Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 10:45:07 -0400 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: e-mail burnout Andrew Austin: > >Here are just a few of the problems with the thinking on this list in the >form of several questions: > >(1) Can everything be reduced to social class? I am not sure what this question is aiming at. The post-Marxists claim that Marxism is class-reductionist. I disagree. For example, the phenomenon of white racism in the South was a historical obstacle to union organizing. Without unions, whites got lower wages. It was in their class interest to defeat Jim Crow, but the dead weight of Slavocracy values prevented this. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx said that men make their own history, but not of their own choosing. The dead weight of tradition hangs heavily. The working class is especially burdened by this, since in ordinary times its ideas are those of the ruling class. > >(2) Can everything be reduced to technology or economics? > See above. >(3) Do ideas have force? See above. > >(4) Do human beings have feelings? Everybody except me. My ex-girlfriend Alicia launched a career as a performance artist with a repertory of stories that included a scathing attack on me. She was on WBAI one morning (Doug's station) doing this piece about me. She said, "Leonard (i.e., yours truly) never expressed any emotions except when the topic was international politics." > >(5) Do human beings have cognition? Do people think and act? Do people >have motives? I took a class at Teachers College a couple of years ago on Computers and Cognition. The dopey professor tried to make the case that human brains and computers basically functioned in the same way. He was an artificial intelligence fanatic and I hated AI. So from that point on, I developed a deep trust of the buzzword cognition. What was your question...? > >(6) Can people share ideas? Is it possible that a people share a >worldview? > The German people shared many ideas. In the nineteenth century and prior to Hitler's assumption of power, one of the main ideas was socialism. The German Social Democracy was the most powerful socialist party in the world. Engels played a role in its formation. Kautsky, another leader, was considered the most brilliant Marxist thinker in the world. Many, many, many, many more Germans identified with the ideas of this movement than with anti-Semitism. There were exceptions obviously. Among them, Richard Wagner. These ideas had very little political impact while the ideas of the social democracy had enormous impact. Germany had exceptional social legislation at a time when the rest of Western Europe had none. This was attributable to the impact of Socialist parliamentarians. Were there any anti-Semitic laws passed prior to the rise of Hitler? No, there were none. Why not? There was no powerful anti-Semitic movement as there was in Czarist Russia or Poland. In these countries, there were restrictive laws. Compared to them, Germany was Enlightenment incarnate. >(7) Do people hate? > Yes. >(8) Do people feel remorse? > Yes. >(9) Do people share responsibility for their actions? Can individuals be >held accountable for the behavior? > This is a key question. Marxists like myself made every effort to put the blame on the proper parties at the time of the My Lai massacre. The bourgeois press wanted to affix blame to Lieutenant Calley, while socialists tried to show that it was the top military brass and the politicians who were responsible. Calley, like the cops Goldhagen wrote about, were doing their job. They were good Germans, as Calley was a good American. The whole point of Goldhagen is to deflect responsibility from the capitalist class to the ordinary people who get turned into killing machines. >(10) Are human beings puppets on strings? Is there no such thing as >freedom? > Under the capitalist system, there is no real freedom. In 1943 Germany, there was even less real freedom than in bourgeois democracies. >(11) Is psychology ever relevant to the study of human social action? > I think it is. I have several books at home in my queue that deal with white racism. One is written by Noel Ignatiev, a brief subscriber to marxism-international. The other is by David Roediger. They are detailed studies of the Irish population at the time of the Civil War. The relationship between Irish--who were considered the niggers of Europe--and black Americans graphically shows the damage racism does to the class struggle. >(12) Is there such a thing as racism? > See above. > >Self-control wasn't even there. The Nazis said kill. Germans killed. No >reason. Just killed. No feelings. Just killed. No belief system to negate >remorse. No remorse. Germans didn't feel. They just killed. For no reason. >Puppets on strings. > There was no self-control among cops and soldiers. They murdered Jews indiscriminately. They murdered Gypsies and homosexuals indiscriminately. They murdered millions of Russians. The Nazi regime was one of the most irrational and demonic killing machines in the history of the human race. The only incident that I can think of that compares is the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsis. Hutus did not hire cops and soldiers to do their dirty work. The genocide was a truly popular movement. Ordinary citizens took machetes and hacked neighbors to death. Perhaps if the German people had been forced to do their own killing in this manner, things would have turned out a little differently. After all, taking a machete to another human being is a pretty gruesome business. Many of Goldhagen's cops complained about their job, that it was making them sick. (Browning reports about this, while Goldhagen gives it short shrift.) Much more to the point is how this killing-machine came into existence and what class forces were responsible. In Goldhagen's view, this killing-machine was the latency of German anti-Semitism made manifest. I will present a class analysis of the Nazi state. My first post should appear this weekend. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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