like their Freud via Lacan and their Marx via Althusser.

Doug

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Doug Henwood
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